Qatar’s world 3,000m steeplechase champion Saif Saaeed Shaheen, formerly Kenya’s Stephen Cherono, will not be allowed to compete at the Athens Olympics, it was confirmed here yesterday. “He is definitely out. He is ineligible to compete according to International Olympic Committee (IOC) rules,” Nick Davies, International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) press chief said.
Shaheen controversially switched countries just a few days before last year’s World Championships and was said to have got a bonus of one million dollars when he won his new country’s first gold medal at that level. The Gulf state had included Shaheen in their Olympic team, and he featured in the Qatari team guide, but Kenya did not finally agree to his participation in Athens as IOC eligibility rules differ from those of the IAAF.
Shaheen’s former nation needed to agree to let him compete in the Olympics, and in similar fashion to the way they blocked Denmark’s Wilson Kipketer in 1996, they refused to do so.
According to sources close to Athletics Kenya, Qatari officials had spent several weeks trying to get them to agree to allow Shaheen to compete in Athens. However, contacts at government level and with the Kenyan IOC member and running legend Kip Keino were rebuffed.
“Kenyans were outraged at seeing us lose the steeplechase to one of our own running for another country,” explained Athletics Kenya Chairman Ishiah Kiplagat recently.
Kenya has won the 3,000m steeplechase at the Olympics every time they have competed — the country missed the 1976 and 1980 Olympics due to political boycotts — since 1968.
Also excluded from Athens is Shaheen’s teammate Abdullah Ahmed Hassan, formerly the Kenyan runner Albert Chepkurui. Hassan, a friend and regular training partner of Shaheen, switched sides at the same time as Shaheen and went on to win the Asian 10,000 title last year, as well as finish fourth in the World Championships 10,000m.
Qatar will still have several other Kenyan-born runners in its team, including world junior 800m champion Majed Saeed Sultan, who Kenyan newspapers have named as formerly being known as Elijah Kosgei.
Sultan was given the green light to run in Athens as he was not an international before moving to Qatar.
However, controversy even shadows Sultan. He admitted at the World Junior Championships, held last month in Italy, that he had graduated from Kenyan high school in 2001, which would make him at least 20 while winning at a championship with an age limit of 19.
In Italy, the entry forms gave him as having a birth date in 1986 but in Athens he had mysteriously got a year younger and appears on the IOC database as being born in 1987.
Sultan was so sensitive about the controversy surrounding Kenyan-born Qatari runners that he also refused to give his original name during an interview in Italy.
