The Confederation of African Athletics (CAA) President, Hamad Kalkaba Malboum, has said that [link id=”10363″ text=”Kenya’s recent table-topping performance”] at the World championships is a victory for the whole of the African continent.
Speaking to [link id=”494″ tax=”post_tag” text=”AthleticsAfrica.com” target=”_blank” target=”_blank”], [link id=”506″ tax=”post_tag” text=”Kalkaba” target=”_blank” target=”_blank”] said it was a thing of joy to see an African country topped the meals table for the first time in a major global championship and the continent must celebrate the feat as one.
“We must unite Africa around this success and use it to our advantage to develop and sell the sport on the continent. We need to focus on promoting and communicating our achievement as Africa and not be divided into Francophone or Anglophone, small or big countries and so on.
“We are finalising plans now for the next African championships in June 2016 in Durban, South Africa and we are looking at a free window when other confederations are also having their championships, when there’s no Diamond League or any Grand Prix events because we want to make sure that all our best athletes are able to attend and compete in Africa, ” he added.
Kalkaba, who was newly [link id=”10338″ text=”elected as Vice President of the IAAF in August” target=”_blank” target=”_blank”] at the IAAF Congress in Beijing, China also commented on the absence of any African athletes on the IAAF Athletes’ Commission.
The secret ballots held in Beijing during the [link id=”522″ tax=”post_tag” text=”IAAF World Championships” target=”_blank” target=”_blank”] last month elected three Europeans, Two members from Asia and One from Oceania to the commission.
The six newly elected representatives of the IAAF Athletes’ Commission are: Valerie Adams (New Zealand), Mutaz Essa Barshim (Qatar), Yelena Isinbayeva (Russia), Koji Murofushi (Japan), Christian Olsson (Sweden) and Andreas Thorkildsen (Norway),
“I’m not sure what happened or how that elections went. But we have two athletes, [link id=”207″ tax=”post_tag” text=”Asbel Kiprop” target=”_blank” target=”_blank”](Kenya) and [link id=”158″ tax=”post_tag” text=”Blessing Okagbare” target=”_blank” target=”_blank”] (Nigeria) who competed for the elections but unfortunately they were not successful to be elected.
“Kiprop for example is one of the greatest athletes out of [link id=”4″ tax=”category” text=”Africa” target=”_blank” target=”_blank”] and popular on the circuit, so I don’t know what went wrong,” Kalkaba noted.
