Julius Yego Slams One Mistake that Has Reduced Kenya’s Medal Count at Major Championships

Former world javelin champion Julius Yego has opened up about what is hindering Kenya from increasing its medal count at major championships.

Kenya has not won a medal in any other sport or discipline other than track at events like Olympics, World Championships and Commonwealth Games for nearly 10 years and Yego feels this is down to the country’s neglect of other sports.

Yego, who won gold at the 2015 World Championships and silver at the 2016 Olympics, remains the only man to have broken the track-only trend and he is not happy that field events, or even sprinting is not getting the attention that track gets.

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The 36-year-old believes Kenya will continue to lag behind countries like the USA at World Championships as long as there is no investment in other disciplines.

“If we only depend on track events, we won’t be able to compete with big countries like the USA because they supplement the medal collection across all the events in championships,” Yego told Pulse Sports.

“If we do not do that, we will only be depending on track events and how many track events can we win in a major championship? Very few, you can even count which events we can win in track.”

The five-time African champion is urging Athletics Kenya and the government to take a keen interest in lifting the standards of other events as it is the only way to increase the medal count.

“If we can supplement with other events like the sprinting now, we have Ferdinand [Omanyala],” he added.

“Remember when Kenya became world champions in 2015, I was part of that team, I won the men’s javelin, the late [Nicholas] Bett won the 400m hurdles so you can see there was diversity in events and if we have such diversities, we can maintain the level of competition with other countries.

“We cannot go to a championship and say we will win it only with track events, it cannot be possible.”

Yego is due to feature in his seventh World Championships in Tokyo, Japan in September and as he nears close to exiting the stage, there are no other javelin throwers that have shown great promise, casting doubt over the future of the sport and field events in Kenya.