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Pulse Sports highlights the Kenyan-born athletes who will be competing for other countries at the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympics.
Kenya is known as the hotbed of athletics talent with new runners springing up every year as the country continues its dominance in middle and long distance races.
Heading to Paris, it is no secret that the country will be relying on athletics again for medals with the 1988 Seoul Games being the last edition when Kenya won a medal in another sport other than track and field.
With its abundance of athletics talent, Kenya has also been exporting quite a number with many of them lured either by big bucks, education or job opportunities to other countries.
Some of them have opted to switch nationalities and heading to the Paris Olympics, there are three Kenyan-born runners who will be running for their adopted countries.
Winfred Yavi (Bahrain)
Winfred Yavi is among the athletes set to light up the Olympics given he she is the reigning world 3,000m steeplechase champion.
Yavi denied Kenyans Beatrice Chepkoech and Faith Cherotich gold at last year’s World Championships and she will be the woman to beat again in Paris.
The 24-year-old was born in Makueni county but switched allegiance to the oil-rich Middle East country when she was 16 and became eligible to represent her adopted nation in August 2016.
This will be her second Olympics Games after her debut in Tokyo 2020 that ended with a 10th-place finish in the 3,000m steeplechase.
Leonard Korir (USA)
Kenyan-born marathoner Leonard Korir will be on the plane to Paris after earning a late Olympics qualification for Team USA following a rule change by World Athletics.
Korir had been waiting since early February to learn his fate after finishing third at the USA Olympics trials.
World Athletics added one university place and four ranking places to the Olympic marathon field last month with the four ranking places give to runners from Chile, Australia, South Africa and the United States, earning Korir a lifeline.
It is a major boost for Korir, who missed a ticket to the delayed 2020 Olympics by just three seconds.
Born in Iten, Elgeyo Marakwet County, the 37-year-old Korir attended Tambach Teachers’ Training College and it was at the age of 20, that his athletics talent was identified before meeting veteran coach Bro Colm O'Connell.
O'Connell advised him to try an athletics scholarship at an American university and he opted to study political science at Iona College.
Korir competed in a number of events while in university and in 2012, he turned professional. He would join the US Army in 2015 and the following year, gained eligibility to represent the United States.
Lonah Chemtai Salpeter (Israel)
Born in Kapkanyar, West Pokot County, Lonah Chemtai Salpeter has already stood on the podium for Israel with the prestigious bronze medal in marathon at the 2022 World Championships and finished fourth in the same competition at the 2023 World Championships, just 21 seconds behind third place.
At the Tokyo Olympics, Salpeter was in the leading quartet right up to the end but collapsed due to the intense heat.
Since the 2023 World Championships, she has competed in relatively short distances, only returning to marathons in Tokyo but she is her country’s hope for a medal in Paris.
It will be the second Olympics Games for the 35-year-old who is hoping to right the wrongs of Tokyo 2020 where she finished 66th in the marathon race that was won by Kenyan Peres Jepchirchir.
She landed in Israel in December 2008 at 20 years of age, having never left her village previously, to work as a live-in nanny for the three children under five years of age of Kenya's Ambassador to Israel.
She would meet Israeli running coach Dan Salpeter in 2011, the pair getting married in 2014, and two years later, she gained Israeli citizenship.
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