Omanyala jets off for Worlds as athletics’ big show begins

It is literally a race against time for Africa’s fastest man Ferdinand Omanyala.

The African 100 metres champion was finally airborne Thursday evening racing to reach America in time to get to the starting blocks at 4.50am on Saturday at the World Athletics Championships that starts today at Hayward Field, Eugene, Oregon, United States.

Omanyala, 26, is scheduled to arrive in Oregon at 8am local time just two hours before the start of the men’s 100m pragramme.

Luckily his superior season’s ranking exempts him from the preliminary rounds that will be held at 10.30pm Kenyan time Friday.

Omanyala, who had faced delays in acquiring his US visa was scheduled to land in Oregon 26 hours after leaving Nairobi at 6pm aboard a Qatar Airlines plane.

Omanyala, who is the deputy captain, is among 46 Kenyans athletes, who will line up in the championships that will feature 1972 athletes from 192 nations.

Omanyala, who has the third fastest time this year of 9.85 seconds, is on a mission to rewrite history books as the first African to win a medal at the world event.

The nation awaits in bated breath with eyes focused on Omanyala, who has single handedly managed to sway the attention that was for many years accorded the middle and long distance track races to sprints.

However, Omanyala, who has clocked seven sub 10 seconds since August including personal best 9.77 at Kip Keino Classic last year, has a battle at hand sailing from the heats on Friday to the semi-finals.

He will be aiming to post much better results after making history as the first Kenyan to reach the Olympic semi-finals men’s 100m in Tokyo last year.

The field in Oregon is rich.

American Fred Kerley, who is firmly in 100m, having ditched the 400m last year to claim silver in 200m at Tokyo Olympics.

Kerley, whom Omanyala beat when winning the Kip Keino Classic in Nairobi in May, is also the man to beat in Oregon as he chases his first individual gold on the global stage, just like Omanyala.

Kerley has only improved in 2022, running sub-10 in all seven of his 100m races, with the peak being at the US Championships at Hayward Field on June 24.

Kerley ran a personal best 9.76sec in the semi-finals and then clocked 9.77sec in the final, the world’s two fastest times this year.

The US contingent includes Trayvon Bromell, who is the second fastest this season in 9.81sec also from the US Championships, Marvin Bracy and Christian Coleman.

Bracy ran 9.86sec in the semi-finals and 9.85sec in the final to finish second behind Kerley at the US Championships.

Bromell, the world’s fastest man in 2021, clocked 9.81sec in the semi-finals and 9.88sec in the final to finish third at the national championships.

Coleman, the reigning world champion, ran 9.87 in the semi-finals at the US Championships before skipping the final by virtue of having a bye into the World Championships.

Omanyala and the US athletes will have plenty of challengers including reigning Olympic champion Marcell Jacobs of Italy and Jamaicans led by 32-year-old Yohan Blake, the 2011 world champion.

Jacobs stunned the track and field world last year when he stormed to the 100m gold in Tokyo. Blake ran 9.85 to win his fifth national 100m title. He’s joined by 21-year-old compatriot Oblique Seville, who finished second in the national championships in 9.88sec.

Olympic 1,500m champion Faith Cheng’etich will be a woman on a mission in her quest to reclaim her 1,500m title starting with the preliminary rounds Friday (at 4.10am on Saturday in Kenya).

Also featuring in the women's metric mile race are 2018 Continental Cup champion Winny Chebet, Edinah Jebitok and Judy Kiyeng.

If Chepng’etich, 27, is to recapture the title and make it a fourth global outdoor championships gold, then she will have achieved a milestone.

Chepng’etich, who was coming back from maternity, lost her crown to Sifan Hassan of the Netherlands in Doha, but since then she has been close to unbeatable in the metric mile race, her sole loss coming at the Diamond League meeting in Florence last year after a thrilling home-straight duel with Hassan.

Chepng’etich and Hassan will be featuring in the preliminaries alongside Ethiopia’s Gudaf Tsegay, the world indoor 1,500m record-holder, Britain’s Laura Muir and Australia’s trio of Jessica Hull, Georgia Griffith and Linden Hall.