At Paris 2024, Ferdinand Omanyala Wants to Prove Kenya is For Sprinters

Since he earned the title as Africa’s fastest man in 2021, followed by winning 100m championship titles at the African Athletic Championships and Commonwealth Games in 2022, Omanyala, 28, is setting his sights on becoming the first Kenyan to medal in the 100m at the Olympic Games in Paris. And not just that, he also wants the world to recognize the East African country as a sprint giant.

“I want to change everything about sprints in this country,” he said earlier this year. “Not that we don’t have the talent. The talent is there because we are very good at rugby. The only thing that we did not have is that strong mentality that ‘you can do this.’ That’s the ceiling that was hindering so many people from doing it.”

The ceiling broke for Omanyala when a friend noticed his speed while playing rugby, and invited him to consider sprinting. He quickly rose in the ranks to earn a berth in the Kenyan contingent at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (in 2021) for the 100m race. But despite only reaching the semifinals in Tokyo, he was able to break the Kenyan 100m record. Weeks later, he became Africa’s fastest man by running a time of 9.77 seconds in front of his home crowd in Nairobi at the KipKeino Classic. The time also made him the ninth fastest man in history.

For Kenyans, it’s a different experience. For decades, the country has dominated the podium in long and middle-distance races. Indeed, since Wilson Kiprugut won the first Olympic medal (bronze, 800m) for the newly independent country at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Kenya has built a reputation for its distance prowess. But at this year’s Olympic Games in Paris, Kenyans will be keeping a close eye on the 100m as well.

Nipping at Omanyala’s heels are two other African stars: Botswana’s Letsile Tebogo and South Africa’s Akani Simbine. Tebogo, 21, is a two-time under-20 world champion who earned silver and bronze medals in 100m and 200m races respectively at the world championships in Budapest last year. Simbine held the African 100m record for two months before Omanyala broke it.

But despite the pressure from these runners — as well as the dominant American and Jamaican sprinters — Omanyala isn’t worried. The more sprinters from Africa, the merrier. “It's a very good career… and I know that we can have so many people get out of poverty because of this,” he said in April this year. “So I'm hoping that it will spread across Africa.”

Omanyala added: “We can have this thing where every time we have an Olympics final or a World Championship final, we have more than two or three sprinters [from Africa] in the final. So that's my dream, and that's the legacy I want to leave.”