EUGENE, Oregon: Organizers of the World Athletics Championships have been desperate to clear a visa backlog that threatens to prevent about 100 athletes, coaches and officials from entering the United States for the event, which begins Friday.
Dozens of athletes from around the world have reported their issues, with Kenyan sprinter Ferdinand Omanyala among the most prominent. Omanyala finally got his visa approved but now faces a race to arrive in Eugene in time for Friday’s 100m.
Kenya’s Sheila Chepkirui, who will run the 10,000 meters on Saturday, said her US visa was approved in May but she still hasn’t got a stamp in her passport. “Tears and pain. Silence,” she wrote on Instagram.
Several others have received late approval but will now arrive on the day of their races – hardly ideal preparation for the sport’s biggest event outside of the Olympics.
Former American sprint champion Michael Johnson tweeted: “That would never happen in a truly professional sport.”
World Athletics (WA) said Thursday that 255 of 374 outstanding visa cases had been resolved after escalating to a joint group of USOPC, Oregon22 and World Athletics. Another 20 have been rejected and around 100 remain to be solved, with many of them likely to fail.
“We’re not going to be 100 percent satisfied unless we have 100 percent of the athletes here. We probably won’t be able to achieve that, but that’s what we’re striving for,” USATF COO Renee Washington said at a press conference after a WA Council meeting.
“Of the 5,500 participants who required a visa, less than one percent still have to be cleared.”
One of the complications for this event is that WA has kept the qualifying window open until just before the start to give athletes more chances to find competition due to the impact of COVID on the events. This means that many had to start the visa application process relatively late.
WA President Seb Coe said: “It’s a small number in percentage terms, but that’s no consolation when you’re in that category.
“We will work to the last minute, but this is a very complicated landscape with many facets. There is not one thing that is the dominant problem. Sometimes it’s a staffing issue, some people have trouble doing face-to-face interviews. There are also political complications in allowing nations to travel to the United States.”
Visa issues aside, Coe described the first World Athletics Championships in the United States as very exciting.
“The United States has always been the powerhouse of athletics,” he said. “We want a lot of people in the stadium, but this is the biggest sports market in the world and there are some really strong assets in the United States to promote the sport.
“At the high school level, it’s the most-participated sport and there are 50 million recreational runners in this country. The challenge is to make a really clear connection between what they do and believing that they are part of the athletics landscape.
“We have a really collaborative process with USATF and we now have a glide path to the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics. So it’s exciting to be here, but we’re also here on a mission.”