"I am happy to be able to concentrate on running again and don’t have any problems any more,” says Leonard Maina Mucheru. The Kenyan will be among the favourites in Sunday’s Samsung Milan City Marathon. “My aim is to finish in the top three and achieve a time of about 2:10 in Milan on Sunday.” Leonard Mucheru made headlines unwillingly when he won the Tiberias Marathon in Israel in 2007. The problem was that the native Kenyan at that time competed for Bahrain and the Arabic nation does not recognize Israel as a state. In December 2003 Mucheru had become a Bahrainian and his name was changed to Mushir Salim Jawher. At that time a number of prominent Kenyan athletes switched to Qatar and Bahrain, attracted by financial rewards.
“I don’t regret that I ran for Bahrain – with the exception of the problem with Israel,” says Leonard Mucheru. “It was a strange situation before I went there, because I had told the Bahrainian federation that I would need a visa for the race in Israel. Since they have no embassy from Israel in Bahrain the guy I was talking to said I should go ahead and get my visa in Kenya. That is what I did – but of course he later denied having said that to me,” explains Leonard Mucheru, who won his debut marathon in Israel in 2:13:13. But in contrast to other reports the runner explains that he never lost his citizenship. “The people of the federation were talking about this to the press. But I always had my Bahrainian passport. The problem was in the following months that when I sent it from Kenya to Bahrain to get visas for a race it suddenly took two months before they sent it back. That way I could not go to a number of events,” says Leonard Mucheru, who always continued living in Limuru near Nairobi and still lives there today. “After my race in Israel they asked me to come to Bahrain to apologize to the public. I did this, but I did not feel good doing this.”
The deliberate delay of the granting of visas was a decisive factor for Leonard Mucheru to change nationality back again. “I asked them to release me which they did. Then I got good support from Kenya’s athletics federation and from our government, so that I got back Kenyan citizenship quickly.” This year he is competing as a Kenyan again. Asked about the people’s reaction in Kenya Leonard Mucheru, who had lived in the US for six years and studied business administration in Philadelphia, answers: “Of course not everyone will be happy with what I did, but I know a lot of people are happy. At first people were disappointed when I left Kenya. I was probably seen as a traitor. But then they realized that besides running for another country I was doing good things for them. I invested all my money in Kenya. In 2003 we started a company producing animal foods in Nairobi. I now have 63 people employed.”
Leonard Mucheru also explains that due to a number of elite runners who have turned away from Kenya “the government received a wake-up call”. “They saw that other countries were offering much more to athletes. So they changed the situation in Kenya as well. Today if you are successful in international championships you will receive financial rewards from the Kenyan government, which was not the case in earlier years,” says the 30 year-old.
In January Leonard Mucheru went back to Israel as a Kenyan and won the Tiberias Marathon for a second time. He established a course record of 2:10:32 which is also his personal best. “They were very happy in Israel when I came back, because they had feared that I might have to give up my running career after the problems a year earlier.”
With an improvement to around 2:10 in the Samsung Milan City Marathon Leonard Mucheru would be happy. His next goal will then be a much faster time: “I think I am capable of running 2:05 in the marathon.” He would make quite some headlines again with that – but for reasons he much more prefers.
More information is available online at: www.milanocitymarathon.it.
Leonard Maina Mucheru in front of the Milan Cathedral. Photo credit: Victah Sailer/photorun.net
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