DEFYING the fury of most of his compatriots, a young Kenyan athlete will be straining to win a gold medal for Qatar tonight after switching citizenship for $1,000 (about £636) a month for life and a new running track for his homeland.

Saif Saeed Shaheen will race against his brother in the 3,000 metres steeplechase at the World Championships in Paris after one of the most controversial and blatantly commercial defections witnessed in the world of athletics.

At the Manchester Games last year, Shaheen was the toast of Kenya after becoming the Commonwealth champion aged just 19. But the junior world record-holder has earned the disapprobation of his former team-mates after he was bought by the Qatari athletic federation and changed his name from Stephen Cherono.

Kenya has dominated the steeplechase for a generation. Its competitors are enraged by the defection of their young star, who ran the fastest time in the event in the world this year for his native land.

“You should not sell your body for money,” Reuben Kosgei, Kenya’s world and Olympic champion who will line up against Shaheen tonight, said.

Shaheen admitted that there was tension between himself and his former team-mates. “They say to me: ‘You want to take away our gold medal. It is our tradition.’ They will be very angry if I win.”

To complicate the ethics of defection, the race will also be a family grudge match: one of the three Kenyans running against Shaheen is his older brother, Abraham Cherono.

The brothers faced each other in the heats on Saturday night and it was the new Qatari who won.

His brother was left sounding baffled. “Maybe he is not proud to be a Kenyan,” Cherono said. “I don’t know why he has done it. It is strange that I have to compete with him, but I have to do my best to beat him.”

Asked if the brothers were close, Shaheen replied: “No. I’m from Qatar now, he’s from Kenya. It’s finished.”

Qatar hopes that its way with a chequebook will buy it a healthy medal haul in the Asian Games in 2006, which will be held in the capital city of Doha. The wealthy Gulf state has also purchased Albert Chepkurui, another top Kenyan runner who now competes as Ahmad Hassan Abdullah, and imported six Bulgarian weightlifters for £600,000 to boost their last Olympic squad.

Under the present rules of the IAAF, the world governing body, an athlete has to serve three years away from international competition before a change of nationality can be approved. The only means of side-stepping the three-year stipulation is if the nation that the athlete is leaving gives its approval.

Qatar sealed Shaheen’s switch by promising the Kenyan federation that it would pay for a new running track in Eldoret, the town in western Kenya from where so many of its best runners come.

Cherono officially became Shaheen and a citizen of Qatar this month, when he signed his $1,000-a-month life-long contract — far in excess of the $2,000 a year that he was earning as a Kenyan athlete.

Claiming that “my heart feels Qatari”, Shaheen took on a Muslim name, which he then admitted that he did not particularly like. But he is not obliged to live in his adopted country or to renounce his Roman Catholicism.

He plans to spend about two months a year in Qatar and live most of the rest of the time in South Africa.

The riches on offer to Shaheen have been made clear by Abdullah Saifeldin Khamis, the other Qatari steeplechaser who will contest tonight’s final.

Khamis used to be Sudanese but switched from being a good African distance runner, of whom there are many, to a good Asian one, of whom there are very few. Now an Asian and Qatari recordholder, last year he made $180,000 in bonuses alone.

Shaheen also hopes to have a longer career in Qatar. “To make the Kenyan side is very hard,” he said. “With Qatar, I’m sure I can keep going for 12 more years.” But he is not counting on a warm reception when he returns to his homeland. “When I win the gold medal,” he said, “maybe they’ll chase me away.”

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