FOLLOWING in the footsteps of Stephen Cherono, the Kenyan who won the Commonwealth Games steeplechase title in 2002 and who re-emerged as a Qatari 13 months later to take the World Championships gold medal in Paris, more Kenyans are abandoning their homeland and heading for the Gulf. It is a contentious issue that will come under discussion when the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) council meets in Berlin this weekend.

Although drugs in general, and THG in particular, are the most urgent subject for consideration by the council, the nationality debate is on the agenda. After Cherono’s victory as Saif Saaeed Shaheen in Paris, the IAAF set up a working group to investigate and now it is due to report.

The difficulties were highlighted yesterday when the Kenya Olympic Committee (KOC) dug in its heels over Shaheen. The committee said that it would not allow him, or any other athlete who has competed for Kenya in the three years before the Games, to represent any other country at the Olympics in Athens next summer. He was allowed to run in Paris because he needed approval only from Athletics Kenya (AK), which gave it.

By the same token, Abel Cheruiyot, the junior silver medal-winner in the World Cross Country Championships last year, and Leonard Mucheru, a team gold medal-winner with Kenya in the 2000 World Cross Country Championships and seventh in the World Indoor Championships 3,000 metres last winter, face a block on participating in the Games for their newly adopted Bahrain. But not so Gregory Konchellah.

Konchellah has sacrificed his glorious family name — his father, Billy Konchellah, was the 1987 and 1991 world champion at 800 metres — to become Youssef Saad Kamel, of Bahrain. He finished second in the Gulf Championships in Kuwait last month and, because he has never run for Kenya, he is not shackled by International Olympic Committee (IOC) rules on nationality and Olympic participation.

Before an athlete may switch allegiance, three years must elapse since he last represented his former country. “The IOC charter is clear,” Tom O’Omuombo, the secretary of the KOC, said. “If this athlete has not represented us, he can do whatever he wants. We have no quarrel with him.”

The quarrel is with Shaheen, Albert Chepkurui, another former Kenyan who competes for Qatar, Mucheru, Cheruiyot and others who are said to be on their way, lured by generous financial packages from the wealthy Gulf states.

The three-year stipulation may be reduced only with the blessing of the national Olympic Committee of the athlete’s former country. “If they want to go to the Olympics in 2004, they will have to run for Kenya,” O’Omuombo said. “It is at our discretion. If we compromise, it encourages misuse of the rule and exodus.”

AK received financial incentives from the Gulf states not to block Kenyan transfers. “We are not going to stand in somebody’s way if he has green pastures elsewhere,” Francis Nyatome, the AK spokesman, said.

By leaving Kenya, athletes have a better chance of being selected for teams in the Gulf and picking up prize-money. Asked whether AK was concerned that history may be repeated, with former Kenyans denying Kenyans gold medals, as Shaheen did Ezekiel Kemboi in Paris, Nyatome said: “We don’t fear that. We have too many good athletes.”