Team Kenya for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games will don new training and competition kit.
The National Olympic Committee of Kenya (NOC-K) Secretary General Francis Mutuku said that the current honeycomb pattern attire that was designed for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games weather will be replaced.
Mutuku said the new kit that focuses beyond summer, will be launched in May next year by their official kit sponsor Nike, the world’s largest supplier of athletic shoes and apparel and a major manufacturer of sports equipment.
Mutuku said that they are in talks with Nike to have the replica merchandise distributed in Africa and Middle East.
“We only had the Team Kenya merchandise on sale in America and Europe because there were no sufficient buyers in Africa on dollar value,” said Mutuku, adding that it was difficult to ship the apparel into the country because of heavy taxation.
Mutuku was speaking during the anti-doping workshop conducted by Anti-Doping Agency of Kenya (ADAK) for sports journalists at Pride Inn Paradise, Mombasa on Friday.
The current Team Kenya’s official kit for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics sparked an uproar on social media moments after it was unveiled in New York in February 2020.
Kenyans faulted the design that features a honeycomb pattern, saying it didn’t have the correct shades of red, green and black – the colours of the country’s national flag.
However, NOC-K officials and athletes including the Olympic marathon champion Eliud expressed their liking for the kit that was designed and unveiled after Nike conducted months of testing in Eldoret.
At the same time, Mutuku disclosed that federations that were planning to have the African Games as qualifiers for the 2024 Paris Olympics might be forced to use other alternatives.
Mutuku said the Games were scheduled for August 4 to 19 this year but postponed to March 8 to 23 next year in Accra, Ghana.
