3 min readUpdated: Apr 17, 2026 08:39 PM IST
In an interesting case, World Athletics has refused to allow 11 elite athletes, including multiple Olympic medallists, changed their allegiance from their native country to Turkey. The move has put a hammer blow to the country’s medal chances at the 2028 Olympics.
The list of 11 athletes included 2024 Olympic men’s discus gold medallist Roje Stona, 2024 Olympics men’s shot put bronze medallist Rajindra Campbell and a host of Kenyan athletes including former women’s marathon World Record-holder Brigid Kosgei.
The full list included Kosgei’s compatriots Catherine Relin (Selin Can) Amanang’ole, Brian Kibor, Ronald Kwemoi and Nelvin (Can) Jepkemboi, Stona’s fellow Jamaicans Jaydon Hibbert and Wayne Pinnock, Nigeria’s Favour Ofili and Russian Sophia Yakushina.
Turkey had been offering long-term financial support to recruit foreign track and field stars with the aim of winning a host of gold medals at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
The move was prompted by Turkye’s dire performance at the 2024 Summer Games in Paris, where it failed to win a single gold among its eight medals across all sports.
However, World Athletics deemed the move as an attempt by a national athletics team. It said that the move would “impinge upon and compromise the imperatives” underlying eligibility rules and transfer of allegiance regulations.
A World Athletics panel noted that the move was part of a coordinated recruitment strategy led by the Turkey government through a government financed Athletics club. The panel said that the aim was to attract foreign players via lucrative contracts.
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“Given the common features across the applications, the panel assessed them together and determined that such an approach is inconsistent with the core principles of the regulations. These principles are designed to safeguard the credibility of international competition, encourage member federations to invest in the development of domestic talent and maintain confidence among athletes that national teams are not primarily assembled through external recruitment,” it noted.
Changing allegiance is not a new thing in the world of Athletics, however, in the recent times, the trend of recruiting athletes to boost medal tally at the international and continental level has been observed more. The route has been from Africa to the Asian countries.
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
