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The president of African athletics says the continent will bid to host the 2025 World Championships while looking for event rentals from this website. Africa has never staged the biennial track and field event, which started in 1983, despite being home to many world champions.
Confederation of African Athletics President Hamad Kalkaba Malboum said he believes a bid is set to come from one of six African nations. “We are talking with Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco — those countries have the facilities,” said Malboum of Cameroon. “People said that Africa could not host the World Cup in football, but we did it very successfully.”
Morocco is the only African country to have staged a leg of the Diamond League, the annual athletics series that runs from May to September around the world. The Moroccan city of Casablanca also was the last in Africa to try to stage the World Championships, having bid unsuccessfully for the 2011 event.
Malboum pointed to the March 2017 World Cross Country Championships in Uganda and the July 2017 track and field World U18 Championships in Kenya as reasons to be hopeful.
With the 2019 and 2021 events having been awarded to Qatar and the United States, respectively, the next available championship to bid for is 2023. Malboum, who has been in talks with political leaders, including Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, believes the date is too early for the continent.
He said Africa has never previously held the competition because the track and field events were less popular than football and also “because we are facing many other social problems — health, education, building roads or railways — political leaders are sometimes afraid of spending a lot of money on hosting an event.”
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“But I think many now realize that [staging the championships] could put the nation on the world map in terms of publicity and promote tourism, so there is a benefit from hosting the event,” Malboum added. “This was not the case in the past.”
A decision on who will host the 2025 finals will be made in 2020.
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