Five swimmers to represent Kenya at the Commonwealth Games

Forty swimmers will be selected out of the 311 registered from 41 teams in the ongoing swimming trials at the Kasarani Aquatic Complex to represent Kenya at the CANA championships in Lilongwe-Malawi on March 21-24.

The 40, however, will include the five swimmers who will represent Kenya at the Commonwealth Games in Gold Coast, Australia.

Kenya Swimming Federation (KSF) Member of Interim Management Committee (MIMC) Reginald Okumu said that National Olympic Committee (NOCK) has only allocated five slots; two men and three ladies to Australia for the event slated for April 4-15.However, the swimmers will be selected based on the (FINA) point criteria.

“For those who will travel for Commonwealth Games we will use the criteria where swimmers with the highest FINA points will qualify and for those who will travel to CANA we will rank all of them and then select two swimmers from every event,” Okumu told Citizen Digital in an interview.

Okumu said that they decided to change the formats for qualifying to CANA as a measure of improving the swimming standards in the country.

“In the past, we were using Heat and Final basis where swimmers would swim and then be ranked from the first to the last. This time though they swim preliminaries in the morning and then the top eight compete in the afternoon at the finals,” he said, adding that, “we have also enforced time standards in this gala in that for you to participate you must have qualifying times unlike in the past where anybody could participate even without a qualifying time.”

Okumu said that he was impressed by the progress of the event and gave thumbs up to Ivan Hart from Mombasa Aquatic who set five different national records yesterday. The eleven- year old set a record in 200 fly, 200 IM, 400m free, 800m free and 1500m free.

The event will reach its climax tomorrow (Sunday) evening when the curtain comes down, paving way for the committee to come up with the list of candidates who will represent Kenya at the two events.