| Summary/Abstract |
In the early 1970s, following a brilliant showing by the Kenyan men’s track and field team at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, a handful of the nation’s young stars accepted athletic scholarships to U.S. colleges. They served as harbingers of much more robust recruiting pipelines that would soon bring dozens—and later hundreds—of Kenyan student athletes to U.S. institutions of higher education. These pipelines were established just prior to Kenya’s back-to-back boycotts of the 1976 and 1980 Olympic Games which, combined with crippling economic stagnation at home, stunted investment in the newly independent nation’s burgeoning athletics program. During this lull, access to elite training and competition in the U.S. collegiate system proved critical to sustaining the trajectory of Kenyan middle- and long-distance running, which has since become one of the most striking examples of national dominance in any sport. Perhaps even more significantly, these pipelines offered student athletes—mostly poor, ethnic-minority Kalenjin from the Rift Valley—otherwise unheard-of access to higher education abroad.
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