PhilG
July 11, 2011, 8:03am
11
kitkat1:
The third world, especially in the remote villages , aren’t big on keeping records and crunching statistics. Most of these guys may have been given a birth certificate when they applied for their passport to run for their country overseas. So there can be a wide discrepency between fact and falsehood but the athletes themselves wouldn’t probably know. And who can we argue with? But I reckon it has reached the stage of being a straight up rort now.
When I went to visit Brother Colm O’Connell in Iten in the central highlands of Kenya some years ago he also added the the wisdom that at least in Kenya "they don’t like to count because it can be premature (or even bad luck). They sometimes don’t start to count until the children are a few years old because so many die as infants. "
I coached a Ugandan international some years back, she confirmed my belief about this subject, many of them do not have a birth certificate, there are few records kept, so basically in a lot of cases they just make up their dob.