I'm not on X, so can't share the post, but I saw it shared from Uganda Athletics. Here's what it says:
Breaking News 🚨: Ugandan starts Joshua Cheptegei and Jacob Kiplimo will miss the 2025 Tokyo World Championships, set for 13-21 September due to personal reasons.
We request that their privacy be respected at this particular time.
I'm not on X, so can't share the post, but I saw it shared from Uganda Athletics. Here's what it says:
Breaking News 🚨: Ugandan starts Joshua Cheptegei and Jacob Kiplimo will miss the 2025 Tokyo World Championships, set for 13-21 September due to personal reasons.
We request that their privacy be respected at this particular time.
"personal reasons" sounds indeed as if the AIU visited Uganda. On the other hand, Cheptegei was announced to run in Amsterdam in October, so he might not want to do worlds because of that.
ok, maybe it could have been worse. Maybe simply not showing up to the event without saying anything. Then shutting down their Instagram. Then saying that they are nursing a small injury. Then not competing for 6 months+ without stating when they are thinking of coming back and not providing any injury updates.
"personal reasons" sounds indeed as if the AIU visited Uganda. On the other hand, Cheptegei was announced to run in Amsterdam in October, so he might not want to do worlds because of that.
I'm not on X, so can't share the post, but I saw it shared from Uganda Athletics. Here's what it says:
Breaking News 🚨: Ugandan starts Joshua Cheptegei and Jacob Kiplimo will miss the 2025 Tokyo World Championships, set for 13-21 September due to personal reasons.
We request that their privacy be respected at this particular time.
Didn't Cheptegei say a long time ago that he was retiring from the track after the 2024 Olympics? To me, it just looks like a moron made an irrelevant post on X.
Top marathoners usually skip Worlds. Fake news imo.
ok, maybe it could have been worse. Maybe simply not showing up to the event without saying anything. Then shutting down their Instagram. Then saying that they are nursing a small injury. Then not competing for 6 months+ without stating when they are thinking of coming back and not providing any injury updates.
Yeah I think most of us already knew they weren't running worlds, so to put out that vague and mysterious sounding tweet is only going to create more speculation.
Then why not just say that's their reason? Why "request their privacy be respected" about something that is public knowledge?
This is just an African English thing - it seems vague and mysterious to us but this is just a normal thing you'd hear someone say in Uganda and wonder why they responded in such a weird way. The reason they aren't running Worlds is because they've moved on to focusing on road racing - but Uganda doesn't have that many great runners so there's probably some expectation these guys would still race everything so instead of giving a straightforward answer they say something like "respect their privacy."
This is just an African English thing - it seems vague and mysterious to us but this is just a normal thing you'd hear someone say in Uganda and wonder why they responded in such a weird way. The reason they aren't running Worlds is because they've moved on to focusing on road racing - but Uganda doesn't have that many great runners so there's probably some expectation these guys would still race everything so instead of giving a straightforward answer they say something like "respect their privacy."
Reminiscent of Tebogo and some of his other Botswanan training partners skipping World Relays, and the media coverage. It doesn't happen much with Kenya, though I remember one WC year where they selected all their marathon megastars and then were "shocked" that none of them ran. In reality, I'm pretty sure it was all for show.
This post was edited 2 minutes after it was posted.