Eliud Kipchoge Named Global Ambassador for the Dakar Youth Olympic Games

The International Olympic Committee has named Eliud Kipchoge a Global Ambassador for the Youth Olympic Games in Dakar, the first Olympic Games of any kind to be staged in Africa. The IOC announced the appointment on Sept. 29, pairing the two-time Olympic marathon champion with Rayssa Leal, the Brazilian skateboarder who has won two Olympic medals. Earlier editions brought in Olympians including Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps and Yao Ming.

About 2,700 athletes aged 17 and under will compete in Dakar, Diamniadio and Saly from Oct. 31 to Nov. 13. Kipchoge plans to meet as many of them as he can, and he has a more defined task with the Refugee Olympic Team, which is sending athletes to a Youth Olympics for the first time. “I’ve been in the sport for 24 years; it’s my time to give back to the next generation,” he said in the IOC’s announcement.

Six refugee athletes based in Kenya and Uganda spent two weeks at a training camp in Kenya’s Uasin Gishu County in September, and Kipchoge came to meet them at a media and stakeholder day there on Sept. 9. Four of the six are in athletics, according to World Athletics, two of them entered at 800m and two at 200m, while the other two compete in judo and taekwondo. Kipchoge said his aim was to convince them that being refugees did not make them any less than the athletes they would line up against. “If I succeed in changing their minds to believe in themselves, and know that they have the same capability as other athletes from other countries. That is why I am here,” he told Mozzart Sport at the camp.

World Athletics had already made Kipchoge the mentor of its under-20 Athlete Refugee Team in January 2024, ahead of that year’s world U20 championships in Lima, under a pledge the federation made at the Global Refugee Forum in December 2023.

The athletes heading to Dakar are only a year or so younger than Kipchoge was when he first beat the best in the world. At 18, he won the 5,000m at the 2003 World Championships in Paris in 12:52.79, holding off Hicham El Guerrouj by just 0.04 seconds, with Kenenisa Bekele third, World Athletics records show. He had won the junior race at the World Cross Country Championships in Lausanne earlier that year. Track medals at the Athens and Beijing Olympics followed before his move to the marathon, where he won gold in Rio and Tokyo and set the 2:01:09 world record in Berlin in 2022.

Kipchoge’s own racing this year has been Eliud’s World Tour, seven marathons on seven continents to raise money for the Eliud Kipchoge Foundation, and he said before the first stop that it was “more for inspiration and to reach more people than in the past marathons.” He opened it in Cape Town in May, his first marathon in Africa, and finished 16th in 2:13:29, then ran 2:18:39 for 12th in Porto Alegre in July. Dakar will be his second Olympic assignment of the year, after he was one of eight flag bearers at the opening ceremony of the Milan Cortina Winter Games in February.

The tour’s third stop is the Melbourne Marathon on Oct. 11, on a redesigned course that finishes inside the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Kipchoge turns 42 on Nov. 5, with the Games in Senegal still under way. “Being the first, it will stay vivid in the minds of young people and the general public for a very long time,” he said of Dakar.