It is the year 2024 as we write this, but let's pretend it's five years later. In 2022, we lived in a world gripped with many restrictive counter-measures against the covid-19 illness. There are no spectator sports at the moment. It is also a world without any proper decent teams running contest in Africa, ever yet. We long for such a thing to exist. We really wish we had did. We know it will be great when it comes into being, but nobody seems to be ready to put any money into it, yet, unfortunately, or to devote a prime-time slot on a popular TV station to it. All the emails we have sent about this and the attempts to back the good concepts have ended up with nothing being launched. This seems like how it will remain.
Then on 23rd Oct 2024 Mrs Jewutu Kiptenga won the big international East African lottery six-ball powerball drawing as the sole winner of one of the biggest roll-over jackpots ever. The jackpot is 860 million Kenyan shillings. As we write this, the US dollar is trading at 107.2 Kenyan Shillings. It's definitely a lot of money.
Jewutu Kiptenga is ever so happy. Her rags to riches story is amazing. Her husband, an Olympic men's marathon gold medal winner with plenty of money, fame and with a good income, pension and sponsors' deal had left her two years ago. He got together with another woman.
He and his elite lawyers cut Jewutu off without a single penny resulting from the separation, which she was too poor to contest, being illiterate and suffering from the 5-part curse of MS, rheumatism, Crohn's Disease, TB and aids. She has been living in poverty in the South Kenyan region of Narok ever since, in steep decline in her village in the countryside. Not so anymore. Winning the big jackpot in the lottery has made her Kenya's 11th richest person, with more than double the wealth of her x-husband as at the moment when she cashed her cheque for the lottery prize winnings.
The x-husband made contact with her on the 25th Oct 2024, seeking to decree that they get back together again, spotting an anomaly in the divorce papers that makes it null and void. But he has burnt his bridges and has gone off with other women long-term. His behaviour when he threw Jewutu out of his life and cut her off without any support or assets was so appalling that no court in Narok would make her share her winning with him now. Therefore: it won't be him that will be waking up in the same house or in the same family (in banking terms) as the lucky and rich Jewutu Kiptenga! He will not be seeing one single penny of these winnings!
27th Oct 2024: Mrs Jewutu Kiptenga decides that she is going to put one quarter of her winnings into the idea of a Kenyan "Golden Gauntlet Premier League of Running". She is keeping the rest for her house, her treatments and for her and her supportive family to live on, comfortably, for the rest of their lives. She will never need to work again, and will be able to devote herself fully to her family and to this new idea, fast becoming a project of running races that she has come up with.
She wants the TV-viewing public to fall in love with this new idea too. She wants it to be all about the teams, the provinces, the youngsters, the spirit of friendship and not just about the very fastest one person who is soon to win an Olympic medal, like all the dreadful events we have seen on TV so far.
By the first get-together of event management-level organisers on the 14th December 2024 Jewutu Kiptenga has assembled a board of directors, made up of her, six other main sponsors, investors, and benefactors, three officials from the Kenyan National Athletics Association and two representatives of the Kenyan national TV company. These twelve very important people get together to discuss how it will be launched, run, governed, structured, etc. As she brings in by far the biggest investment, Jewutu Kiptenga is allowed to have a double vote and the tie-breaking vote too, in the event of a 6-6 verdict.
An agreement is reached. It is comprehensive, ambitious, far-reaching and fast-moving. The best thing about it is that it comes with a guaranteed weekly slot on Channel 2 on Kenyan national TV at 8 PM every Saturday, which will initially be known as the running show.
A delighted Jewutu Kiptenga and all the other members of the board of directors line up to give press conferences that also make it, in an abridged version, into the Kenyan evening TV news that day. The whole country starts talking about how it will work, whether it can work, whether they will watch and how they think it will go. The TV show launches as a weekly special on Kenya TV channel 2, with the same time slot from 8 pm to 9 pm to be devoted to her for the first three weeks and then the 4 pm to 5 pm time slot on this same channel will be devoted to Jewutu Kiptenga's project alone for at least 6 months, as long as the ratings are at least 23.8% of their most-viewed news or soaps show on average.
The first of a hopefully infinitely many weekly TV show called The Running Show and soon to be renamed The Golden Gauntlet Premier League of Running, featuring Jewutu Kiptenga and many special guest interviews airs on the 19th of February 2034, featuring special filmings of all the main meetings of the management's organisational and launch process. Her quest, in December 2024 Jewutu, focusses on her efforts to set up a qualifying race in each of the 47 counties of Kenya, so that each area will have a good fair chance of winning the contest and so that each person be they rich or poor will be able to go to the try-out race in their home province.
By the time January 2034 comes around, Jewutu Kiptenga and her team have finalised the plans not just for the qualifying event, but she also knows exactly what she will have the competition evolve to become, if all goes well, over the following years too. There are a lot of brilliant ideas assembled in this project, all adding that extra bit of sparkle magic to the mix, including an unusual format decision to ensure that tiered divisions only to exist in years ending in 2 to 4, not in years ending 5 to 1 so the first seven years of competition and the majority of the later years too will have no separate race to win a second lower-tier group. It's looking promising now! The funding, the business plan, the TV show, and the host venues are all being finalised in a very professional and intelligent way. Not bad for a frail elderly illiterate woman who suffers from the 5-part curse of ailments.
Find out how this new set-up works and why, when and how it succeeds!
