By Samuel Munai
The national 7’s men and women rugby team has received a moral boost as they prepare for the Olympics Games later this year after receiving a sponsorship cheque of shs 2.8 million from the National Olympic committee of Kenya NOC-K to go towards high performance training their training.
The support will go towards enhancing the team to travel to Madrid, Spain for a series of high-performance preparation events hosted by the Spanish Rugby Federation and World Rugby and will feature up to 12 men’s and 12 women’s teams.
Kenya Lioness vice captain Sheila Chanjira has hailed the sponsorship by Kenya Charity sweepstake as a huge boost to the team’s morale as they prepare for the Olympics Games.
“It’s big boost to the teams morale ahead of the tournament and the games in Tokyo because we will prepare for the games while testing ourselves against the best in the world so I want to thank NOCK and the new partners for their efforts to make sure that we are ready for the game,” Chanjira said.
Rugby was one of the sports that was late to resume training after the resumption of sports guidelines were released by the Ministry of Sports. The teams resumed training late last year despite the difficult covid requirements and conditions. The Union made the requisite arrangements to have the team training before the start of the official Olympic training program.
Acording to Joshua Aron who is federation’s Treasure, the teams are in dire need of sh. 159 million for Olympic Games preparations.
Both team have qualified for Tokyo Games that were rescheduled to this year after the disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The KRU will tomorrow name the teams to travel to Spain this being the first time that the rugby teams will be in competition since the coronavirus pandemic started in March of 2020.