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....