By: Andy Yu
Last Friday, Kenyan sprinter — Ferdinand Omanyala — nearly missed the World Athletics Championships hosted at Oregon, the biggest event after the Olympics. The reason? The extremely late arrival of his visa.
Omanyala had applied for the visa on July 7th with the rest of the Kenyan team. However, unlike the majority of his team, which had received their visa the following day, Omanyala received his visa with barely a day left to catch a flight to the US.
Landing with just three hours before his race, Omanyala hurried directly to Hayward Field. He finished his heat in 3rd place with a time of 10.10 seconds, far from his best time this season 9.85 seconds but good enough to get through to the semifinals, where he was shortly eliminated.
Ferdinand Omanyala’s situation touches on a bigger problem Visa applicants face. Athletes all around the world have long had problems with receiving their US visa’s in a timely fashion. Nigerian athletes who were not as lucky as Omanyala were forced to pull out last minute due to visa problems. Despite paying their visa fees in April, they were given a consular appointment for March of 2024. Furthermore, typical people face even more frustrating setbacks and difficulties than athletes do.
In light of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, visa services have been indefinitely suspended. Now as the coronavirus becomes much less of a threat, routine visa services have been opened back up. With the dramatic influx of visa applicants, Officials are finding themselves “with a significant backlog of cases” leading to delays.
An unidentified official who spoke to the guardian said in a statement, “I am sure this kind of treatment won’t be meted to athletes, officials and journalists from Great Britain, Germany and Australia.” To an extent, this is true. According to the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, the average wait time for a US visa in Nairobi is 687 days, 3.5 times the average wait for somebody living in London.
After being interviewed about his close call, Omanyala said in a statement, “It’s really disappointing, and I hope they do better next time.”
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