Flashes of Panic

It’s beautiful. Really, really beautiful. World Cross is making one of its comparatively rare trips outside Europe, to the country which is (arguably) the current center of gravity of the sport, the nation that, in the last decade, won the event so often they established one of the longest championship streaks in any sport, ever.

And the U.S. is warning people away. They think the World Cross might be a terrorism target.

First off, what business is it of theirs? Sure, there’s little question the Mombasa World Cross will be significantly less choreographed and engineered than Fukuoka was last year, but 90% of that can be written off with the recognition that Africa and Asia do things differently. The IAAF was ready for that when they sited World Cross in Kenya. That’s half the point. And this probably means that, if someone wanted to disrupt the event, they’ll have an easier time of it in Mombasa. But it’s not up to the U.S. to stick their oar in; it’s up to the IAAF and Kenya to deal with it.

And second ridiculous thing about this: what do they think this is, the Super Bowl? What kind of attention would terrorists get from attacking World Cross? For one thing, people simply aren’t concentrated at a cross country meet the way they would be at, say, any one of a dozen soccer games held in Kenya in a given year, leaving off any number of other stadium events held on the continent in a given year. Explode a bomb, kill a few dozen people, and the thousands of people who hear about it on the news will say, “There’s a World Cross Country Championships? Really?”

There are homegrown Kenyan radicals who want to use the World Cross to make a statement, mostly Kenya’s discontented Muslim minority. There’s been terrorism in Kenya, most notably the Nairobi embassy bombing in 1998. So these are real issues, and I don’t think anybody’s taking them lightly.

But, as A said, a terrorist attack at World Cross sounds a lot like an attack on Hartford. Why bother, when there are so many more attractive targets?

I’m not a betting person, but if I was, I’d put my money on the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi causing more damage to the World Cross in Mombasa with this statement than any terrorists.

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