Viewed locally as the most competitive athletics event after the World Cross Country Championships, the Kenyan trials last weekend illustrated just how the sport's development programme should be a case study for the rest of the world.

The stunning displays follow Kenya's success at the World Athletics Championships in Edmonton, Canada last year.

Kenya won seven medals to underscore why it is known as the world athletics superpower.

Kenya will once again be on show at the World Cross Country Championships in Dublin, Ireland, on March 23-24. Kenyans, whose domination of the championship began in 1980, will be the team to beat.

No individual or single country has the ability to match Kenya, leave alone dominate a sport that has been its preserve since the 1960s.

Belgian Mohammed Mourhit's victories in the past two editions have been described by local coaches as a flash in the pan.

So what is so special about Kenyans that they are able to master all weather conditions?

Besides physical abilities, Kenyans are endowed with a rare determination to win. This is supplemented by an elaborate selection programme in which every athlete is given more than one chance to vie for selection.

Last Saturday, the 36 athletes who will represent Kenya in the Dublin were selected out of 10,000 probables in an exercise that took four months to conclude.

Starting at village level last November, the competition moved higher notch by notch through various competitions in 62 districts, 10 "sports provinces" and the Kenya Amateur Athletics Association affiliates and then the final trials.

In between, various meetings were organised in rural areas with an exceptional successful meeting being held in Eldoret, considered the leading athletics town in the world, and home to the majority of world-beating Kenyans.

At the Eldoret meeting, 2,000 athletes, ranging from veterans to street children as young as nine, took part. A notable example was Richard Limo, the winner of the Kenyan trials at the age of 21.

Last year, Limo surprised the world, though not himself, by clinching the 5,000 metres world title in Edmonton, a medal that had eluded Kenyans since 1997. 

Limo and his 36 Dublin-bound colleagues are expected to maintain a tradition started in 1985 by John Ngugi. Apart from the retired runner's five titles, Paul Tergat and William Sigei won a record seven between them.

By comparison, Moroccan Khalid Skah (the 1990/91 champion) and now Mourhit are the only individuals who have in the past broken Kenyan's hold on the title. While Limo and company will be battling with mud and cold in Dublin, another exercise to select athletes to take part in the Commonwealth Games in Manchester in late July will get underway in Nyeri, Central Province, on the same weekend.

Like the cross-country, many athletes will be exposed to competition at various levels in different parts of Kenya that will result in a remarkable level of success compared with invitational meetings for elite athletes in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

As in the cross country, few if any athletes who ran in the last Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 1998, will qualify for Manchester. Kenya's turnover in athletics is the highest in the world, owing to tough domestic competition, and therefore the selection is expected to be extremely tough.

Kenya for example has won 15 senior men and 12 individual titles at the annual cross country championships considered the toughest open athletics meeting in the world. At the outdoor track and field championships, they have won 19 gold medals.

By all means, with the interlude of 90/91 and 2000/01 when the country lost the senior men's title at cross country, Kenyans rightfully take the world cross country championships their own.