{"id":11447,"date":"2026-01-08T15:38:45","date_gmt":"2026-01-08T15:38:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/11447\/"},"modified":"2026-01-08T15:38:45","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T15:38:45","slug":"visa-problems-decimate-ethiopian-team-for-florida-world-cross-championships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/11447\/","title":{"rendered":"Visa problems decimate Ethiopian team for Florida World Cross Championships"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Bernard<\/a> By
\n
\n Bernard Cheruiyot
\n <\/a>
\n Published on: January 08, 2026 06:20 (EAT)
\n \"Visa <\/p>\n

Athletics – World Athletics Championship – Women’s 10,000m – National Athletics Centre, Budapest, Hungary – August 19, 2023 Ethiopia’s Ejgayehu Taye, Ethiopia’s Gudaf Tsegay and Kenya’s Agnes Jebet Ngetich in action during the final REUTERS\/Sarah Meyssonnier<\/p>\n

\"Vocalize <\/p>\n

Audio By Vocalize<\/p>\n

The Ethiopian squad at the World Cross Country Championships in Tallahassee, Florida, on Saturday (Jan 10) has been hit by multiple visa rejections.<\/p>\n

Letsrun.com\u00a0revealed this week that the United States has rejected 14 athlete visa applications from Ethiopia. It has mainly affected the under-20 teams but officials, coaches, senior athletes and relay runners from the east African nation also had problems despite the organisers being well aware of likely issues.<\/p>\n

Yet Ethiopia aside, the number of countries missing from the event is alarming.<\/p>\n

The list of no-shows in Tallahassee includes Italy, Germany, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Austria, Czechia, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Ukraine, Turkey and Switzerland \u2013 to name just a few.<\/p>\n

In addition, Belgium has only one runner (in the under-20 men’s race) while Netherlands also has just one athlete (senior women’s race).<\/p>\n

Denmark and Serbia have hosted the event in recent years, too, but are not supporting the 2026 championships.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Bernard Cheruiyot Published on: January 08, 2026 06:20 (EAT) Athletics – World Athletics Championship – Women’s 10,000m…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11448,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[65,2279,7793,2679,2281],"class_list":{"0":"post-11447","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ethiopia","8":"tag-ethiopia","9":"tag-florida","10":"tag-tallahassee","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-world-cross-country-championships"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11447\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}