World Championship organisers attended the visa matters

Following a frustrating visa chaos from a number of athletes around the world, the World Athletics Championships organisers were desperately trying to help clear a visa issuing deadlock that is threatening to prevent a large number of athletes, including the coaches and officials from entering the United States for the event that started on Friday 15 July.

Among the affected athletes is Team South Africa™s 40 athletes who were stranded in Italy without visas to fly to Oregon in the USA and the Kenyan sprinter Ferdinand Omanyala among the most high-profile.

However Omanyala finally got his visa approved but now faces a race to arrive in Eugene in time for Friday's 100 metres heats.

Another fellow Kenyan Sheila Chepkirui, in line to race in the 10 000 metres on Saturday, indicate in her Instagram that said despite her US visa being approved in May this year she still did not have the stamp in her passport. "Tears and pain. Silence,"

Several others have received late approval now have arrived on the day of their races - hardly ideal preparation for the sport's biggest event outside the Olympics.

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On Thursday the World Athletics (WA) said that 255 of 374 outstanding visa cases had been resolved after being escalated to a joint group comprising USOPC, Oregon22 and World Athletics.

Another 20 have been refused and around 100 are still to be resolved, with many of them expected to fail.

USATF COO Renee Washington said œwe won™t be 100 per cent satisfied unless we had 100 per cent of the athletes here. That is not something that we will probably be able to achieve but that is what we strive for."

"Of the 5 500 participants that needed visas, less than one per cent have yet to be resolved."

One of the complications for this event is that WA left the window for qualification open until very close to the start in order to give athletes more chance to find competitions due to the impact of Covid on events. It means that many have had to start the visa application process relatively late.

WA president Sebastian Coe said: "In percentage terms it's a small number, but that's of no comfort if you are in that category.

"We will work right up to the last minute but this is a very complicated multi-faceted landscape. There isn't one thing that is the dominant problem.

"Sometimes it's a staffing issue, some people are struggling to get face to face interviews. There are political complications as well about nations being able to travel into the United States."