London’s bid for the 2029 World ­Athletics Championships has ended in failure after it lost out to Nairobi. The Kenyan capital will be the first African city to host the championships.

The World Athletics president, Sebastian Coe, said the decision to go to Nairobi was historic and promised that it would stage a “­groundbreaking championships”.

While eyebrows will also be raised given that 318 elite Kenyan athletes have been banned for violating anti-doping rules since the Athletics Integrity Unit was set up in 2017, a World Athletics spokesperson defended the decision, pointing out the Kenyan government had committed $5m annually to anti-doping efforts.

“Kenya is much improved in this area and we believe Nairobi hosting the world championships can act as a powerful catalyst in the Kenyan government’s continued fight against doping,” the spokesperson said. “It will put a spotlight on clean sport and galvanise the nation behind compliance.”

As Nairobi and Munich, which was awarded the 2031 championships, celebrated, one senior source in the London team, which had been seen widely as the frontrunner for 2029, said they were “totally gutted”.

Only over the weekend did some start to fear that their £45m bid, made up of £35m from the government and £10m from the mayor’s office, might not get over the line. London believed it had a strong case , and the sight of around 60,000 fans watching track and field every night for a week was a compelling proposition.

Jack Buckner, the chief executive of UK Athletics, said: “We are deeply disappointed. We believed we had an outstanding bid which would genuinely take the sport to new levels.

“Although today’s announcement hasn’t gone our way, we will review and regroup. We know the world’s athletes love competing here and we’ll continue to explore further opportunities to make that happen.”

In hindsight, the lengthy public battle with West Ham to get permission to use the stadium in September 2029 – which was settled only on the eve of the bid being submitted – was not ideal. The sparse crowds on the opening days of last month’s European Athletics Championships in Birmingham perhaps did not help either.

However, the London 2027 team believed those factors were irrelevant, and it simply came down to a thirst in World Athletics for Kenya to host the championships and the size of Nairobi’s bid.

Lord Coe, though, stressed there had been a range of factors at play. “Yes, of course, we see the historical, groundbreaking nature of taking the World Athletics Championships to Africa, but that alone is not the basis upon the decision,” he said. “It was made across budgets, it was made across financial government guarantees, it was made across the growth potential of the sport. It was also grounded in some really serious analysis.”

Coe also pushed back when he was reminded that going to Kenya would mean that Europe, which has the biggest fanbase for track and field, will have staged one World ­Athletics Championships between one championship, in Budapest in 2023, between 2017 and 2031.

“Europe is a heartland and we openly accept that,” he said. “It is in large part the breadbasket of our sport. But we do also have a responsibility to make sure that an international governing federation made up of well over 200 federations has the opportunity to be able to take our championships into areas that strategically we think will actually grow the footprint of our sport.

“And Munich 2031 is a European city. What it does allow us to do in the next three editions is to have our World Athletics Championships globally based: in Africa, in Europe, and our next ­edition in Asia in 2027 [Beijing] next year.”