Confirmation of this latest honour for the Kenyan 800m star arguably came at just the right time for the 2010 IAAF World Athlete of the Year, mere hours after he didn't make the final three for this year's award.
Nonetheless, Rudisha was excited about the opportunity to succeed Namibian Frankie Fredericks: "I will fight to ensure athletes' rights are factored and I will also seek the improvement of incentives to prevent the high rate of transfer allegiance by athletes from the continent."
The 27-year-old has always shown pride while competing for Kenya, doing so with a wide smile on his face even through the lean years he has gone through recently.
Having set a world record time for the 800m of 1:40.91 (the first-ever and only sub-1:41 time) while winning gold at the 2012 Olympic Games, it was expected that Rudisha would dominate two-lap running.
However, the four years between Games has seen him suffer from injury, off-the-track murmurings about his personal life and the rise of talented rivals. That much was evident when he had to settle for a silver medal at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow after an inspired performance by the up-and-coming Nijel Amos from Botswana.
Amos though, after beating Rudisha six times on the trot couldn't handle the pressure of expectation at the last year's world championships, and failed to reach the final. That opened the door for the Kenyan, and he won his second world title (after 2011) comfortably to remind his compatriots Ferguson Cheruiyot Rotich and Alfred Kipketer that, at the very least, he was still boss of the Kenyan squad.
That said, 2016 got off to a rocky start for Rudisha. He finished fifth in his first Diamond League meet in May after confusion at the start, but then set a new African record (the second fastest time of all-tim, in fact) in the rarely contested 600 metres race in Birmingham in June, clocking 1:13.10. However, he struggled again in Stockholm - in unfavoured wet conditions. As such, he had to put on a good show at the Kenyan Olympic trials...
He started them well enough by winning his heat only to suffer in the final and have to fight back on the home straight to finish third behind Kipketer and Rotich.
"I feel that my body is coming back pretty nicely and I am in better form than last year. I am focused and determined to defend my [Olympic] title," Rudisha said, with the metaphorical final ticket to Rio just within his grasp.
As it happened, Rudisha then ran a 1:43.35 in Hungary on 18 July to head to the Olympics with the top two fastest times this year, electronic and hand-timed. However, the last person to win the 800m title at consecutive Olympic Games was New Zealander Peter Snell, all the way back in 1964.
However it was Amos who suffered in the the heat and the heats at the Estadio Olimpico João Havelange first, shortening the odds that Rudisha could match Snell.
In the final, he did just that with a fair bit of 'snell' himself cruising home in a time of 1:42.15, the world's quickest time since 2012, to successfully defend his Olympic title - Algerian Taoufik Makhloufi and the US's Clayton Murphy taking the other podium positions.
Of course, Rudisha is now out of the running for the 2016 IAAF World Athlete of the Year gong, but considering he only turns 28 two weeks after the winners are confirmed the Kenyan should still have a few more opportunities to add to an ever-growing list of honours.