In recent years, Kenyan athletes participating in the track and field events at the Paris Olympics have endured the most comprehensive drug-testing regime of any competing nation. There’s solid reasoning behind this.
Kenya is not only globally renowned as a running dominion but has also been wrestling to recover from a massive doping scandal first identified about ten years ago.
Since 2015, around 300 Kenyan athletes have faced disciplinary action for using prohibited substances. Such was the severity of the situation that sport authorities contemplated what was seen as an implausible option: imposing a ban similar to the one faced by Russia. Russia, another major sporting nation, has been prominently absent from competition in Paris due to a history of doping and other related issues.
Kenya plays a substantial role in track and field sports, a status cemented when Naftali Temu clinched the country’s first gold medal back in the 1968 Games. Losing Kenya from the athletic scene would have profoundly impacted the sport, remarked Barnabas Korir, an executive committee member of Kenya’s athletics federation.
Korir noted that Kenya’s absence would lead to a lack of real competition for other countries, given that Kenya is home to some of the greatest athletes and possesses deeper talent compared to other nations. This is why Kenya was afforded the chance to rectify this problem.
The potential of a ban represented a moment of reckoning for Kenya, a country whose international reputation and internal identity are considerably allied to its exemplary runners, as pointed out by Brett Clothier, the head of the independent unit accountable for global athletics’ drug testing.
In 2023, the Kenyan government pledged to invest $5 million every year to restore its inadequate anti-doping scheme. This commitment, although being only half of what the UK government contributes to its local body and one third of the US’s contribution for testing, is a commendable amount given Kenya’s relative economic status, according to Clothier, who also heads the Athletics Integrity Unit.
Now, he suggests, the drug-testing regime of track and field athletes in Kenya is globally unrivalled.
Contrary to Russia, where a state-backed doping scheme facilitated elite athletes while tainting countless global sports events, doping in Kenya grows naturally from grassroots levels and is tinged with economic ambiguity and fierce competition.
According to athletics officials in Clothier and Kenya, the majority of top-tier runners originate from three counties located in the northern valleys, a considerable distance from Nairobi, the capital. These areas see running as one of the limited reliable avenues of escaping the harsh clutches of poverty.
“Imagine an organised crime syndicate,” Clothier said, likening the efforts to exploit and benefit from a pool of skilled middle- and long-distance runners that surpasses any other region in the globe. “Every hopeful criminal views them as a goldmine,” he added.
Such circumstances not only attracted Kenyans but have also drawn foreign nationals who scout talented athletes and present them with a gateway to amass wealth which has the potential to transform not just their lives but their community as a whole.
“Runners are parading around with lucrative dollar signs, enticed by people promising, ‘We can accelerate your running speed’,” said Clothier.
Marathon running happens to be the most monetising and commercial sport, with Kenyans holding the title for being the world-beaters. Numerous key cities worldwide host annual marathons, each embodying a chance for a cash windfall.
Snatching a victory in a significant marathon could bring in upwards of $100,000, whereas even less significant ones proffer prizes ranging between $5,000 and $10,000. In Kenya, even these modest sums could equate to an annual salary. Securing a sponsorship deal with a footwear company could mean an added influx of revenue.
The stark disparity between this financial gain and poverty “forms a mammoth risk for doping”, mentioned Clothier.
However, the exceeding talent pool among Kenyan athletes suggests that those at the peak are constantly anxious about being dethroned by those waiting in the wings.
In an attempt to dissuade top-rated runners from resorting to doping to preserve their standing and revenue, the count of listed athletes in Kenya’s drug-testing cohort was augmented to 300, up from 30. The positive outcome for test administrators has been the increase in internationally-recorded doping cases involving Kenyans, spiking from a solitary case in 2017 to 38 in 2022.
This preliminary success led the authorities governing track events and their doping clampdown associates to implore the Kenyan government to recommit to overhauling a system that had been an unchecked hub of corruption.
For several years the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) has established a near-constant presence in Kenya, deploying some of its most senior personnel to the east African nation for considerable periods. The AIU has enhanced its intelligence efforts within Kenya and developed strategies for surprising training camps with spontaneous testing. Further, it has hired a fresh group of local staff by offering significantly higher salaries, in some instances, up to five times what was previously offered.
This move prompted an immediate reaction. The number of local cases surged, with high-tech drugs being identified and challenging legal action, as the figures of prominent athletes caught by the AIU, whose role is to target the top runners, began to decline. Simultaneously, the record of individuals caught by the newly created local anti-doping agency started to rise. In 2023 alone, the Kenyan anti-doping agency launched legal action against 60 athletes, while an additional 29 were scrutinised by global organisations.
Injecting more resources into the Kenyan anti-doping agency has also been beneficial in capturing some of the country’s highest-profile athletes and revealing intricate strategies to evade testers. This includes staging car accidents and sometimes even conspiring with notable medical professionals to falsify records.
Their most recent victory was a lengthy two-year ordeal. Shrouded in controversy, Lawrence Cherono, a Boston and Chicago marathon victor, alleged he accidentally ingested heart medicine that was prescribed for his wife. After months of eluding requests for official documents that could verify his allegations, it eventually called for a court order and private investigators’ services to followed Cherono’s movements until he arrived at the hospital.
In the end, Cherono’s defence crumbled, resulting in a seven-year ban for the athlete in July. All these successful prosecutions, including several high-profile Kenyan athletes, have caused damage, noted Korir. However, he also emphasised that these “few bad seeds” should not eclipse several decades of honest athletic achievements.
“I would like the world to know that a majority of Kenya’s past athletes have participated with honesty”, he stated. – New York Times.