Olympics 2024 | Why Kenya stopped running from its doping past

Paris: No country competing in the track and field competition at the Paris Olympics has had its athletes subjected to more drug testing than Kenya in recent years. There is a reason for that.

Not only is the East African nation a running powerhouse, it has also been trying to emerge from a major cheating crisis first detected nearly a decade ago.

About 300 athletes from Kenya have been punished for using banned substances since 2015. The situation was so bad at one point that track and field officials had discussed the possibility of the unthinkable: a ban similar to those imposed on Russia, another sporting powerhouse whose doping past — among other issues — has rendered it conspicuous by its absence in Paris.

Kenya’s vast footprint, and dominance, of track and field since Naftali Temu brought home the country’s first gold medal at the 1968 Games meant losing the nation would have diminished the entire sport, said Barnabas Korir, an executive committee member of Kenya’s athletics federation.

Without Kenya, he said, “other countries will feel they will not get a proper competition because this country has some of the best athletes, deeper talent than any country.”

“That is why,” he said, “the chance was given to Kenya to redeem itself from this problem.”

For Brett Clothier, the head of the independent unit responsible for drug testing in global athletics, the threat of a ban represented a “come-to-Jesus moment” for Kenya, a nation whose global standing, and sense of itself, is in many ways linked to its champion runners.

That much is clear on the roads out of Jomo Kenyatta airport in Nairobi, where the faces of top stars such as Faith Kipyegon and Eliud Kipchoge appear on billboards, and where Kenyan runners come and go on their way to races around the world. Their success has been so consistent, the country’s gold-medal haul now so consistent, that winning well — breaking a record — is now the true measure of success.

“We say they are ambassadors for our country,” Korir said.

Risking all of that was not an option, Kenyan officials decided. So the Kenyan government bowed to demands (and threats) to invest a vast sum to create a new anti-doping agency capable of tackling a problem that had spread through the entire Kenyan running pyramid.

In 2023, the government committed to spend $5 million annually to rebuild its broken anti-doping program. The total is half the contribution of the British government to its local body and only a third of the United States’ contribution to testing there. But, according to Clothier, the head of track and field’s anti-doping body, the Athletics Integrity Unit, it is an “incredible” sum considering the relative financial might of Kenya.

Testing of track and field athletes in Kenya is now “the best in the world,” Clothier said.

Unlike Russia, whose state-sponsored doping program offered advantages to elite athletes and corrupted dozens of international sporting events before it was revealed, doping in Kenya rises organically from the ground up and is complicated by a mix of economic uncertainty and intense competition.

Nearly all the best runners, Clothier and Kenyan athletics officials said, hail from three counties in the northern valleys, far from the capital Nairobi. In those counties, running is one of the few proven ways to escape grinding poverty.

“It’s like organized crime,” Clothier said of the effort to control and profit from a pool of talented middle- and long-distance runners that is deeper than anywhere else in the world. “Every wannabe criminal sees them as a moneymaking opportunity.”

Those conditions have attracted not just Kenyans but also foreign nationals who seek out talented athletes and offer them the chance to secure riches that can be not only life changing but also community changing.

“Runners are walking around with flashing dollar signs, and there are people telling them, ‘We can make you run faster,’” Clothier said.

The most lucrative and commercial sport is marathon running, and Kenyans happen to be the best in the world at it. Scores of major cities around the world host annual marathons, and each one represents an opportunity for a payday.

Winning a major marathon can be worth $100,000 or more, and even minor ones offer prizes of $5,000 to $10,000 for winning. In Kenya, even those smaller purses can represent the equivalent of a year’s wages. An endorsement contract with a shoe company can bring in yet more income.

That contrast between that money and poverty “creates a huge risk of doping,” Clothier said.

But the same depth of talent among Kenyan runners means the very top ones are always in fear of being knocked off their perch by those just below.

To reduce the risk that elite runners will turn to doping to protect their status, and their incomes, the number of named athletes in Kenya’s drug-testing pool was increased to 300 from 30. The results have been encouraging for the testers: The number of international doping cases — runners caught cheating — involving Kenyans went from just one in 2017 to 38 in 2022.

“On Kenya, the jury’s out,” Clothier, a naturally cautious Australian lawyer, said when asked if that represented the end of Kenya’s doping problem. “We’ve got off to a good start.”

But that early success was why track officials, and their anti-doping surrogates, have worked to persuade the Kenyan government to reaffirm its commitment to overhaul a system that had fallen prey to unchecked corruption.

Just before the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016, the head of Kenya’s track and field squad was caught in an undercover sting offering to tip off athletes about the timing of drug tests in return for thousands of dollars.

“Everyone knew there was a lot of cheating in Kenya,” Clothier said. “For our sport, Kenya is the No. 1 country in our sport, with the No. 1 doping problem. So we decided we are just doing it.”

The AIU has had a semi-permanent presence in Kenya for years, sending some of its top staff to East Africa for several months at a time. It has increased its intelligence-gathering capability in the country and worked to make remote training camps targets for random testing. It also has recruited a new generation of local staff members with promises of higher pay, which, in some cases, was as much as five times higher than in the past.

The response was immediate. The local caseload increased, with sophisticated drugs detected and prosecuted, and the number of elite athletes caught by the AIU, which is responsible for pursuing the very best runners, started to fall just as the total caught by the new local anti-doping agency crept higher. In 2023, the Kenyan anti-doping agency opened cases against 60 athletes, and another 29 were investigated by global bodies.

The Kenyan anti-doping agency’s additional resources have also helped catch some of the biggest stars and expose elaborate efforts to avoid testers, including faking car crashes and sometimes working with senior medical doctors to fake records.

Its most recent success story took two years to complete. Lawrence Cherono, a winner of the Boston and Chicago marathons, claimed he had inadvertently ingested heart medication that had been prescribed to his wife. Demands for official documents proving the medication was his wife’s were stymied for months, eventually requiring a court subpoena and the use of private investigators to track the athlete as he visited the clinic.

Eventually, Cherono’s story fell apart, and in July, the 37-year-old was banned for seven years.

All of those success stories, and the others that have taken out some of Kenya’s biggest stars, have hurt, Korir said. But he also said the “bad apples” must not overshadow decades of athletic success.

“I want to tell the world that most of the Kenyan athletes from the past have been running clean,” he said.