Kenyan track and field athletes are the target of nearly one-quarter of out-of-competition doping tests, a statistic that underlines how much suspicion there is over the world’s most successful distance-running nation.
The figures were revealed on Thursday by Brett Clothier, head of the International Association of Athletics Federations’ Athletics Integrity Unit.
Kenyans made up 22 percent of the unit’s out-of-competition testing program, and the nation’s athletes took up “at least the equivalent amount of time in our investigations and intelligence team,” Clothier said.
“Kenya is a great and justly proud athletics nation, but it now has a serious doping problem,” Clothier said in comments accompanying the release of a report following a nearly two-year investigation by the unit and the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) Intelligence and Investigations Department.
The report concluded there was “widespread doping” in Kenya, but “the doping practices of Kenyan athletes are unsophisticated, opportunistic and uncoordinated, and there is no evidence of an institutionalized system.”
It did not need a two-year investigation to discover a problem, with a clear spike in cases since about the time of the 2012 London Olympics.
However, what the report did do was dig deeper into some of the reasons behind the mess in Kenya.
It appeared to separate Kenya’s doping problems from that of Russia and that nation’s organized, state-sponsored scheme.
Doping in Kenya “is different from other doping structures discovered elsewhere in the world and, as such, it requires a different approach,” WADA director of intelligence and investigations Gunter Younger said.
Kenyan athletes are “insufficiently educated on doping and/or willfully blind as to the consequences of doping,” the report said.
It also stressed the need for better control over medical practitioners and “quasi-medical practitioners” who are “highly relevant” to the doping problem and often the source of banned substances.
Overall, the report pointed to a weak anti-doping effort in Kenya exacerbated by the unwillingness of athletes to help.
Investigators said they reached out to 31 Kenyan athletes serving doping bans.
Only seven gave interviews and none said they had used prohibited substances, despite being found guilty at doping hearings. None provided any helpful information.
A total of 131 Kenyan athletes failed doping tests between 2004 and this year, while track and field was by far the worst sport. In the same period, all other sports in Kenya produced seven failed tests.
The anabolic steroid Nandrolone was the most prevalent banned substance for Kenyan athletes. The corticosteroids group, anti-inflammatories that can improve athletic performance, were the next most used.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier