The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) is to launch a doping crackdown on elite marathon runners after scandals involving top Kenyan and Russian stars.
Organizers of the top races in London, New York, Boston, Chicago, Tokyo and Berlin have agreed to finance extra testing of top runners by the IAAF.
The finance from World Marathon Majors (WMM) means that the top 150 runners will face tougher testing after races and out of competition.
Failed tests by Russia’s Liliya Shobukhova, who was the second fastest women in history, and Kenya’s Rita Jeptoo, three time winner of the Boston marathon, sullied the name of one of the original Olympic disciplines.
Jeptoo — who in the past two years has achieved the Chicago/Boston double — was one of 35 Kenyan athletes suspended over the past two years for taking banned drugs.
The WMM “offered their contribution to our program,” IAAF anti-doping manager Thomas Capdevielle said when announcing the clampdown.
He said it “basically means systematic ABP [athletes biological passport] testing at the races on all the elite field, as we have been doing for the past two years, but also urine tests out of competition.”
Drug investigators would have “more resources to follow a group of 100-250 elite marathon runners in the world,” Capdevielle added. “So we will have like a sub-group that we will very closely followup.”
He added that a new drug testing laboratory to be opened in Kenya within three months would be a “significant achievement.”
Capdevielle called it a “priority project” that would analyze blood tests on Kenyan, Ethiopian, and Ugandan athletes.
Shobukhova was banned for two years in April last year over suspicious blood values in her biological passport. Her three wins at the Chicago marathon and one at the London race were all annulled.
Meanwhile, the IAAF and the World Anti-Doping Agency started full-scale inquiries into race-walking in Russia after a German television documentary alleged widespread doping by top athletes.
“We hope to at least initiate proceedings in the next two or three months on the first individuals,” Capdevielle said.
He added that the IAAF could appeal against some sanctions ordered by the Russian Athletics Federation to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the main international appeals tribunal.
Proceedings have already been started against Viktor Chegin, who heads the Russian race-walking center in Saransk and has trained more than 20 athletes caught for doping in recent years.
Three of the five latest race walkers banned last month were past or present Olympic champions. All were coached by Chegin.
“We are confident it will end in a satisfying conclusion for us,” Capdevielle said of the IAAF action against Chegin.
IAAF president Lamine Diack told the BBC also on Monday the sport was facing a crisis, although he denied that 99 percent of Russian athletes were doping, describing those claims as “ridiculous.”
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