Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Kenyan distance runner tests positive for the banned masking agent furosemide. Kenyan distance runner denies any guilt, blames it on medication prescribed by his doctor and receives a two-year suspension in October, 2024.
Same Kenyan distance runner submits another sample which tests positive for the steroid testosterone. Again, same Kenyan denies any guilt, then changes his mind and signs an admission-of-doping form, which results in a combined five-year suspension in August 2025.
The announcement by the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) on Wednesday concerning the above Kenyan distance runner, Charles Kipkkurui Langat, already sounded like a broken record to a lot of people. The 29-year-old isn’t a headline name in Kenyan distance running, but he’s been cleaning up on the roads. A winner of both the Barcelona and Lisbon half-marathons, he’s one of only nine men to have run under 27 minutes for 10km on the road. He also broke the 59-minute barrier in the half-marathon. That’s fast.
Here’s where the needle gets stuck. It’s become increasingly difficult to keep pace with the number of Kenyan distance runners being banned by the AIU, such is their near-weekly frequency and often repeat offences. According to the latest AIU figures, 135 Kenyan names are currently suspended, including some lifetime bans, already accounting for around 75 per cent of positive doping cases in 2025.
Since the AIU was set up as a fully independent anti-doping unit of World Athletics in 2017, the number of Kenyan runners banned has amounted to well over 300, with no apparent end in sight. Kenyan athletes missing tests, tampering with tests, jumping out the window to avoid tests - it is farcical and disheartening.
In some ways, the numbers are shocking. In other ways, the athletics world has become numbed by them. In the last month alone, Sheila Chebet was banned for five years for attempted tampering with a sample, after blaming her positive test for tramadol on a dental prescription. She later wrote to the AIU asking for forgiveness. Judy Jelagat Kemboi was also provisionally suspended by the AIU after testing positive for hydrochlorothiazide, or HCTZ, a banned diuretic also widely used as a masking agent.
Again, not exactly headline names in Kenyan distance running, although HCTZ did make the headlines when women’s marathon world-record holder Ruth Chepngetich was announced as testing positive for the same substance in July. She is provisionally suspended pending the full investigation into her case. She is among the biggest Kenyan names to fall from grace, although much of the running world had already turned its back on her performances.
This column has previously addressed some of the doubts around Chepngetich after she ran 2:09:56 to win the Chicago Marathon last October, taking just under two minutes off the previous mark. At age 30, Chepngetich had considerable marathon pedigree. A twice-previous winner and 2019 world champion, she also became the first woman to break the 2:10 barrier.
Much of the initial response to Chepngetich’s world record did acknowledge that she had never failed a doping test. There was nothing immediately suspicious about her coach, because she didn’t have one. Her Italian agent Federico Rosa did have a worrying history, however. Boston and Chicago champion Rita Jeptoo, as well as 2016 Olympic champion Jemima Sumgong, were among the Kenyans he represented serving lengthy doping bans.
After her Chicago record, Athletics Kenya took the strange step of publishing a 400-word defence of Chepngetich. The Kenyan parliament also spent more than 20 minutes on the floor defending Chepngetich against what they described as “baseless allegations” of doping on LetsRun.com.
Then, in April, nine days before Chepngetich was set to run the London Marathon, she announced her withdrawal, claiming she was “not in the right place mentally or physically”. Turns out something else wasn’t right.
Chepngetich had undergone an out-of-competition doping test on March 14th and, on April 16th, was notified of her positive test for HCTZ. Two days later she withdrew from London and on July 17th was provisionally suspended by the AIU, which charged her with an anti-doping rule violation.
There have been incidents where trace amounts of HCTZ can be found in contaminated pharmaceutical products. This is why a minimum concentration of 20 ng/mL in any sample is required to return a positive test. Chepngetich’s sample contained a concentration of 3,800 ng/mL of HCTZ, or 190 times the amount needed to trigger a positive test. A case, perhaps, of the athlete needing to get better at masking the masking agent if they are to avoid a positive test.
[ Olympics 2024: Why Kenya stopped running from its doping pastOpens in new window ]
Last month, The New York Times ran a lengthy feature under the headline: Some Kenyan Runners See Doping as a Path to Glory, and to Basic Sustenance. It’s a damning read. Journalist Tariq Panja investigated the situation in Iten and Eldoret, where the general poverty means many Kenyan distance runners “calculate that doping is worth the risks not only of getting caught, but also of damaging their health and, in some cases, even dying”.
It is over a decade since I spent a few weeks living and running with Kenyans in Iten, perched at 7,875ft altitude on the western escarpment of Kenya’s Great Rift Valley. It is a sort of running paradise. The town is still marked by two red rectangular arches, with six words written across the top: WELCOME TO ITEN – HOME OF CHAMPIONS.
If running back under that sign now, I’d be thinking instead that Iten is the home of many champion cheats, such has been the gradual decline in my faith in Kenyan distance running in the decade since.
It has also been a decade since Sebastian Coe was elected president of World Athletics, in August 2015. Coe also set up the AIU with the intention of restoring some confidence in athletics, by trying to ensure more of the cheaters get caught. Despite this now-crippling doping crisis in Kenya, Coe has repeatedly declined any sort of blanket ban, like that imposed on Russia in 2015, claiming Russian doping was state-sponsored, whereas Kenyan doping is not.
It is still doping on an industrial scale and while many Kenyan athletes will again light up the track at next month’s World Championships in Tokyo, it is becoming increasingly hard to keep the faith in a country so far ahead of everyone else on the AIU’s list of the biggest cheats of all.
