Skepticism began immediately after Chepngetich demolished the women’s world record by nearly two minutes at the Chicago Marathon last October.
The suspicions bubbled up as soon as she streaked across the finish line.
Kenya’s Ruth Chepngetich began fending off questions from skeptical reporters immediately after she ran a 2:09.56 to demolish the women’s world record by nearly two minutes at the Chicago Marathon last October.
Robert Johnson, co-founder of Letsrun.com, referenced the flurry of Kenyan distance runners suspended for anti-doping violations in recent years. Then Johnson asked Chepngetich during her post-race news conference what she would say to those who think her time is “too fast,” that it must be “too good to be true?”
“You know, people must talk,” Chepngetich responded. Then after a long pause, she added, “People must talk, so I don’t know.”
Nine months later, the Athletics Integrity Unit has provided more reason to doubt the legitimacy of Chepngetich’s jaw-dropping world-record performance. The organization that combats doping in international track and field provisionally suspended Chepngetich on Thursday for a positive doping test.
Chepngetich, according to the AIU, tested positive for Hydrochlorothiazide, a diuretic that can be used to mask the presence of performance-enhancing drugs. The AIU collected the sample from Chepngetich on March 14 and notified her of the alleged positive test on April 16.
“Chepngetich was not provisionally suspended by the AIU at the time of notification, however, on 19 April, she opted for a voluntary provisional suspension while the AIU’s investigation was ongoing,” AIU head Brett Clothier said in the statement. “In the intervening months, the AIU continued its investigation and today issued a notice of charge and imposed its own provisional suspension.”
The AIU gave no timetable for a disciplinary case for the 30-year-old runner.
The suspension of Chepngetich will only fuel suspicions that Kenya’s distance-running domination isn’t the fairytale it was once thought to be. The competition to earn the chance to compete overseas for life-changing prize money has created, in the words of World Athletics’ top anti-doping official, “a temptation to dope that’s like no other part of our sport.”
In 2014, Kenya’s Rita Jeptoo tested positive for EPO, a prohibited substance with a long history of abuse among endurance athletes seeking to improve stamina and performance. The 2014 Chicago Marathon and Boston Marathon champion was stripped of those titles and also lost the chance to collect the $500,000 prize she had been awarded as that year’s World Marathon Majors champion.
Alarmed by Jeptoo’s drug case and a spate of others involving Kenyan runners, the World Anti-Doping Agency teamed up with the AIU to examine the doping practices of the country’s elite athletes. They found, through interviews with athletes, coaches and administrators, that Kenya had “a serious doping problem” but that it was “drastically different from other doping structures discovered elsewhere in the world.”
As of July 1, more than 100 Kenyan track and field athletes were ineligible to compete due to anti-doping violations, according to the AIU’s global list. That group includes world record holders, Olympic gold medalists and other giants of the distance-running world.
“The doping problem in Kenya is devastating,” Claudio Berardelli, a prominent Italian distance-running coach whose training group is based in Kenya, told Yahoo Sports before the 2024 Paris Olympics. “Many athletes have fallen victim to the temptation. All of a sudden, in a short period of time, it was like, 'What is happening? Were we blind?'”
Kenya didn’t establish a national anti-doping agency until 2016, soon after the country narrowly avoided a ban from the Rio Olympics for a series of doping offenses and corruption allegations. Only in 2022 did the Kenyan government at last publicly acknowledge the country’s doping problem and commit to spending $25 million over the next five years to combat the epidemic.
Last October, Athletics Kenya released a statement in response to the “unwarranted scrutiny” of Chepngetich’s Chicago Marathon victory. The statement lauded Chepngetich as “one of the finest athletes of our time.”
“To single her out is utterly unfair,” the statement read. “It is therefore disheartening to witness some sections of the media casting unwarranted doubt on her achievements.”
Less than a year later, Chepngetich is facing new doping allegations and a provisional suspension.
And fans of endurance sports have yet another reason to view all great performances with a baseline level of skepticism.
Category: General Sports
