Running: Kenya’s anti-doping program lags far behind its runners

In case you haven’t noticed, Kenya’s runners are good. Lately, they are better than ever.

Last spring at the London Marathon, Kenyan men finished first, second, third and fourth. Over the summer, at the world track and field championships in Beijing, Kenyans topped the medals table for the first time, with seven gold medals, six silver and three bronze.

And on Sunday, Kenyan runners captured the men’s and women’s races at the New York City Marathon for the third year in a row.

But that’s where this feel-good story ends.

The reason is simple: Kenya cannot assure the world that any of its athletes is drug-free, at least based on evidence collected by its national anti-doping program. World Anti-Doping Agency officials say the Kenyan anti-doping agency exists in name only.

The government established the agency in the past year, but has yet to finance it, WADA officials recently told me.

“There’s just no political will for it, even though they’ve been encouraged, persuaded, cajoled by us,” David Howman, WADA’s director-general, said of WADA’s effort to help Kenya put anti-doping measures into effect over the past two-plus years. “It’s reached a crisis point, really.”

How big a crisis? Big enough that Kenya could soon face ejection from the Olympics.

The main problem right now is that Kenya’s reluctance to move forward with its anti-doping program means that its athletes aren’t tested as much as they should be, especially out of competition, when most doping occurs. It means some rising stars are not being tested at all.

Even after more than two dozen Kenyan athletes tested positive over the past several years, and after a German journalist reported how easy it was to obtain doping products in Kenya, Kenyan athletic officials didn’t rush to mend their country’s sporting reputation. Instead, WADA officials said, the Kenyan government has been shrugging its shoulders at the problem.

While the World Marathon Majors, which includes the New York City Marathon, conducts its own prerace testing, Kenyan athletes are currently tested by two groups. One is a regional anti-doping organization run by WADA, and financed in part out of WADA’s $30 million annual global budget. The other is the International Association of Athletics Federations, track and field’s governing body, which this year was accused of corruption and of burying a study that reportedly found widespread doping in the sport.

The cloud over the IAAF grew ever darker Wednesday morning when the French authorities said they were investigating the federation’s former president Lamine Diack on the suspicion that he had taken bribes from Russia to cover up positive doping tests. A French prosecutor told The Associated Press that the amount was about 1 million euros ($1.2 million).

But Howman said a bigger issue was that the regional anti-doping agency that monitors Kenyans was stretched thin and conducted “very limited testing.”

While the IAAF picks up some of the slack, it’s impossible for it to test all of any nation’s top athletes, much less the ones who are making their way through domestic sports systems. That’s why national anti-doping agencies are needed; they can monitor athletes who have shown great potential but have not yet made it into the top ranks. The agencies know who they are and have the best access to them.

Kenya, like all countries in the Olympic movement, knows this already. Or at least it should. WADA said that it had held at least a half-dozen meetings with Kenyan officials, in Kenya, over the past few years. WADA has even brought in experts from the anti-doping agencies in Norway and China to hold Kenya’s hand in building its own program. Yet even that hasn’t spurred action, which is unacceptable for a nation whose runners are routinely the first to cross the world’s finish lines.

What Kenya is doing is unfair to its athletes, whose achievements increasingly face skepticism. But it is also unfair, obviously, to their opponents.

When I spoke with members of the Kenyan Olympic Committee last week at a meeting of national Olympic committees in Washington, the committee’s president, Kip Keino, and secretary-general, F.K. Paul, at first told me they had no idea that their country’s anti-doping agency was basically nonfunctional.

“They do testing and investigation and are official,” said Keino, a gold medalist at the 1968 and ‘72 games. “They are taking care of all the anti-doping to ensure that only natural, talented athletes compete in our sports.”

But it wasn’t long before the conversation evolved into Keino saying that actually it’s just the IAAF and the regional anti-doping organization that perform the testing.

“What’s the difference if we do the testing, or they do the testing?” he said, prompting me to try to explain the difference to a man who shouldn’t need me to explain it.

Paul went on to say that the government was not involved in the anti-doping agency but that it needed to be because government funding was crucial. I asked why it had taken so long. Paul blamed “political unwillingness.”

Keino said: “If WADA doesn’t think we have an anti-doping agency, they should tell us. I thought all along that everything was OK.”

Paul added, “It’s a mistake that must be corrected.”

Then the two of them got into a spat about Keino’s having attended a recent meeting about the anti-doping agency, and Paul said he hadn’t been invited and hadn’t even known about it.

An hour after beginning our circuitous chat, I realized why creating a functioning anti-doping agency — which WADA said usually takes about two years — might not be so easy. While Kenya has drafted anti-doping legislation, Howman said, the effort has stalled. In some ways, it has even regressed.

“It’s an indication of talking the talk, but not even starting the walk, and that’s really disappointing,” he said.

If that walk doesn’t start in the next few weeks, Howman said, WADA will report the status of Kenya’s anti-doping agency to its foundation board, which could then send the case to an independent compliance committee for review.

If that committee agrees that Kenya is violating the World Anti-Doping Code by failing to have a functioning national anti-doping agency, the committee could deem Kenya officially noncompliant. The International Olympic Committee and the IAAF could then punish Kenya in any number of ways, such as by barring their officials from working international events, barring the country from hosting official events and — ultimately — barring Kenyan athletes from competing for their country in the Olympics.

If that happens, so much for Kenyan runners being world-beaters. Being the best means nothing, Kenya, when you can’t go out and prove it.