Kenya’s once famed elite running programme is under increased scrutiny as the extent of doping comes to light.
By Helena Hussey
Over the past 50 years Kenyan athletes have come to dominate long-distance running; yet, what started with a generation of self-funded, hard-scrabble independent athletes, has now morphed a who’s who of once famous athletes, who have now been banned from the sport.
In the last year alone, 13 Kenyan athletes have tested positive for banned substances. As of July 2023, 40% of all doping cases in global athletics were Kenyan athletes.
There is no simple answer as to why this is, instead there is a trifecta of issues from poverty, to corrupt agents, to a testing system that caters to Western athletes.
The story of doping in Kenya is one of money, poverty, and the measures that individuals and institutions are willing to go to for personal safety, professional acclaim, and economic freedom. This scandal has thrust to the fore the relationship between elite sports and poverty.
The Role of Poverty
Running is a lucrative enterprise, and it is this financial gain that is at the heart of this crisis.
Dr. Jake Shelley, an ex-Great Britain middle and long-distance runner, who now works for the International Testing Agency, is a leading expert on doping in athletics. In our numerous conversations about the series of events that led Kenya from the highs of 1968, to the current state of its athletics programmes, he pointed to the unusual pressure that poverty has placed on these athletes to succeed.
When talking about the unprecedented ability of these runners, and the dominance they maintained in the sport over such an extended period of time, he spoke about the role of financial instability as a key factor in their success.
“Kenya has just been streaks ahead of everyone else for decades,” he said. “The financial opportunity offered to runners in Kenya means [running] appears a viable means for them. Finding a way out of poverty.”
There are only so many places available on the elite circuit, and so the incentive for these runners is not to win gold medals, but simply to be the best of their peers, so they can enter races and earn any prize money available to them.
Natasha Mboya, who grew up competing for Kenya in the junior sports categories, agrees with this sentiment.
“The lack of support from the government has led to some pretty obvious declines in sports,” she said. “It doesn’t attract top talent in the way that it would if there was better funding and support or maintain public interest.”
According to Brett Clothier, the head of the Athletics Integrity Unit, this shift of emphasis – from accolades to earnings – has led athletes to be more willing to commit crimes. If it is down to your ability to run, as to whether you can make it out of poverty, he suggests most athletes would choose to dope, as ultimately that is a far smaller sacrifice.
The Agent Problem
Within Kenyan society, athletes have the ability to earn significantly more than the average salary. In 2021 Kenya’s average annual salary was approximately $5,400. In comparison the prize money for first place in Boston’s 2022 marathon was $150,000, with an additional bonus of $50,000 if any record was set.
However it is not just the runners who are looking to profit from this, but agents too.
In elite running, especially at the top races such as the Boston marathon, runners have to pay their way unless they are big names with lucrative sponsors. For many athletes from countries like Kenya and Ethiopia, they cannot afford the fees required to enter, let alone the airfare, kit or accommodation.
In this gap, come the agents, along with a healthy dose of “corruption,” said Mboya.
Many agents representing Kenya’s runners have fought hard to establish relationships with sponsors and directors that act as a direct line to competition, and, in turn, earnings for their runners.
“The issue,” Shelley said. “Is that the agents usually take 20%, sometimes more than what the athletes earn – it’s in an agent’s financial interests for the athletes to do really well in these races.”
The systems in place to drug test athletes place the onus entirely on the individual themselves. Although this could tarnish the reputation of their coach, the agents are able to continue unscathed.
“The speculation is agents get their athletes access, and very powerful performance enhancing drugs like EPO. Their athletes on these drugs then make their agent 20% of their own fee, and bear in mind, an agent can have a number of athletes in one race,” Shelley says. “Then six months later or so, the athletes get caught for doping and get banned from the sport. But the agent just gets a new batch of athletes and the cycle repeats.”
The Testing System
I asked Shelley why he thought that the first few positive tests only started appearing 10 years ago when there was no real signifier to suggest Kenya had started doping.
“No one was looking properly before,” he said. “There just wasn’t the scrutiny via testing on Kenyan athletes. To catch doping you have to test people out of competition. And that’s much more complicated.”
Dr. Moni Wekesa, a professor of law and sport science at Daystar University in Nairobi, agreed.
“The process of doping control is very expensive and relatively inaccessible [for Kenyan athletes]” he said.
The testing system is poorly funded, and designed around the Western lifestyle.
Elite athletes are tested in pods; during their time in the pod they have to make themselves available to testers at a certain address for a particular hour each day, with most athletes choosing the early morning as they are sure to be at the pre agreed address.
“This [system] works well for British, American,and other Western athletes because they can just put their home address, or hotel address,” Shelley said. “In Kenya, the addresses are not quite as specific. In Iten [a famous running town in Eldoret] the athletes live in larger camps, to locate that athlete, it’d be behind like a gated access to this camp.”
If you miss three of these calls there is a resulting doping ban, known as a ‘whereabouts failure’. A number of high profile Kenyan athletes have fallen foul to this ban, such as 1500m world champion Elijah Manangoi.
“There have been multiple stories of Kenyan athletes being seen jumping over the fence at the back of these camps to evade testing. Once they’re tipped off by whoever’s at the gate,” Shelley said. “Bans like can be controversial, you don’t know whether that’s an admin mistake or whether they genuinely were doping and didn’t take the test because they knew that we’re going to fail it.”
‘Whereabouts failures’ highlight the flaws of the Western system of drugs testing, and epitomise the fine line that Kenyan athletes are constantly treading.
Fallen Idols
These factors have led to changes: the Kenyan government has committed to providing $5 million worth of funding to combat doping, over the next five years; they have set up the Anti-Doping Agency of Kenya and increased their national testing pool to 300, from 38 in 2022.
But for fans and experts alike this scandal has left a long shadow.
“These were people we grew up with,” Mboya said. “In the hours and hours of training we did, the promise was always: ‘you can be the next Reptoo’, so it was pretty heartbreaking watching that illusion being shattered.”
Shelley shared a similar sentiment.
“I do think there are clean Kenyan athletes, but Kenya didn’t start doping 10 years ago,” he said. “All the people I grew up looking up to, it’s tarnished their reputation too and they’re long since retired.
Shelley is sure that there are more of his childhood heroes whose names will go on the ever-increasing list of banned athletes.
“It seems to me that this is really only the middle of the iceberg.”