ADDENDUM: 17 July 2025

Today, the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) provisionally suspended marathon world record holder Ruth Chepngetich due to a doping violation.

Ms. Chepngetich tested positive for hydrochlorothlazide, (HCTZ), a banned diurectic used as a masking agent to conceal the presence of other prohibited substances.

The sample was collected in an out-of-competition test on 14 March 2025. It revealed a concentration of 3800 ng/ml in her urine, far exceeding the WADA reporting threshold of 20 ng/ml.

Chepngetich, who ran 2:09:56 in Chicago in October 2024, to break the existing women’s world record by 1:57, while winning her third Chicago title to go along with the 2019 World Championship Marathon title in Doha 2019, accepted a voluntary provisional suspension on 19 April. AIU has since imposed its own provisional suspension. If found guilty, Chepngetich faces a standard two-year ban, although that can be adjusted on the outcome of her case.

She also has the right to a hearing before a Disciplinary Tribunal. This case has implications for the Kenyan women’s marathon team for this September’s World T & F Championships in Tokyo. But beyond that, it continues a sad, vexing problem haunting this and every major sport.

As of 31 December 2024, a report stated 119 Kenyan athletes were on the AIU’s ineligible list. This number was a significant increase from the 54 two years ago. In June 2025, Daniel Kinyanjui was banned for five years. In June 2024, the Anti-Doping Agency of Kenya (ADAK) provisionally suspended 26 athletes, including 10km world record holder Rhonex Kipruto, who received a six-year suspension.

How We Got Here

Long the redheaded stepchild of the federation legislated to oversee it, road racing came of age when Congress was changing the landscape of Olympic sports in America. In 1978, congressional legislation broke up the old Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), established the United States Olympic Committee along with individual governing bodies for all 30 Olympic sports formerly under AAU jurisdiction.

The Amateur Sports Act of 1978 grouped road racing with track & field and race walking under the new federation called The Athletics Congress, TAC for short (now USA Track & Field).

One reason for the roads’ inclusion was the limited number of track and field members in TAC, around 80,000, while the booming sport of road running represented millions of potential new members. With the Olympic marathon being a road race, there was the connection.

But TAC never fully embraced the roads, and didn’t have its finger on the pulse of the burgeoning sport. Accordingly, road racing grew up independent of its governing body in many areas, including logistics, sponsorship, and media, everything but sanctioning, insurance, and the Olympic Trials Marathons. 

As such, the sport road racing took deep root at the individual local event level, and didn’t require much of its governing body. For its part, the federation focused its attention on track and field, its primary component. 

However, as road racing grew, expanding nationally then globally, it never did mature into a cohesive whole. Instead, it maintained its individual event orientation, making for strong local control of the events, but stripping the sport of the possibility of forming something greater than the sum of its parts. 

In some ways, we see the consequences of that growth pattern in today’s road racing community in the spread of positive drug tests that has besmirched the sport and racing for many years.

***

Deliberate Indifference is when someone shows a lack of interest or concern about something important. In criminal law, it means someone is aware of circumstances that would make a reasonable person aware of a crime, but they choose to ignore it and remain ignorant.

In the realm of drug abuse in running, how many federations, events, sponsors, and managers can be said to be willfully indifferent to the PED abuse that has banned one nation from international competition since 2015, Russia, and threatens another in 2024, Kenya?

With that in mind, should more than just individual athletes be held to account for the scourge of drug abuse that plaques this sport to the point of public indifference to the outcome of its competitions?

***

Years ago, when open prize money entered the sport and East African athletes began dominating the road race scene in the early 1990s, there was concern that an unregulated marketplace that had no rules and regulations to control the flow of athletes might eventually jeopardize the health of the sport.

With waves of athletes coming and going with no responsibility to contribute to the advancement of the enterprise in the public eye beyond running fast, the worry was fans might grow indifferent to the series of anonymous, interchangeable athletes who displaced better known, but slower brand names, even as the participation side continued to flourish.

In time, this indifference might even prove fatal to the golden goose that was paying these athletes a substantial wage. Well, the goose might not be completely cooked quite yet, but you might say the heat is rising. 

***

In recent years, the running powerhouse of Kenya has seen hundreds of positive drug tests pour out of its Central Highlands’ training camps, putting the nation on the verge of an across-the-board international ban similar to the one World Athletics placed on Russia in 2015.

The situation has become so toxic, no outstanding performance coming out of Kenya is accepted at face value anymore. It is an untenable situation that makes cynics of us all, and, fair or not, suspected cheaters of every athlete who runs well.

Ruth Chepngetich’s recent marathon world record in Chicago on 13 October 2024 is just the latest record to fall prey to our sporting doubting Thomases.

Thus, the question: what else can be done?

First, we should ask, what is the goal? Second, what means are at hand to accomplish that goal? Because today, zero PED tolerance has proven unsuccessful in protecting the sport against human frailty, especially in countries where poverty provides an enormous incentive to get ahead by whatever means necessary.

If the goal is fair competition, how to judge the ban on PED use as an instrument in creating a level playing field? Poorly, I would suggest. 

And if the current system leads to every great performance being instantly doubted, why should any sport continue that system if it has no self-correcting agency? 

***

Performance enhancement is nothing new. Something as universal as personal coaching was considered beyond the pale in Victorian times when sport was mostly a “gentlemen’s game” practiced by the leisure class. 

But in terms of substances to improve performance, things have changed dramatically since the 1904 Olympic Games Marathon in St. Louis where gold medalist, American Thomas Hicks, took strychnine mixed with raw eggs, washed down with brandy during the race.

In Rome in 1960, amphetamines led the death of a Danish Olympic cyclist. But the most nakedly systematic use of exogenous drugs in the form of anabolic steroids came in the 1972 and ‘76 Games by East Germany and 1980 by the Soviet Union when winning at any cost was a realpolitik instrument in the Cold War pitting communism against capitalism and the health of the athletes was an accepted casualty. 

Today, the west still hasn’t settled its political differences with the communist world, but in the realm of PEDs, there is now a plethora of drugs available to enhance performance, including very precise micro-dosing usage, during which the safety of the athlete is almost assuredly maintained.

Also, despite widespread testing by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which was co-founded by 140 member nations and the International Olympic Committee in 1999 to “promote, coordinate, and monitor the fight against drugs in sports”, illegal drug use has continued to evade detection, especially where random, out-of-competition testing is difficult to administer for both logistical and/or political reasons. ***

The primary components in this current system are the federations, the events, their sponsors, the athletes, their coaches, agents and managers, and WADA. 

The managers and agents are the go-betweens, the ones who negotiate with the events and sponsors on behalf of the athletes. But the ones responsible for catching the dopers are WADA agents acting for the interests of the sport. 

So, how to indemnify the events against drug cheats without simply eliminating financial rewards altogether, euthanizing the golden goose?

Right now, the pressure is on the drug testers to catch the drug takers. But that system has not worked well enough, as PED use and the suspicion of its use continue to be a blight upon the sport. 

If the agents are at the hub in this system, the ones who connect the athletes to events and sponsors, why not require the agents to post a bond before races as a guard against future drug positives? That puts the onus on the agents to ensure their athletes compete clean. 

At present, the only entity in the entire sport that’s under risk of penalty for positive PED use is the individual athlete. But since they come and go with such rapidity that none rise to iconic status in the public imagination, the public quickly forgets about them and the cycle spins on, ad infinitum, with drug positives and the loss of one more anonymous athlete the meager price that’s paid. Nothing new to see here. Let’s all just move along.

There are no consequences to the events, the sponsors, or the agents for an athlete in their race, wearing their kit, or under their care who gets popped for drugs. Without disincentives to all the entities involved, like the international ban instituted against the Russian Federation for its state doping program in 2015, where will the pressure to change come from? 

And since agents are closer to the athletes than the race directors or sponsors, might a performance bond force them to take a more proactive role by creating a self-protecting mechanism against the possibility of a rogue athlete?

For instance, since the events pay the agents who then distribute the money to their athletes, the agents could place all but a small percentage of an athlete’s winnings into a trust account to be parceled out after a certain amount of time. This policy was once used by the U.S. federation when road race athletes first challenged the amateur system in 1982 (called TACTRUST). Later, Abbott World Marathon Majors instituted a similar mechanism to protect its investment.

Since October 2022, AWMM only awards $50,000 to their series champions. When the series began in 2006, the series champion’s prize was ten times that, $500,000. Hello, golden goose. 

Due to drug positives by series champions Lylilia Shobokhova, Rita Jeptoo, and Jemima Sumgong, where the series’ award money was never recovered, the majors reduced the champions prize to $250,000 in 2017 before further chopping it to the current $50,000 in 2022, while focusing their attention on six-star participants.

But before reducing the payouts to today’s negligible amount, AWMM postponed distribution of the $500,000 prize by awarding $100,000 per year for five years to offset any future drug testing positive results. 

Where to apply pressure to encourage the result you’re after?

Right now, the agents just sign up as many runners as they can handle, and if some slip through the cracks and go to rogue physicians or rogue pharmacists, where is the leverage to ameliorate the problem? 

You have to look for the weak point in the system that is currently not producing the results you want. Putting the onus on the agents is one way to apply pressure to the system everybody admits has failed to adequately protect the integrity of the sport.

But others say, the linchpin is really the sponsors. The shoe sponsors are a major funding agency for events, athletes, and federations. As long as the shoe company sponsors continue to support each entity irrespective of the drug problem infecting the game, where is the braking mechanism in the system? 

The non-endemic sponsors like Bank of America or TCS aren’t interested in elite competitions. Their interest lies with the thousands of participation runners. So unless the drug issue somehow starts reducing the size of race entries…

But there are no signs of that happening, because the back of the pack runners no longer care about this elite athletes either.

Only when a PED scandal becomes large enough to affect the retail sales of the shoe companies or negatively impacts title sponsorship PR will anything get done, says one long-time sport insider with experience in dealing with all entities involved. 

Ruth Chepngetich with her WR in Chicago

The women’s marathon world record run by Ruth Chepngetich in Chicago on 13 October 2024 has generated widespread skepticism as well as minor offsetting support. But the net result will likely increase sales for the brand of super shoes she wore. Why would the manufacturer of those shoes do anything to arrest that? They wouldn’t. They aren’t. They won’t. 

Not until shoe company CEOs see their bonuses affected because a scandal is widespread enough to reduce sales or has metastasized enough for Congress to call the CEOs before their committees, in the glare of media spotlights, will anything possibly happen. 

Remember, the huge social media companies changed policies only after they were called before Congress.

In 2005, and again in 2008, Major League Baseball was called before congressional hearings to investigate steroid use. Those hearings led to new MLB drug policies that ended of what came to be known as “the steroid era”.

Running’s PED era continues at pace, and nobody seems to really give a hoot. Not until large-scale financial interests are put in jeopardy will the scourge of drug use ever be brought to heal.

All said, the sad but true bottom line is the sport of running is such a minor player in the larger sporting and societal landscape, despite the economic impact and charitable fund raising generated by the sport, that the harm caused by PED use in running doesn’t jeopardize the power-elite enough to kick-start any of the above rehabilitating actions.

And so it goes.

END

From Abbott World Marathon Majors:

Liliya Shobukhova (RUS) was the original winner of Series IV and V but she was banned from competition for a doping violation in April 2014 and all her results from 9 October 2009 have been annulled. 

** Rita Jeptoo (KEN) won four races in the 2013/14 series but gave positive A and B samples in an out-of-competition test in September 2014. Her standings and the final results of the 2013/14 Series have been determined at the completion of the due legal process and the outcome of an appeal. As a result, the Series VIII title has been awarded to Edna Kiplagat. 

*** Edna Kiplagat was crowned women’s Series X champion following the doping investigation and legal process against Jemima Sumgong (KEN), who won two races but gave a positive sample in an out-of-competition test in February 2017. /