WTF Is Happening in Kenya? An In-Depth Look at the World’s Latest Doping Crisis

We’ve all seen the sign:

WELCOME TO ITEN: HOME OF CHAMPIONS

Perched atop the Great Rift Valley, Iten is one of a handful of rural Kenyan villages famous for consistently producing the best distance runners in the world. At the entrance to the town stands an arch with those famous words printed across the top, flanked by a Kenyan flag on either side.

But that flag, once a source of awe and respect in the athletics world, is increasingly becoming a symbol of distrust.

For as long as they have been a part of the international distance running scene, Kenyan athletes have been dumbfoundingly dominant. The best male and female Kenyan marathoners are more than a minute quicker than their fastest non-Kenyan counterparts, and since the turn of the century, one in five of the country’s Olympians have won a medal at the Games – and every single one of them has been a runner.

The entrance to Iten, Kenya

Despite these lofty accomplishments, scientists have found no genetic explanation for their seemingly unbounded talent. In the nature vs nurture debate, nurture has won out: is it really as simple as living at altitude, eating fresh foods, and growing up in a country that idolises their professional runners?

For some, perhaps. But a growing number of others have turned to performance-enhancing drugs to find an edge over their rivals, plunging the nation into a doping crisis that has undermined the mythical status of generations past and pushed Kenya to the brink of a sweeping international ban.

Why Kenya?

At the highest level of the sport, there are 230 distance runners currently serving a suspension for falling foul of anti-doping rules. 91 of those athletes are Kenyan, which is an astounding figure when you consider that Ethiopia, which has the second-highest number of suspended runners, has 12.

These aren’t low-profile athletes either: 2016 Olympic Marathon champion Jemima Sumgong, former marathon world record holder Wilson Kipsang, three-time Boston Marathon champion Rita Jeptoo, 10km world record holder Rhonex Kipruto…the list goes on.

These athletes have robbed prize money, stolen moments, and caused us to reflexively question the legitimacy of every impressive performance we witness.

10km world record holder and 2019 World Athletics Championships 10,000m bronze medallist  Rhonex Kipruto was banned from the sport for six years after it was found that he was at the centre of “a deliberate and sophisticated doping regime”

In a sense, we have seen this before: in 2015, Russia became the first country to be banned from international competition by World Athletics because of doping offences. Indeed, Kenya has narrowly avoided joining Russia twice in the last seven years.

What makes Kenya unique - and why they haven’t been handed a nationwide ban - is that, unlike the state-sponsored, top-down doping programs we have seen in the East, Kenya’s problem seems to have arisen organically.

Picture this: you are born and raised in a poverty-stricken farming village and have never left your hometown. Then, one day, your neighbour goes off to Europe for a few weeks and returns with more money than your village has ever seen. His name is spoken on the news, a man from Nike sends him money, clothes, and plane tickets, and he moves to a nicer area of the countryside, where he buys his own house and farm.

After seeing this, you realise you have a choice. Take the red pill, and you can change your life: travel the world, lift your family out of poverty, send your kids to school. Take the blue pill, and life goes on: you work on your family farm until you die, never straying more than a few miles from where you were born.

The catch? If someone finds out you’re taking performance-enhancing drugs, you get handed a two-year ban from World Athletics. Nobody will come for your money.

This is the decision facing many of Kenya’s best runners, and the low-risk, high-reward nature of the current system, coupled with the god-like acclaim afforded to the nation’s best distance runners, has turned the country into a doper’s Wild West.

Almost half of Kenya’s rural population live in poverty

“None of the athletes in Kenya need to go far and wide to search out drugs. People come to them offering drugs. It's a financial opportunity. So, there are networks of people who approach athletes,” explained Brett Clothier, Head of the Athletics Integrity Unit, in an interview last year.

“What you have in Kenya is a huge professional class of runners who can earn a really good living, especially by Kenyan standards, running on the road. That creates a really large illicit market for performance-enhancing substances. When you have this illicit market, you have the opportunity for people to financially benefit from doping and people who have the financial opportunity to sell performance-enhancing drugs. What we see is a classic, uncoordinated illicit drugs market driven by money.”

The problem is exaggerated by the fact that Kenya is – performance-enhancing drugs or not – a breeding ground for distance running talent. Excellence on the international athletics stage has been ingrained into the national psyche, and the living conditions, especially in rural areas, naturally produce great runners.

“The 100th-ranked Kenyan in the marathon can go around the world earning really good money as a professional runner,” continued Clothier.

“That brings up a lot of challenges for the domestic anti-doping programme, because in many other countries the hundredth-ranked long jumper, for example, has to work in a supermarket, hasn't got a huge incentive to dope and we don't expect the anti-doping agency to be testing them.”

Brett Clothier, Head of the Athletics Integrity Unit, is working hard to solve the doping crisis in Kenya

The open nature of running also makes it impossible to ensure everyone who should be getting tested is doing so. In sports like cycling, soccer, or rugby, it’s easy to separate the professionals from the amateurs. However, some running races have more than 50,000 people on the start line, and, theoretically, anybody can win that event and take home what can sometimes be hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money.

But Kenya is not the only country where top athletes turn to running to escape poverty. Ethiopia has long shared the global distance-running stage with their East African neighbour, yet only four doping cases involved Ethiopians in 2023.

“Athletics in Ethiopia happens all in Addis Ababa (the capital and most populous city), so there is more control and more access to federation doctors than in Kenya, where many athletes live and train in very rural places far from facilities,” explained Federico Rosa, an agent who represents a number of the top East African athletes.

The final challenge facing anti-doping agencies in Kenya is that the omertà of dopers seems to match the mafia. No one talks. Few inform on their peers.

Even with the offer of a lighter sanction, almost no Kenyan athletes have provided the World Anti-Doping Agency or the Athletics Integrity Unit with information about how they came upon these drugs. It’s a classic case of the prisoner’s dilemma: if everyone stays silent, the system survives. And, if you fully intend on re-entering that system after your ban is lifted, a few months knocked off your suspension will hardly tempt you to talk.

How do we stop it?

Option 1: Criminalise doping

This seems like the most obvious solution, but in truth, it probably wouldn’t work. It’s actually already a civil offence to take performance-enhancing drugs in Kenya, although very few people have ever been charged, even when found guilty by anti-doping agencies. While upgrading doping to a criminal offence seems like a logical next step, outlawing drugs has literally never worked anywhere in the world. On the one hand, we might see less doping, but we could also see the system get far more sophisticated, which is not what anyone wants.

An effective middle ground could be to have athletes legally commit to clean competition by signing an affidavit before a race that holds them liable for a certain amount of money if they are found to be doping in the future, although no races have implemented this.

Three-time 1500m world champion and former 1500m Olympic champion Asbel Kiprop recently served a four-year doping ban. He has publicly announced his intentions to return to the sport in 2025.

Option 2: Harsher punishments by World Athletics

This is the easiest option and one that athletes and fans would welcome with open arms. If you’ve admitted to cheating, why should you be welcomed back after only a couple of years? Lifetime bans should be far more common, and dirty athletes should have their entire careers wiped from the history books. Any medals they won should be redistributed, any records they have broken erased. A task force could go after prize money, but that has proven to be expensive and unsuccessful in the past. Again, this wouldn’t prevent doping from happening – there will never be a way to completely stop cheats entering the sport – but lifetime bans and the eradication of past performances would ensure that athletes who have lost at the hands of dopers are at least partially compensated.

Option 3: More testing and education, especially among juniors

Most performance-enhancing drugs, especially the ones that aid endurance running, are produced in the human body. When athletes dope, they are simply injecting more of a substance that their body can already make. This makes it quite hard to detect those taking banned substances, especially if they are microdosing in training and cycling off them before races (in 2021, only 24% of World Athletics Gold Label Road Race winners had ever been tested out of competition).

The Athlete Biological Passport (ABP) was introduced to address this issue. It monitors an athlete's biological markers throughout their career, which enables authorities to detect unusual changes over time rather than only flagging athletes with impossibly high values. For example, if an athlete’s testosterone, EPO, and human growth hormone levels consistently increase as they age into their 30s, this athlete is probably doping, even if these values remain within the possible range for someone not using performance-enhancing substances.

The ABP has been instrumental in exposing the majority of cheaters in the past five years, but unfortunately, it’s also caused a rise in cases of junior athletes taking banned substances. Many junior athletes are, through either their own choice or, more often, by the hand of others, trying to raise their numbers as high as possible before their first ever test. That way, the only way to not trigger an ABP violation would be to continue doping, which would allow them to go their whole career on performance-enhancing drugs without raising suspicion.

However, without sophisticated facilities and a well-trained medical team, this type of doping is unsustainable for an entire career, and more often than not, all that happens is athletes are exposed to dangerous performance-enhancing drugs at a young age and then caught and banned from the sport after a few years on the international circuit. More testing and education at the junior level would protect young athletes from the risks of performance-enhancing drugs and would see fewer dirty runners rise through the ranks and onto the senior circuit.

Former junior 10,000m world champion Rodgers Kwemoi was banned for six years in 2023 after his ABP revealed that he had blood doped at least 18 times

Option 4: Trust the process

Problems are rarely solved by just doing more of what you are already doing, but that is the approach that World Athletics and the Athletics Integrity Unit are taking.

The two organisations committed a total of three million USD to expand the testing pool from the top 38 road athletes to the top 300 in 2023 and increased testing at Kenya’s national championships sevenfold in the space of a year.

"This money can be a real game-changer," said Clothier.

"No other national anti-doping agency is at that level of testing in our sport."

A paradox of all anti-doping agencies is that a lack of positive tests is not necessarily cause for celebration.

"No one thinks that there was less doping in Kenya five years ago," explained Clothier.

"It's just now we're catching people and trying to fix things. The first step is uncovering what's happening. That has created a lot of drama, but it has got everyone to take it seriously. It's a really difficult task, but if ever there is going to be serious improvement in anti-doping in Kenya it's now.”

So, take heed. The long list of Kenyan dopers is only going to get longer, but that just means it’s working: it’s a short-term pain for a long-term gain.

That being said, Kenya’s poor economy and high levels of corruption might make that money redundant. The Anti-Doping Agency of Kenya – which was only founded in 2016 – saw its budget slashed from 288 million shillings (2.23 million USD) to 20 million shillings (150,000 USD) at the start of the 2025 financial year.

“This decision is crippling the agency,” explained Daniel Makdwallo, chairman of the board of directors.

“It is preventing us from fulfilling our obligations. With such limited financial resources, we are at risk of not being able to comply with the World Anti-Doping Code.”

Daniel Makdwallo speaks in a press conference after ADAK’s budget is reduced from 288 million shillings to 20 million at the start of the 2025 financial year.

Option 5: Sustainable, long-term change

Regardless of how the global anti-doping agencies spin it, it’s a sad reality that a sport held in such high revere in Kenya is having its image and legacy tainted by a growing number of Icarus-like characters.

They are not the first country of runners that has turned to doping to find an advantage, but they are the only group in our sport’s history to do it in such a frantic and unorganised way. The East Germans, the Chinese, the Russians - all of those doping crises stemmed from a place of national pride and involved corrupt agencies at the highest level. That is not the case in Kenya.

We often speak of East Africa’s food, culture, and terrain as being the perfect blend for distance running performance, but perhaps it is time to consider that the uglier realities facing the Kenyan people have engendered a second, darker nexus driving the desperation that leads to doping. Cheating will never be welcome in our sport, but acknowledging that harsher punishments may only serve to further alienate the world’s greatest distance runners is an important first step that needs to be taken.

Long-term solutions will likely involve a mix of education, pathways to escape turbulent areas, and holistic support systems for an athlete’s entire network. The sooner we focus on things like this, the sooner we can prioritise prevention over punishment.

And that will be a good thing for everyone.