Kenyan 2:02 marathon runner Titus Ekiru receives 10-year ban

Following on from recent record breaking performances in the marathon by Kenyan runners, it was announced at the start of this week that Titus Ekiru from Kenya was banned for a decade after twice failing a drugs test. 

He was up to now one of the top marathon runners from Kenya with a marathon personal best of 2:02:57 which had placed him on joint 6th of the all time marathon record list.

The two positive tests in 2021 came at the Milan Marathon where he tested positive for triamcinolone acetonide and at the Abu Dhabi Marathon where he tested positive for a synthetic opioid. He was also found guilty of tampering with two other samples.

His ban which runs from June 28, 2022 until June 27, 2032 will effectively end the competitive running career of the 32-year old.

It also seems he colluded with a 'high-ranking doctor' at a Kenyan hospital who administered some of the banned substances. It raises the obvious question of how rife is this in Kenya and some of the other African countries? Why was he only caught when he was tested in Milan and Abu Dhabi? Is there any drug testing going on within Kenya?

If there is no effective ongoing tests then athletes can train away on performance enhancing drugs within the country and wait for the substances to clear their system before traveling to competitions where they will be tested.

The full story is on the Athletics Weekly website.

A list of the wins for Titus Ekiru can be seen on Wikipedia.

NIKE sponsor drugs cheat Justin Gatlin

Justin Gatlin of the USA is one of the world's top sprinters with a personal best of 9.77 seconds for 100m. He is however a controversial character having twice been banned for drug offences.....for amphetamines in 2001  and for testosterone in 2006.

The news that he has been given a sponsorship deal by NIKE has been greeted by dismay by many in the athletics community.

Paula Radcliffe in her twitter posted the following........“I am very disappointed to hear this news. I don’t believe it truly reflects the core values of the Nike that I am proud to represent, nor the integrity and the ideals of the people I work with on a daily basis.”

Athletics Weekly have an article on it HERE .....and they ask how can a company like NIKE sponsor a known drugs cheat like Gatlin and yet drop someone like Jo Pavey who won the 10000m at the European Championships last year aged 41.

Minimum ban for doping increased to 4 years

Up to now, the minimum ban for doping in athletics has been 2 years. What it has meant that anyone taking banned substances could still train away and be back in time for major championships. It was in effect too lenient and not enough of a deterrent.

As of the 1st of January 2015, the minimum ban has now been increased to 4 years. This means that anyone caught doping will not be able to participate in competitions for at least four years which means that they would miss major events like the Olympics, the World Championships and so on.

The punishment for missing three tests within a 12-month period has been increased from 18 months to two years. Athletes guilty of "inadvertent doping" will receive a two-year ban - although they can get a reduction if they have "substantial proof that they were not at fault or intending to cheat".

Reigning Boston and Chicago Marathon champion Rita Jeptoo fails drugs test

It was announced yesterday that one of the top Kenyan marathon runners Rita Jeptoo had failed a doping test. In a statement, Athletics Kenya said..."The result of the 'A' sample for the athlete has indicated the presence of prohibited substances."

33 year old Jeptoo won the Boston Marathon last April in a course record time of 2:18:57 and also won the Chicago Marathon in October in 2:24:35. She has previously won the  Boston and Chicago marathons and also  won marathons in Stockholm, Paris, Milan and Lisbon.

She was due this weekend to be awarded $500,000 for winning the yearlong World Marathon Major Series. In a statement, the organisers of that award said......."World Marathon Majors is disappointed to learn that Rita Jeptoo has apparently had an A test that proved positive for a banned substance under IAAF rules. World Marathon Majors has been at the forefront of the fight against doping in our sport and has a rule that no athlete can win the World Marathon Majors Series title, who has been in breach of IAAF anti-doping rules. WMM events were the first major events to confirm that all elite athletes taking part in their events would be blood tested and have consistently called for wider testing by others. Additionally, WWM has previously agreed that any athlete found guilty of a doping offense will not be invited back to its races. As part of that fight against doping, WMM has been giving support and financial help to the IAAF anti doping drive and helped fund a wider programme of out of competition testing…At present there has been no decision in this case by the IAAF, including in relation to sanctions, and as a result WMM is unable to comment further until that determination has been made although in the circumstances it has been decided to postpone the WMM Awards Ceremony that was due to take place on November 2, 2014."

All this of course puts the spotlight on countres like Kenya and the level of drug testing they do on their national athletes. In 2013, former top Kenyan athlete Moses Kiptanui claimed that doping was rife amongst Kenyan athletes. In total, 36 Kenyans have been confirmed as failing tests in the past two years.

Top Irish sprinter Steven Colvert fails drugs test

It has been announced that Steven Colvert, one of the top 100m and 200m sprinters in the country has failed a drugs test. His 'A' sample was found to contain traces of EPO, a performance enhancing drug.

He had been due to travel with the Irish Team to Estonia for the European Team Chalpionships First League but he has now been forced to withdraw.

In an interview with Feidhlim Kelly writing for the Irish Examiner, he said.....“I’m going to seek to have the B sample tested along with giving my full co-operation to the Irish Sports Council and all the relevant bodies involved in the investigations. I’m happy to provide any extra drugs tests, provide financial statements and take any forensic test above and beyond what’s required in order to vindicate my name. I firmly believe there has been some sort of error or false positive"

You can read the full article written by Feidhlim Kelly on the Irish Examiner website.

Winner of 2010 London Marathon gets a drugs ban...

Today Tuesday the 29th of April 2014, the Russian Athletics Federation announced that Liliya Shobukhova has been handed a two-year ban for doping, with her results from October 9, 2009 to be annulled. This was as a result of having found abnormalities in her biological passport.

This means she is set to lose her 2010 London Marathon title, as well as Chicago Marathon titles from 2009, 2010 and 2011, with her ban backdated to January 24, 2013. It will run until January 23, 2015.

If the ban is confirmed following any appeal, her two World Marathon Major (WMM) series wins of 2009/2010 and 2010/2011 would also be annulled. The WMM series comprises the Tokyo, Boston, Virgin Money London, BMW Berlin, Bank of America Chicago and TCS New York City marathons. Just for the Major Series alone, she would have earned $1 million over the two years while for the 2010 London title alone, she would have won $55,000.

In a statement for the World Marathon Majors, a spokesman confirmed that any athlete found guilty of a doping offence is required to repay any prize or appearance money earned at WMM events including WMM series prize money. The statement continued..."WMM will continue to hold a stern line and supports all measures to ensure the integrity of the athletes competing in their races. Cheats need to understand that they are not welcome in our sport and that they will be caught.”

The 36-year-old Shobukhova's time of 2 hours, 18 minutes, 20 seconds in Chicago in 2011 made her the second-fastest women's marathon runner behind record holder Paula Radcliffe of Britain. In response to the news of the drugs ban, Paula Radcliffe put this on her Twitter account..."Lilya Shobukhova finally exposed as a drug cheat. Action needs to be taken to show cheating not acceptable. Monies won should be returned and rightful winners recognized."

If this sounds familiar, remember Tatyana Aryasova of Russia who won the Dublin Marathon in 2010, got €15,000 in prize money and then tested positive for a banned substance just a few months later.

Seriously...if someone is caught, is the prize money ever returned???

IAAF to reintroduce 4 year bans for doping...

The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) has announced that from 2015, athletes found guilty of using banned substances will be given a four year ban instead of the current two. It was cut to two years in 1997 to bring it in line with other international sports bodies but it has meant that some athletes could cheat and still be ready for the next Olympics.

In a statement, the IAAF said..."The IAAF has an ethical obligation to the overwhelming majority of athletes and officials who believe in clean sport. The new Wada code, which will come into force on 1 January, 2015, will reflect our firm commitment to have tougher penalties and the IAAF will return to four-year sanctions for serious doping offences. As a leader in this fight, the IAAF has built and delivers a programme that is well resourced, far reaching, sophisticated and increasingly able to detect and remove from the sport those who breach our anti-doping rules."

IAAF vice-president Sergey Bubka said..."It's the only way to succeed - we must be harsh, we must be strong. Clearly today it's unpleasant to see some positive cases but we can see systems start to work, and really well. We will continue to fight. We understand it is tough but we are getting stronger and we will continue to do our best."

This new move from the IAAF will be welcomed by most people involved in athletics. A four year ban is a good part of any athletes career and considering that the Olympic cycle is every four years then this is a real deterrent.

WADA to adopt four year ban for drugs cheating...

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) have recently announced that they will be introducing a new four year ban for serious drugs offences. This will be introduced in 2013 and be applied at the start of 2015. The new rule doubles the length of existing bans for serious drug offences including anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, masking agents, trafficking and prohibited methods. WADA president John Fahey said: “It is clear from the number of submissions we received, that there is a strong desire in the world of sport, from governments and within the anti-doping community to strengthen the sanction articles in the code. Athletes must know that there is a heavy price to pay for intentional doping, that the risks are high. I am confident this draft will deliver that message loud and clear, and that our own stakeholders will agree.”

The current two year ban has meant that athletes can fail just after an Olympic Games and still compete in the next one. Many have complained that a two year ban is not much different than an athlete picking up an injury and coming back from it and as such, was not enough of a deterrent. The new four year ban changes that with athletes now guaranteed to miss an Olympic cycle which in many cases may well be the end of their career.

Green tea may help athletes to cheat...

A study in a test lab suggests that tea seems to reduce testosterone concentrations by up to 30 percent and appeared to work best when testosterone was only slightly higher than normal. Similar results have been found in rodent studies. The green tea contains catechins, also found in white tea, which seem to stop an enzyme involved in detecting testosterone. By preventing that enzyme from working, testosterone largely goes unnoticed in the body and doesn't get passed into the urine — where officials usually test for the hormone. Experts say athletes taking testosterone for doping purposes typically have 200 to 300 percent more in their bodies than normal. The study was a test in a lab dish so scientists aren't sure if the effects will be the same in people but some say the results are intriguing enough that Olympic testing could be updated to include that possibility.

The World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA has tight controls on other commonly consumed substances like caffeine. It bans diuretics that could mask drug use and warns athletes about taking nutritional supplements which could be spiked with banned drugs. The researchers said it was too early to tell what the effect of green tea might be in humans, but said other beverages or foods likely produced similar effects. Olivier Rabin, scientific director of WADA said "We may need to adjust our steroid (test) to allow us to exclude whether a test is modified by food or training or disease, before we can say that it's doping. We might have to raise the normal threshold for what is a considered a legal amount of testosterone to allow for any such interference."

Some experts said the limited effects of foods like green tea on masking illegal drug use would be too small to help doping athletes. "You would probably need to drink the tea continuously to get any sustained but minor effect," said Andrew Kicman, head of research and development at the Drug Control Centre at King's College London, which is providing the anti-doping laboratory for the upcoming Olympics. "It would be a very foolish athlete who's thinking of doping with testosterone and thinks he could drink white or green tea to beat a drug test," he said. "And I personally wouldn't want to drink nine cups of tea on the day of a race."

IAAF adds controversial Chinese athlete to it's new hall of fame...

The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) has just announced the names of 12 athletes to it's new hall of fame. While there are some obvious choices like Jesse Owens, Emil Zatopek and Ed Moses, they also announced the controversial Chinese athlete Wang Junxia. Back in 1993, she took a huge 42 seconds off the old 10,000 metre record when she ran 29:31.7. That record still stands today, in fact, no-one has come within 22 seconds of it.

Her coach at the time was Ma Junren who later had some of his athletes fail drugs tests. Junren was also the coach of the three Chinese runners that appeared out of nowhere at the 1993 World Championships in Struttgart and pushed Sonia O'Sullivan into 4th place. In an interview last year, O'Sullivan wondered if those Chinese runners were clean at the time.

On hearing that Wang Junxia was nominated to the Hall of Fame, Paula Radcliffe, the Marathon record holder and who had beaten Wang comfortably at the World Junior Cross Country Championships in Boston in 1992, posted a message on Twitter saying it was "a cruel joke".

It would be incredibly naive for anyone to believe that the Chinese performances of that era were clean. The Telegraph has a piece on it HERE

London 2012 unveils new Olympic test lab

Professor David Cowan, the chief drugs scientist of the 2012 London Olympic Games revealed on Thursday night that this summer’s Olympics will feature around 5,000 separate urine and blood samples – eclipsing the previous high of 4,770 at the Beijing Games in 2008 – and another 1,250 at the Paralympics. As well as the random sampling, all Olympic medalists will be tested as a matter of routine. Cowan admits it will be impossible to guarantee a “drug-free” Games, but is confident that none of the previous competitions will be able to match London for the vigour and scope of the dope testing. “The testing for these Games has the benefit of four more years of advancement in science, newer equipment, and new technology that makes the detection super-fast,” said Cowan, the director of King’s College drug control centre, which will run the Olympic drug testing programme.

Cowan continued..."Part of that is the extended windows of detection, but we can also test for more and more substances while still using small amounts of urine so that the imposition on the athletes is minimised. It would be foolish to say these Olympics would be drug-free but my advice to athletes is if they take the risk they will get caught. With 50 per cent of the athletes being tested, anybody who does try to cheat will stand a good chance of detection. The blood and urine samples from athletes will be stored after the Games for eight years to enable retrospective testing on the samples when new tests for more drugs are developed.

Olympics minister Hugh Robertson, who revealed that procedures enabling police drugs raids on athletes rooms at the Olympic village were “under negotiation”, said: “We are doing all we can to ensure there is no place to hide for drug cheats at the London Olympics. Of course we cannot absolutely guarantee that these will be a drug-free Games, but we can guarantee we have got the very best system possible to try to catch anybody who even thinks of cheating.”

Doping statistics
- Up to 6,250 samples will be tested during Games time – more than any other Games
- The Anti-Doping workforce at the Games will be over 1,000 people
- Up to one in two athletes will be tested at the Olympic Games including every Olympic medallist
- The laboratory will operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week during the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games
- Up to 400 samples will be tested every day
- The shortest test turnaround time will be 24hrs (some tests will take longer)
- The laboratory is 4,400 square metres in size – the same size as seven tennis courts
- A team of more than 150 anti-doping scientists will carry out the testing during the Games.

A video clip showing how samples are tested can be seen here......

Martin Fagan gets official 2 year ban for taking EPO...

Following on from the breaking news story last weekend, Irish Marathon runner Martin Fagan was as expected, suspended on Tuesday for two years by Athletics Ireland after he admitted using banned performance-enhancing drugs. The 28-year-old from Mullingar tested positve for the blood-boosting drug erythropoietin (EPO).during an out-of-competition test at his training base in the United States last month. He admitted at a hearing in Dublin that he had bought EPO on the internet and administered it himself ahead of a planned appearance at last weekend's Houston Marathon last Sunday (January 15).

Athletics Ireland and the Irish Sports Council made the following announcement...."The Irish Sport Anti-Doping Disciplinary Panel has determined that Martin Fagan, an athlete affiliated to Athletics Ireland, has committed an anti-doping rule violation. The Panel found that, contrary to Article 2.1 of the Irish Anti-Doping Rules, Mr Fagan, tested positive for the presence of a prohibited substance or its metabolite or marker, recombinant erythropoietin, in a sample of his urine collected on behalf of the Irish Sports Council during out of competition testing at Tucson, Arizona on the 10th December 2011. Mr Fagan has been sanctioned, subject to his right to appeal within 14 days, by the imposition on him of a period of ineligibility for two years. The Panel has decided that because of the prompt admission of the violation by Mr Fagan the appropriate commencement date for the period of ineligibility is 10th December 2011, the date on which the sample was collected."

Ian O'Riordan of the Irish Times has a piece about it HERE

Cliona Foley of the Irish Independent has a more critical article HERE

Since this story broke last weekend, there has been a lot of reaction to it on various websites. Some people have been sympathetic to Martin Fagan and his fight with depression, some have been outrightly hostile to him over his taking of EPO while others believe perhaps naively that he will serve the two year ban and all will be well again.

Once an athlete takes a performance-enhancing drug, they have crossed the Rubicon, there is no turning back. The ban might be for two years but the damage is permanent. I would suspect that if you were to talk privately to the powers that be within Athletics Ireland or the Irish Sports Council, they would probably say that they genuinely wish Martin Fagan all the best for the future, that he gets help and gets his personal life sorted out. However when it comes to athletics, they would hope that he would retire from the sport and fade away.

Clenbuterol...The drug to cause headlines at the London Olympics?

Over the last few days, there has been a few news items covering the use and detection of one particular drug...Clenbuterol.

Clenbuterol is an anabolic steroid that is banned in sports as a performance-enhancing drug. When used, it causes an increase in aerobic capacity, central nervous system stimulation, and an increase in blood pressure and oxygen transportation.

About a year ago, the drug hit the headlines when Alberto Contador, the 2010 winner of the Tour de France revealed that a urine sample he had given on 21 July during the Tour had contained traces of Clenbuterol. He has stated that due to the number of other tests he passed and that only a tiny amount of the substance was detected in the one he failed, that food contamination was to blame.

The issue here is that in some countries like China and Mexico, Clenbuterol is used by farmers on cattle to produce leaner, more valuable meat even though it is banned. Traces of the drug however pass into the meat of the animal which in turn can be eaten by people.

During this summer’s under-17 football World Cup in Mexico, Fifa revealed that 109 positive tests were recorded for the banned drug out of 208 urine samples taken during the tournament. The statistics are so extraordinary that both Fifa and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) have confirmed they will not be prosecuting any cases, blaming the failed tests on contaminated meat.
WADA has shelved a similar case involving Danish cyclist Philip Nielsen, who tested positive for the steroid after the 2010 Tour of Mexico. In the Contador case above, he is claiming that he ate some meat from Spain, which was contaminated with Clenbuterol.

In principle, the edict  of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) remains that competitors are responsible for what they themselves consume.

WADA warned competitors in the Pan American Games which began in Mexico on October 14 about the dangers of consuming local meat, stating:”We have received compelling evidence..that indicates a serious health problem in Mexico to meat contaminated with clenbuterol.” It urged athletes only to eat in canteens regarded as safe by the organisers and to try to eat the same food in large numbers.

With the 2012 Olympic games in London supposed to have the highest number of drugs tests ever, expect to hear the name Clenbuterol again.