Kenyan marathon champion Sumgong gets four-year ban

Banned skier says ‘medal is clean’

NAIROBI, Nov 7, (Agencies): Kenya’s Olympic marathon champion Jemima Sumgong has been suspended for four years for doping, Athletics Kenya said Tuesday.

“Sumgong will serve the four-year ban as from (April 3) when she was provisionally suspended,” Athletics Kenya said in a statement.

The 32-year-old tested positive for the banned blood booster EPO in an out-of-competition test by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) in her native Kenya.

Erythropoietin is a natural hormone that stimulates red cell production. For a runner, injecting an artificially produced version increases oxygen absorption which allows them to run harder and faster without tiring.

Sumgong, who also tested positive for a banned substance in 2012, starred at the London Marathon in 2016, defying the odds to win despite suffering a bruising fall.

Meanwhile, Russian cross country skier Alexander Legkov says he will fight to clear his name after being sanctioned for doping at the 2014 Sochi Games and hit with a lifetime ban from the Olympics last week.

Legkov and Evgeniy Belov were the first Russians to be sanctioned for antidoping rule violations following an International Olympic Committee (IOC) investigation into allegations of widespread doping among Russians

Sumgong

and sample tampering by laboratory and security officials at the Sochi Games.

Legkov won gold in the 50km freestyle and a silver medal in the 4x10km relay event in Sochi. The IOC said all of Russia’s 4x10km team would be disqualified given Legkov’s violation.

Belov, who competed in the men’s skiathlon 15+15km mass start event and the 15km classic country skiing event, did not medal at the Games.

Legkov, in his first public comments since being banned, wrote on his Instagram page late on Monday: “My medal is clean. I will fight.

“In the past years I was tested more than 150 times and I was clean. “I was tested not in Moscow or in Sochi, but in Cologne, Lausanne, Dresden.

“We all have to comply with the sanctions procedure which none of us can be sure ... is fair and free of other interests,” Legkov said.

“Every athlete, no matter from which country, can end up in this kind of situation.”

The Kremlin on Tuesday said it would be a “great loss” for the Olympic movement if the Russian team were to be banned from the 2018 Winter Games over doping.

The statement came after the New York Times quoted a source in the International Olympic Committee (IOC) saying Russia would be allowed to participate in the Pyeongchang Games with certain limitations.

“We obviously don’t want to talk about the worst case scenario, which is to say Russia’s non-participation in the Olympics, because that would be a great loss to the whole Olympic movement,” President Vladimir Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov told journalists.