WE’RE AFTER YOU
Anti-doping force fly to Kenya as three Brits are accused of taking drugs
TWO UK Anti-Doping investigators have arrived in Kenya armed with the names of three British athletes alleged to have taken performanceenhancing drugs.
Sportsmail understands they will work alongside Kenyan police following a TV documentary which claimed doping is rife in Iten, a high-altitude training town frequented by, among others, British athletes.
One of the names handed to UKAD is of an athlete thought to be on a ‘red hot’ watchlist, meaning they have prior intelligence — be it rumour or documented evidence — which suggests they may have doped.
Between 12 and 18 elite British athletes, mainly middle and longdistance runners, spend part of the winter in Iten, a town in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, each year. Among the tens of Great Britain runners to have trained there at various times over the last five years are Mo Farah, Paula Radcliffe, 1,500m world silver medallist Hannah England and other middle-distance runners Laura Weightman, Steph Twell, Andrew Osagi and Michael Rimmer. None is suspected of any wrongdoing.
A sign at the entrance to the town reads ‘Home of Champions’ and one in four of its residents are elite athletes.
But hidden camera footage obtained by The Sunday Times hints at a darker side to its enormous success. One doctor was clandestinely filmed claiming to have supplied ‘more than 50’ athletes including three Britons with the blood boosting drug EPO, favoured by cheating cyclists in the late 1980s and 1990s. The doctor boasted he could dramatically improve performances in three months. When approached on the record in the documentary, he retracted his comments and no athletes were publicly named.
The documentary also claimed to show boxes of EPO and syringes retrieved from a bin on the premises of the High Altitude Training Centre (HATC) where athletes base themselves while in Iten.
But Pieter Langerhorst, who owns the HATC with his wife Lornah Kiplagat, a famed Dutch distance runner, said he doubted the evidence on the film. ‘We have 16 cameras installed to monitor what is going on, and we must be the only training centre in the world that always tells drugs testers which athletes are staying here, and in which rooms, to allow them to test at short notice,’ he said,
‘The documentary alleged that packets of EPO were found in a bin on our premises. But from what I read EPO needs to be stored in a refrigerator and here there is just one communal fridge, which all the athletes use. The only time we allowed another fridge was last year, when Kyle Barber, the IAAF’s out-ofcompetition testing and intelligence co-ordinator, wanted to take blood from some athletes. We booked him into two rooms under my name so that no one would be aware he was coming.’
Steeplechase runner Eilish McColgan, daughter of former world champion Liz, said hearing of doping allegations in Iten did not come as a major shock but she had never witnessed any drug-taking while training there. ‘We’re secluded from it maybe,’ she said. ‘But it’s not a major surprise. I don’t think Kenya is the only country at it. Ethiopia are probably similar because of the lack of testing. ‘I’ve spoken out before about the testing procedures, that it’s nowhere near as strict as in the UK. They get told before the drugs testers are coming. In the UK, they just show up. It’s a different procedure in Kenya and that definitely needs to change if they want to eradicate the problem.’ UKAD dispatched two investigators on Thursday after The Sunday Times provided them with the names of the three athletes a doctor claimed to have treated. They are working with Kenyan police because doping is now a criminal offence in the country. Meanwhile, the IAAF has rejected all but one of 136 athletes who applied for exemption from the ban on Russia’s track and field team at the Olympics. Only long jumper Darya Klishina will be allowed to compete.