Revealed: Doping watchdogs’ war on marathon cheats

‘Rampant’ drug-taking allowed to go unchecked Scale similar to cycling and baseball’s past issues

Anti-doping officials are engaged in a new front in the war on cheats as they tackle “rampant, unchecked” drug-taking among professional marathon runners, The Daily Telegraph can reveal.

Brett Clothier, the head of the Athletics Integrity Unit, said the problem is on a similar scale to the worst doping scandals to have hit the sport in recent decades. He compared it to the systemic blooddoping that emerged in cycling two decades ago and steroid-abuse in Major League Baseball.

Clothier, speaking ahead of the first of the year’s six major marathons in Tokyo on Sunday, said up to 80 per cent of those winning major prize money were not tested in the run-up to their race.

He explained: “We did a study that showed that, in 2018, of all the marathon races around the world outside of the six major marathons, something like 70 to 80 per cent of the podium finishers didn’t have any out-of-competition test in the nine months leading up to the race.

“There was just no testing. Not only that but the athletes weren’t in a testing pool, so they knew no one was going to test them. Plus, they were running for big money, especially relative to the country they were from. This was a real recipe for disaster.”

Runners can make a good living even out of road racing, with prize money of several hundred thousand pounds available each year at the marathons in the United Kingdom alone. The winnings are particularly attractive for athletes from countries such as Kenya and Ethiopia, where testing is weak.

The AIU – the independent successor to the athletics world ruling body’s in-house anti-doping department – has a budget of €8 million (£6.82 million), more than twice its predecessor, but a fraction of the sponsorship earnings available to the world’s top athletes, whose individual deals often run well into seven figures.

The unit is focused on a new, intelligence-led approach, looking to test those runners about whom it has suspicions rather than a scattergun, random approach.

On the marathon problem, Clothier said: “It needed to be fixed or else the industry was going to face its own moment, like cycling did in the Nineties, or like baseball did [in the Noughties]. Rampant, unchecked doping.”

The AIU introduced the Road Running Integrity Programme after studying the drug-testing regime around professional athletes who competed at the world’s marathons in 2018. The AIU’S investigative unit found drug-taking was endemic among the runners who make a living from marathons. So many athletes are able to profit because the explosion in popularity of mass-participation road races means that several hundred of these events now offer appearance fees and prize money.

The AIU found that outside of the top runners competing at the six World Marathon Majors, most athletes were not in a testing pool, meaning they could train in the knowledge they would not be tested outside of competition.

This was partly a result of the fact that most hailed from Kenya and Ethiopia, where the national antidoping agencies lacked the resources to keep track of all their athletes. It was felt that the temptation to cheat was greater because the prize money and appearance fees available abroad went further for East African athletes than it would for their rivals from more prosperous countries.

The AIU also found that it lacked the in-depth knowledge of the doping networks in these countries and needed to invest most of all in its investigative department.

The AIU was able to persuade the six major marathons to increase their funding to it, enabling it to expand its road-running programme. It increased the amount of intelligence-gathering resources devoted to the discipline and provided the funds to set up a new blood-testing laboratory in Nairobi.

The programme has led to a spate of athletes being sanctioned, among them Sarah Chepchirchir, the winner of the 2017 Tokyo Marathon, and the world half-marathon record-holder Abraham Kiptum, both of whom were given four-year bans in November after abnormalities in their blood passports led to a charge of using “a prohibited substance or method”.

The 2016 Olympic women’s marathon champion Jemima Sumgong was given a four-year ban after testing positive for EPO. Last month, the project had its most high-profile case in Wilson Kipsang, the former men’s marathon world-record holder, who was suspended on suspicion of breaching rules around “tampering and whereabouts” and is awaiting his hearing. Kipsang’s management stressed that he had not failed a drugs test and added: “No prohibited substance was found.”

To enable the road-running programme to expand again this season, the AIU agreed with World Athletics – the sport’s ruling body – that all of its 167 accredited marathons should contribute funding to the anti-doping programme.

The unit also persuaded runners and their management to contribute a cut of income to the unit.

Clothier said: “We went out to all these races and said, ‘This is a huge problem. You should all understand the doping situation is out of control’. There is nothing to stop them from doping and they’re running for great appearance money and great prize money. We’re heading for a crisis.”

This further investment allowed the unit to expand its testing pool of athletes from about 150 to more than 300 and to invest again in intelligence-gathering. The unit now hopes to target other integrity “crises” that it has identified.

“Yeah, there are [others],” Clothier said. “There are a lot of issues that we’ve identified, not just particular cases or people, but trends and issues. Problem areas that we need to intervene on.”