EXCLUSIVE: ‘Entourages’, blatant tricks and a tainted marathon world record that still stands
Athletics is in the grips of a doping crisis.
Leading the fight against the crisis, including highly calculated “entourages” and tricks as blatant as having a lookalike sibling take a test, is the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU).
Wide World of Sports spoke exclusively with David Howman, the AIU’s chairman and a former long-serving director-general of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), ahead of the Valencia Marathon, taking place on Sunday.
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Among the topics covered were the robust testing regime of athletics’ anti-doping police, the devious deeds of lawbreakers, and Kenyan Ruth Chepngetich’s controversial retention of the women’s marathon world record.
Athletics’ doping crisis by the numbers
As of December 1, a total of 607 people are on the AIU’s “global list of ineligible persons”, including 579 athletes and 28 support personnel. The latter can refer to coaches, agents, medical workers and any other people involved in an athlete’s set-up.
The country that accounts for the majority of the 607 suspensions is Kenya, which has 140 people banned, followed by India, which has 132 ineligible athletes.
Rounding out the top five are Russia (64), China (31) and South Africa (21). No Australians are on the list.
Of the 607, more than half are male and more than half are long-distance runners, with sprinters accounting for the second-highest percentage of suspended athletes, followed by throwers.
Fifty-six people are serving lifetime bans and the most common length of suspension is four years.
‘You need to know what cheats are up to’
The AIU, an independent arm of World Athletics, was set up in 2017 in the wake of a monumental doping scandal involving officials from the sport’s global governing body, known at the time as the IAAF, and officials from the Russian athletics federation.
An investigation uncovered systemic doping, extortion and corruption, leading to four IAAF officials copping lifetime bans, the appointment of Sebastian Coe as the athletics body’s president, and the formation of the independent integrity body, which handles all doping and non-doping matters.
The AIU has what it calls its “registered testing pool”. Included in the pool are many of the top athletes in the world, all of whom are subject to out-of-competition testing and required to provide whereabouts details.
Athletes not in the pool can also be tested, but only those in the pool need to provide whereabouts information.
“We look at profiles which are accumulated through blood testing and urine testing to ensure that if there is a suspicion that athlete will be tested more often,” Howman explained.
“We will spend a lot of time investigating all athletes in the registered testing pool to see who might reach that level of suspicion and then test them reasonably frequently.”
Ruth Chepngetich of Kenya pictured after annihilating the women’s marathon world record in the 2024 Chicago Marathon. She’s since been found guilty of doping. Getty
He drew attention to Chepngetich — the Kenyan who in October was hit with a three-year suspension after being found guilty of using Hydrochlorothiazide.
In the Chicago Marathon in October 2024, Chepngetich obliterated the women’s marathon world record by almost two minutes.
In March this year, she tested positive.
“She was tested more than 15 times over a period of some weeks [after the Chicago Marathon] because of that suspicion [raised through the registered testing pool],” Howman said.
“So that’s an example of what we would do, just to ensure that the top athletes that think they’re getting away with it, don’t get away with it.
“There’s that sort of feeling out there in some sports that, look, you might be tested … probably three times a year, so once you’ve been tested twice, when they come again, you can probably take a missed test, and if you’re loaded up with steroids or whatever other prohibited substance, you can avoid a positive. So that’s sort of going on a little bit.
“If you’re trying to catch cheats, you need to know what cheats are up to, right? And you have to counter that. And we’ve got a pretty good intelligence team that looks at all the information around athletes to ensure we test them at the right time.
Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) chairman David Howman. Supplied
“Any surprising result goes into an athlete’s profile. If the team sees something surprising happening — some athlete running faster by several seconds over a long distance, or a longer throw — that does raise a suspicion.”
In addition to the testing it carries out on athletes in its registered pool, the AIU is commissioned by independent events, including the world marathon majors and events such as the Valencia Marathon, to conduct in-competition testing.
“There is a lot of money to be made on the world marathon circuit and there is a lot of money to be made now on the road-running circuit,” Howman said.
“So you could be No.100 in the world and go and run a 10-kilometre event in the US, let’s say, and win $20,000. Those are the races that the promoters want us to make sure are tested to get the right result for the winner. So it has expanded over the last four years quite considerably, with others coming to us.”
The AIU doesn’t carry out testing during Olympics — that’s the task of the International Testing Agency (ITA) — but it is responsible for in-competition testing at world athletics championships.
In 2024, the AIU took 13,428 samples, including 4988 in competition and 8440 out of competition.
Those samples were taken from 3747 athletes spanning 139 nationalities.
US sprinter Gil Roberts, a repeat doping offender, was hit with an eight-year ban in 2024. Getty
‘Doesn’t know the difference between the sisters’
Howman rattled off a host of ways in which cheating athletes try to rort the system.
“We’ve actually got situations where athletes have given information saying to their supplier, ‘Is it OK if I use this today because I’m likely to be tested, or should I take this test today when I’ve got a knock at the door because I’ve just taken the drug you sent?'” Howman said.
“If you are testing an athlete out of competition and that athlete decides that her sister might be a better person to give the sample that day, and they might look pretty similar, if your chaperone doesn’t know the difference between the sisters, you might be able to get away with a different sample from a different person.
“That’s been done. I’m not suggesting it’s been done recently, but I’m really aware of that [happening] on quite a number of occasions.
Diana Kipyogei of Kenya winning the 2021 Boston Marathon. She’s since been banned for doping offences and had her Boston win wiped. Getty
“And that’s particularly possible when you are testing somebody in their home country and you don’t know the individual athlete.
“Then there are ways of avoiding samples which are pretty simple: don’t answer the door when the doping control officer comes, and you take a missed test.
“You’re allowed two missed tests in a year, so you could take two missed tests when you were doping up, and by the time they come for the third one, if it’s not the next day, for example, then you might get away with it. That’s now being used a lot.”
Chepngetich resorted to a trick of a different kind, telling the AIU she had taken her housemaid’s medication and saying she had done so without checking to see if it contained a prohibited substance.
The trick didn’t come off.
To Howman’s point about missed tests, an athlete can escape with a two-year suspension for recording three missed tests in a year, rather than the four-year ban often handed out when a prohibited substance is detected.
“We have in our submissions to the World Anti-Doping Agency said that two years is not enough because some people are intentionally taking the two-year, rather than the four,” Howman said.
“And when I say rather than the four, these are people who are doping on pretty serious substances.”
Among the athletes currently serving suspensions for whereabouts failures is Spaniard Mohamed Katir, who won silver in the men’s 5000 metres at the 2023 world athletics championships in Budapest.
Spaniard Mohamed Katir, pictured celebrating winning silver in the men’s 5000 metres at the 2023 world athletics championships, is now suspended for whereabouts failures. Getty
“There are corners you can cut,” Howman added.
“It’s just like the police; the police can look for people they know are breaking the rules and use all sorts of ways and means of working out what they’re doing.
“On the other hand, the cheating athlete takes a lot of advice as to how to get around the rules, and can get that advice from various people.
“What you do, if you’re running a decent program, is you find out what you would tell a cheating athlete trying to counter it.”
In many cases, involved in an athlete’s lawbreaking is what Howman calls an “entourage”, which may include doctors, lawyers, coaches and agents.
“All sorts of rough and ready people,” Howman said.
‘Then you hope the radar works properly’
Wide World of Sports put a scenario to Howman: the case of the off-the-grid runner who juices up out of sight and extracts the training benefits, then lays off the gear and heads to a lucrative race with no banned substance in their system.
“That could happen, and it could happen in road races because you’ve got some countries in East Africa, for example, where there would probably be several hundreds of athletes who could go around the world and go and win a road race and perhaps in their own country be ranked 165 or something,” Howman replied.
“Now, they’re not going to be on anybody’s radar until they rock up and win. But once they’ve rocked up and won, they might be on the radar, so then you hope the radar works properly.”
The controversial Chepngetich world record
When Chepngetich galloped to victory in last year’s Chicago Marathon in two hours, nine minutes, 56 seconds (2:09:56), slashing nearly two minutes off Ethiopian Tigst Assefa’s world record and destroying her personal best by more than four minutes, the athletics world largely reacted with suspicion and anger.
And even when the AIU revealed in October that the provisionally suspended Chepngetich had been slugged with a three-year ban, much of that anger lingered.
Why? Because as per the World Anti-Doping Code, it was confirmed that all of Chepngetich’s results registered prior to March 14, the day her positive sample was taken, would stand, including her 2024 Chicago Marathon title and the world record she set en route to victory.
Ruth Chepngetich completing the 2024 Chicago Marathon. TNS
Many have pointed out that if she was doping in March, she was all but certainly doping when she ran easily the fastest marathon time by a woman in history.
“The reason that you can’t [strip the world record] is that the rules don’t provide it. The rules say the day of the positive test is the day from which she can be sanctioned,” Howman said.
“So this particular sample that led to her sanction was after the marathon that she broke the record in, and you can’t go backwards to say, ‘Therefore, she was cheating in that’, just because she got a sample three months later.
“People are upset because they think, ‘Well, if she’s doing it then, she was doing it before, and you should have taken the marathon title and the money and the world record away’.
“And the answer to that is: no, you simply can’t, you’re precluded by the rules. The rules are contained in the World Anti-Doping Code, so we have to abide by that and sanction appropriately.”
The case regarding Chepngetich’s positive test for Hydrochlorothiazide is complete, but the AIU is continuing to investigate suspicious material recovered from her phone.
‘A long road to redemption’
Speaking in 2015 in the wake of the doping scandal involving IAAF and Russian athletics federation officials, Coe admitted the sport was facing “a long road to redemption”.
A decade on, the question beckons: how far along the road to redemption has athletics come?
“If you look at some of the stats that come from approval ratings from fans and so on, through surveys, I think you’ll find that athletics has changed quite considerably under the leadership of Seb Coe and has come back to a position of being a trusted sport,” Howman said.
“And I think it’s pretty easy to compare athletics with one or two of the others where perhaps there’s still big suspicions, and they’re not overcome by the testing that’s being conducted now because they’re no longer finding the cheats.
“I know the World Athletics council … is very happy with the work that we have done as an independent part of their body in retrieving their reputation, because it’s reputational risk that the sport suffers and that has been recovered by weeding out those at the top that have been cheating and still are.”
World Athletics president Sebastian Coe speaks at a press conference during the Paris 2024 Olympics. Getty
Howman recalled some remarks made by athletes during September’s world athletics championships.
“We had a couple of athletes in Tokyo who, when they finished, came out and said, ‘We would not have been on the podium had it not been for the AIU making sure that the cheats were not present’,” Howman said.
“That’s the sort of applause, I think, we would be saying gives credence to the work that we’re doing.”
Among the athletes wiped out for doping offences ahead of the world championships was Ethiopia’s Diribe Welteji, who had won silver in the women’s 1500 metres at the previous world titles.
Rising American sprint star Erriyon Knighton was also barred. The two-time world championship medallist was suspended for four years, ruling him out of a home Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028.
“It’s our job to try to reduce the stain as much as possible,” Howman said.
“But you’re never going to get rid of all the cheats … just like you’re never going to rid a barrel of apples from the rotten ones. You’re always going to have them.”
