In the hills above Africa's Great Rift Valley lies the small city of Iten in Kenya. The town bills itself as the "Home of Champions."
Indeed, dozens of world and Olympic champions have lived and trained in Iten, a testament to its ideal conditions for competitive long-distance running. Thin air and soft, red dirt roads have attracted thousands of runners, along with world-class coaches and trainers.
Unfortunately, it's also attracted a plethora of drug and doping entrepreneurs who play on the runners' extreme poverty and desperation to convince them that they can supply the edge they need to win.
That's the bottom line. It's all about winning. And even a small amount of money won can be life-changing. "In a region where the average annual income is the equivalent of little more than $2,000 and the competition so intense, the potentially life-changing lure of banned substances, referred to locally as 'the medicine,' is obvious," writes Tariq Panja in the New York Times.
The young Kenyans believe the risks of getting caught or damaging their health are worth it.
A few miles from Iten is the region’s health care hub, the city of Eldoret. It serves as an easy market for performance-enhancing drugs as pharmacies line the streets, each selling dreams of glory.
“This economic reality means the high-risk situation is always going to be impossible to completely eradicate,” said Brett Clothier, the Head of Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU), the organization responsible for anti-doping efforts.
It gets harder when the Kenyan government's anti-doping officials show videos of substances that can increase speed and endurance.
Some of Kenya’s most prominent runners have been caught doping and barred from competition. The women’s marathon world-record holder, Ruth Chepngetich, who is from the Rift Valley, was suspended this month after testing positive for a prohibited substance. Her agent did not respond to a request for comment.
International officials have made headway. Kenyans are now among the most-tested athletes anywhere, Clothier said, adding that as widespread as the doping is, it was far worse just a few years ago.
Yet, global antidoping bodies suspect that policing efforts may be touching only the edges of a cheating epidemic. Officials in Kenya responsible for tackling doping have been caught taking bribes. Some have been arrested.
The problem has become so bad that World Athletics, the governing body for track and field, has threatened to ban Kenya from global competition unless its government commits to spending $25 million to fight doping. This is an unprecedented amount in the anti-doping world.
“We have to teach them a different way of seeing things: that using illegitimate means of doing well is not going to help them in the long run; it damages their health, and they might not be successful,” said Barnabas Korir, an executive committee member of Kenya’s athletics federation who also sits on a multiagency antidoping body.
“It’s a matter of changing the whole attitude.”
One of the most successful anti-doping tools is blanket testing.
One morning in November, officials descended on a track where scores of athletes were training, locking the gates behind them. Pandemonium ensued, according to Ben Kipchirchir, a Kenyan runner.
Kipchirchir said he witnessed athletes clamber over walls and vault fences to escape. “They were running this way and that,” he said, smiling ruefully.
Often, Kenyans and others taking drugs show little regard for the physical risks, such as dangerously elevated heart rates, kidney and liver disease, and even death.
Deaths of runners are, if not common, then certainly noticeable. Authorities are unable to determine if the runners died as a result of doping because autopsy results are usually not shared.
“If someone drops dead like that, an athlete who is fit, a young one, there has to be a reason,” said Korir, the Kenyan official. “It can’t be someone just drops dead.”
In 2024, World Athletics began to award cash prizes of $50,000 for a gold medalist in any track and field event. As the money available to winning athletes soars, so does the temptation to cheat. Even an athlete in the middle tier of excellence on the pro circuit (11th-20th place) can earn from $10,000 to $60,000.
That's life-changing money to an impoverished, third-world athlete desperate to feed his family.
