A prominent Kenyan track coach has been banned for ten years from the sport for helping athletes--Kenyan and British--evade and beat doping tests. As someone who loves the sport, and who in particular loves watching the Kenyans run--most distance runners at the world class look like death warmed over, but the Kenyans tend to actually look healthy--I am tremendously disappointed, but not altogether surprised, that some of them have taken a hint from world class cycling and started to help their performances with drugs like EPO, which increases the # of red blood cells and thus keeps distance athletes going.
Really, the more I see of elite sport, the more I'm becoming convinced that a huge portion of it is a fraud. Probably a good number of "clean" athletes out there, but especially on the (theoretically) XX side of the equation, a huge portion has been fraudulent for half a century now.
We might suggest that either the IAAF needs to institute the cycling federation's "biological passport" testing (basically control charts on various factors related to doping fed with routine tests), or the world is going to see the entire enterprise as a gigantic episode of the Avengers. And if they do clean things up, I dare suggest that there are going to be a certain number of world records that are going to be untouchable for a while in the same way that all of the women's track WRs up to 800 meters are over 30 years old.
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1 comment:
This is sad news. Very unfortunate.
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