British detectives to help probe doping claims

British detectives have been invited to Kenya to investigate doping claims among athletes in the North Rift region. Two arrests have been made.

The Cabinet Secretary for Sports, Culture and the Arts, Hassan Wario, said on Tuesday that police and the Anti-Doping Agency of Kenya were investigating fresh claims made in European media that elite Kenyan and European athletes were being injected with illegal performance-enhancing substances by local doctors.

He spoke as Governors Jackson Mandago (Uasin Gishu) and Alex Tolgos (Elgeyo-Marakwet) said they would look into ways to police foreign journalists, managers and coaches in the North Rift.

Speaking in Eldoret during the official launch of Team Kenya’s Olympic residential training camps, Dr Wario disclosed that Kenyan security agencies had invited detectives and officials from the United Kingdom Anti-Doping Agency to aid in investigations.

Last weekend, the German TV station ARD and the British newspaper The Sunday Times made sensational claims that Kenyan doctors were administering illegal performance enhancing drugs on elite Kenyan and European athletes.

Although it did not name the athletes, the joint ARD-Times exposé said three British runners were involved.

But Dr Wario also questioned the timing of the European media claims, which come just days before the August 4-21 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He said that so far, over 230 athletes had been tested.

Dr Wario said at the High Performance Training Centre where Kenya’s track and field team to the Olympics is training: “We have nothing to hide because our country is a hotbed of talent”.

Mr Mandago said the allegations in the European media were “malicious and designed to divert our athletes’ attention from training for Rio”.

He said: “I wish to encourage our great sportsmen to continue training smart for the Olympics. These speculations about our athletes using performance enhancing drugs are meant to taint our image and shift our focus from what is important”.

As governors in North Rift region, Mr Mandago said, they were going to hold talks on how to regulate and vet foreigners, who come to the local training camps as a way of protecting Kenyan athletes from manipulation.

A team of undercover journalists in the joint ARD-Times exposé reported finding used syringes and empty erythropoeitin (Epo) packs in rooms and dustbins at the high altitude training centre in Iten, which is frequented by top foreign athletes, including World and Olympic champions.

Dutchman Pieter Langerhorst, who co-owns the training centre with his Kenyan-born Dutch wife, Mrs Lornah Kiplagat, a multiple world distance running champion and record holder, denied that his camp had accommodated drug cheats.

“If they have proof, why don’t they publish names?” Mr Langerhorst told the Nation on Tuesday from Amsterdam, where he is attending the European Athletics Championships.
“Kenyan athletes don’t stay at the High Altitude Training Centre, so what has Kenyan athletics to do with it?”

The report further claimed that the administration of the banned substances, including blood-booster Epo, was being done at Eldoret’s St Luke’s Orthapaedic and Trauma Hospital, an allegation the hospital also promptly denied on Monday.

An aspiring athlete, Fredrick Lemishen Nkoyon, who was filmed in the expose, also disowned the report, saying the journalists had led him to believe that they would coach him and help him to compete in the London Marathon and at no point did he know that he was being recorded by hidden cameras.

Dr Wario, who was accompanied by top officials from the anti-narcotics police unit in Eldoret, however, did not disclose the details of the two fresh arrests made.

“We have become far too smooth, far too trusty and far too generous to those training in our camps,” said Dr Wario regarding the government’s intention to vet foreign journalists and sports officials coming to work in Kenya.

“We will not stop those coming to train in our country, but we will be more vigilant and strict,” he said.