Mary Keitany Sets the Women's Clean WR!!! 2:16:59

Thank you so much, Canova. As always, your post is very informative.

Do you think Mary will go even further in Berlin? (i.e:sub 2:17)

bop wrote:

Radcliffe never failed a drug test that I'm aware of. Since she hasn't failed any thing many people will make a leap and say that she is innocent and clean... so she has nothing to make public.

That first sentence, ok. The second sentence? She may or may not have failed a drug test, but she failed

- to keep her promise of transparency

- to keep her promise of providing her frozen samples to independent testers

- to maintain an inconspicuous ABP

- to convince the first expert consulted after her ABP violation

- to get an unanimous vote of confidence from the three experts after deliberation of her 2012 ABP violation

And I disagree with your conclusion to a large extent, as I agree with Tucker's arguments and suggestions.

Interesting response Renato, my ESP seems to be working very well.

It is true that intestinal infections are truly horrible and are often quite difficult to get rid of especially if you live in a third world country. Often certain antibiotics fail to work. Runners can kiss away 6 months easy with a really bad infection.

So you are saying that in the past year Mary Keitany left her western coach (in this case Italian) of many years to be coached by her husband? But only a week or so ago you warned us that problems start when Kenyan women leave proper coaching and start being coached by their money hungry husbands eg Jemima Sumgong.

The drop from 2:24 to 2:17 is really the same as going from 3:37 to 3:26 for 1500m. If it was a Moroccan miler we would all be howling very loudly and quite rightly so. In this case Keitany's saving grace is the fact that she had run 2:19 in 2011 & 2:18 in 2012. I am still sceptical though, for 3/4ths of that race she looked like she was on for 2:14 or faster. It was like watching a fembot in action.

Got a new strong motivation? So she wasn't motivated before, right? Sorry, but that's horse hockey, plain and simple. You are simply trying to sound like you've got the answer that nobody else does. I don't think she's on drugs. Many runners are passed up for Olympic spots from different countries, and they don't come close to doing what she did and they are just as motivated. It's simply being healthy and getting in the right training, nothing else...but nice try Mr. Canova;).

How I explained to the AK Chairman, Gen. Jackson Tuwei, if AK wants to reduce the phenom of domestic doping, there are two main steps to do :

1) All Kenyan athletes must be registered with the Federation. At the moment, in all the African Countries the possibility to compete is free. When there is a domestic competition, runners directly coming from some village, or from the forest, without any coach and without any club, can go to run. They need to be on the track or on the road early in the morning, go to the organizer seated in front of a table who write their name on a normal paper after asking "who are you" and "when are you born", and the runners don't need to show any document certifying their name and their age.

Also, at the moment there is no need to be member of some club for having the opportunity to compete, so there is no way to know how many athletes there are, and to control their real age.

2) AK must ask to have registration for Clubs, in all the regional athletic bodies. All the athletes must be registered for some Club, but this is a process lasting some time, so the best option is to ask to form clubs during all the year 2018, starting from 1st Jan to have the registration of the athletes, that can be carried out in two different ways : a) belonging to some Club (already registered as AK Member), or b) on individual basis.

For being registered, becoming AK member, every athlete must produce a birth certificate together with a valid document (ID) and a picture.

Based on these documents, AK has to create a card which becomes the ID of every athlete, with the official date of birth and the picture, in order to guarantee that the athletes is exactly the one who wants to compete.

3) Starting from 1st Jan 2018, ONLY REGISTERED ATHLETES SHOWING THE ABOVE CARD CAN BE ALLOWED TO COMPETE, in domestic competition too. It's clear that the most part of Kenyans don't want any kind of registration, and go to complaint for this new rule, but, after 3 months that who is not registered can't compete in any race, who wants to run has to start to follow the rule. This is the only way for having control on the athletes.

4) AK doesn't know who the coaches of the athletes are. The next step is to ask every athlete of good value (for example, in top 50 in the world) who is his/her coach, instead to speak with managers only, who the most of time don't know many things about their athletes, being very far in other Countries. Only the coaches working on daily basis with the athletes can give some important infos, about shape, type of training, availability for institutional competitions. The fact to have a list of the REAL coaches of the best athletes can avoid some mistake, like the selection in 2016 of the Team for WHM Championships for women, when AK put in the team the best 5 athletes of the previous year, without speaking with their coaches, including athletes injured (Gladys Cherono), sick (Mary Keitany), not interested (Florence Kiplagat).

5) Having the names of the coaches, AK CAN CONTROL THEY ARE REAL COACHES, not only husbands without any specific knowledge, or drivers following some road runner and giving him some water. There are at the moment many coaches who have the degree of Level I and Level II for coaching, according the IAAF rules : only coaches already with an official degree can be allowed to follow the best athletes.

6) The best athletes MUST be coached by an OFFICIAL IAAF COACH. In different case, AK MUST NOT ALLOW THEM TO COMPETE ABROAD.

7) In this situation, the role of the husbands can be more clear : there are the GOOD HUSBANDS, who follows the plan of some real coach and are able to support their wife in very important way (Charles, the husband of Mary, belongs to this category, such as the husband of Vivian Cheruiyot and the husband of Irene Cheptai), and there are husbands who only want to have a role in the situation, looking for personal glory and for money, not knowing anything about training, who are very dangerous because look at every system for earning more money and create a big name for themselves. If you look at the names of husbands of the athletes caught for doping, you can have a small list of this kind of husbands (but I'm sorry that the list is very much longer).

People has to understand that, with the current organization and the lack of control by AK (because there are thousands of unknown athletes every years), there is no possibility to end the problem of doping. The first step is not to increase the antidoping tests, but is to create a system where the athletes can be known and controlled. In this case, the tests can be organized and can become a real deterrent, because all the components around the athletes are involved.

bop wrote:

Radcliffe never failed a drug test that I'm aware of. Since she hasn't failed any thing many people will make a leap and say that she is innocent and clean... so she has nothing to make public.

casual obsever wrote:

That first sentence, ok. The second sentence? She may or may not have failed a drug test, but she failed

- to keep her promise of transparency

- to keep her promise of providing her frozen samples to independent testers

- to maintain an inconspicuous ABP

- to convince the first expert consulted after her ABP violation

- to get an unanimous vote of confidence from the three experts after deliberation of her 2012 ABP violation

And I disagree with your conclusion to a large extent, as I agree with Tucker's arguments and suggestions.

You're right: when I say "she has nothing to make public"... I'm wrong. She has blood values to make public which will reduce the amount of missing information. There certainly is a lot of missing information and a lot of misinformation.

Do I think Radcliffe blood doped? I am unsure. If I had to choose - I would err on the side of "no convincing proof, so she's innocent" but I do not feel strongly. The absence of certain truth has almost become as big of an issue as the actual cheating... so the debate carries on.

Do I think Keitany is a cheater? No - I have no evidence that she is or indication that she might be. Between Rita Jeptoo and Jemima Sumgong's positive's it's hard to have faith but I'm holding onto the idea that some people are clean.

Mary seems perfectly suited for the marathon, small and extremely efficient. However, when Mary broke the half world record, I was amazed that someone with such modest track credentials could run that fast so soon. Mary ran close to her 5k and 10K PRs in route to the half WR. Albeit, Mary went to the roads early in her career and perhaps what she did on the track is irrelevant. It is relatively easy to dope when you are only running 3 road races a year. We all have to agree Mary has not been able to produce spectator results when the doping controls are stricter as in world cross, the track or even WC and Olympic marathons. With all of that said, I don't necessarily think Mary is dirty, but in this day-and-age people are connecting all sorts of dots when it comes to Kenya.

Don't AK face the 2 very real dilemmas in trying to clean up the structure of the sport in Kenya to appease the IAAF, IOC and WADA.

A) those athletes who don't want to be monitored will run off to Bahrain, Saudi Arabia or UAE to compete.

B) the system becomes too bureaucratic and blotted with regulations and red tape. Thus suffocating the talent or as all blotted bureaucracies do, they become corrupt, returning AK back to square one again.

Wow, seriously, way to try and absolutely KILL running in Kenya, with such high handed authoritarian regime measures.

Honestly, I thought you were trying to be good for the Kenyans, but sadly, you're not. Maybe it's time for you to get out of Kenya, keep your mouth shut and retire.

casual obsever wrote:

bop wrote:

Radcliffe never failed a drug test that I'm aware of. Since she hasn't failed any thing many people will make a leap and say that she is innocent and clean... so she has nothing to make public.

That first sentence, ok. The second sentence? She may or may not have failed a drug test, but she failed

- to keep her promise of transparency

- to keep her promise of providing her frozen samples to independent testers

- to maintain an inconspicuous ABP

- to convince the first expert consulted after her ABP violation

- to get an unanimous vote of confidence from the three experts after deliberation of her 2012 ABP violation

And I disagree with your conclusion to a large extent, as I agree with Tucker's arguments and suggestions.

Good post, and it reminds me of how hazy the facts are around what happened with Paula's third suspicious blood values test in 2012. The way that the IAAF describe it in their 'Response to Allegations of Blood doping' (https://www.iaaf.org/news/press-release/iaaf-response-blood-testing) and what the actual process would be according to the WADA ABP Operating Guidelines (https://www.wada-ama.org/en/resources/athlete-biological-passport/athlete-biological-passport-abp-operating-guidelines) are shall we say, a little different.

Check out page 49 and onwards of these guidelines. The only time that a passport gets reviewed by multiple Experts is if i) there is an Atypical Passport Finding ii) an Expert has carried out a review and deemed that it is a 'Likely doping' initial review. The next stage is then that three experts (including the initial expert) carry out a review.

Now it becomes unclear. Did the experts have a 'likely doping' consensus, and there was an Adverse Passport Finding, which the Athlete is then notified about, can respond with 'explanations' and then the Experts review this information again? Unclear from this interview:

(about 8:20 in) where she says that the 'experts unanimously said that there was no case to answer' though I'd be interested to know when the bit about her being injured at altitude was reported (given that contemporary interviews have her saying how well the training was going in Kenya and how she was training 100 mile weeks etc.

Then there's this weird snippet about the 2012 test as well:

"The paper adds: "A second high test several years later did spark an investigation by the IAAF. The British athlete said that 12 experts from the IAAF had viewed the data on these tests and 11 had concluded that the results were consistent with an athlete training at altitude."

All of this makes me think of a couple of things:

- Given the levels of corruption within the IAAF, including within their anti-doping department (Dollé), and given that it requires just one dissenting 'expert' voice to 'free' a suspected doper, what is the possibility of corruption/bribery in this decision making process, and what have the IAAF/WADA done to address this issue given the history? Who was the 'expert' that exonerated Paula? Plan B Saugy?

- Connected to this, the assessment of the athlete's profile should be anonymised. In practice, is that really possible, does not the number of times that an athlete has been tested and therefore points on the ABP not indicate who this would be? i.e. Paula had been tested way more than any other female elite marathoner, and it would pretty easy to work out who this was.

What I say is what every Country in the World is doing. There is no Country in the World where somebody coming from nothing can go to compete in free way without being part of some organization.

Athletics is something organizing in very clear way :

1) IAAF (the international Federation)

2) Inside IAAF, there are the Member Federations (which at the moment are 214, more than the Countries members of United Nations)

3) Inside any Member Federation, there are Clubs or equivalent teams (for example, University Teams in US)

4) Inside Teams, there are the athletes.

Athletes can compete for free at their beginning, in competitions of local level, BUT THERE ARE NO CONTRIES ALLOWING ATHLETES WITHOUT ANY REGISTRATION UNDER THEIR OWN FEDERATION TO COMPETE IN NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL ACTIVITY.

If you are a player of Football, or Soccer, or Basket, you need a Team for competing, and the Team has officially to take part in some Championship at its own level (1st / 2nd / 3rd league, or University Championships, or any type of tournament where you can participate only if official member of a Team). If you are a player of Tennis, of course you can play with a friend for fun, but if you want to participate in some official tournament you need to be member of a Team (circle), otherwise you can't enter in the tournament.

If you are a skier, you can't enter yourself in any official competition, but is your Club to enter you. The same if you are a cyclist, or a pilot in Formula One or NASCAR.

I don't understand WHY you think that running AT OFFICIAL LEVEL must be something you can go without any rule.

When you go in some official competition, that competition is organized by an official BODY (in this case, extension of AK), you need to follow precise rules, and you USE some official organization for doing something that at the end becomes OFFICIAL.

Athletics has precise rules, and at the end there are precise results. In Kenya too many times the quality of the competitions is very poor (for example, there is not the organization for having ALL THE OFFICIAL RESULTS in many track meetings, since at the end there are only the results of the finals and not the results of heats), and, how there is not control on the athletes, there is not control in some result too.

This situation of very poor quality can be acceptable when we go in local competitions, when the goal is the recruitment of the athletes, but is not acceptable when we speak about athletes of high level, who can, and want, to compete in international races and meeting without any knowledge and control by the National Body.

How is it possible to control the possibility of cheating (with doping, or with the correct names, or with the fake age) if AK doesn't have any knowledge about big part of the athletes, not registered and changing name because sometimes they compete with their Kenyan given name as surname, some other time they use their correct family name, so AK supposes are two different athletes ?

You can't think that "athletic anarchy" is the solution, and that every kind of control is "authoritarian regime". Only improving the global organization of athletics, and knowing in better way who are the "users" of this organization, can help to face doping and technical problems, the most part starting because ignorance of rules and of mutual respect.

Mary's back in Kenya: "I'm thinking about my body first, I have to rest and recover, then we'll see".

https://twitter.com/MichKatami/status/858189884401623041

Looks like hubby & the kids have been to Burberry, they must have hypnotized her husband. I would be concerned about "The Unabomber" sharing the same flight.

Subway Surfers Addiction wrote:

Looks like hubby & the kids have been to Burberry, they must have hypnotized her husband. I would be concerned about "The Unabomber" sharing the same flight.

LOL. Leave him alone, he's trying to stay awake.

Mary welcomed back home in Eldoret

http://www.nation.co.ke/sports/athletics/How-Mary-Keitany-plotted-world-record-London-Marathon/1100-3908590-kqhbk9z/index.html

El Keniano wrote:

Mary welcomed back home in Eldoret

http://www.nation.co.ke/sports/athletics/How-Mary-Keitany-plotted-world-record-London-Marathon/1100-3908590-kqhbk9z/index.html

That's a lot of flowers. Probably weigh heavier than Mary.