Two more Kenyans banned Feb. 6, 2023

Just curious...of all the tests AK have taken, how many busts?

I believe the word in Iten is that it's around 1 per 5,000 Kenyan shilling in tea money.

Can it be that AK tests athletes so they are sure they are clean when they send them to championships?

40% of doping violations in 2022 is what it says it is - except to the board's resident doping denier.

Kenia should be blocked from athletics as they do obviously systematic doping. I have the feeling the athletic foundation gets paid by them to keep them 'alive'.

Recall that Russia wasn't banned for the doping, but for the lack of enforcement and cover-ups.

Here's what Coe said is the difference between Kenyan and Russia:

"During a visit to Kenya, Coe contrasted the approach of the country's sports authorities with that in Russia, which he said involved state-supervised cover-ups.

"There is no suggestion that that is the case in Kenya; in fact, quite the reverse," Coe said during a news conference alongside Kenya's sports minister."

I guess you are trying to talk about me, while confusingly responding to me. I've always thought calling me a "troll" was both childish and an intellectual copout.

"laissez faire attitude regarding cheating"? I'm not ever arguing against anti-doping detection and enforcement, but I'm also for education of both athletes and the more gullible fans.

Here we are in a thread where two athletes did what any normal person does when they are sick -- go to a hospital. Newsflash: hospitals treat illness and injury with drugs. We saw something similar in a 2017 WADA funded study -- many of the positive athletes interviewed had a similar story -- had some illness or injury and went to a doctor who treated the illness and injury the way he would with any patient. The solution to this issue is raising athlete and doctors' awareness and education of some of the constraints and obligations imposed by the WADA Code, such as permissable choices of medicine and TUEs.

At some point, intellectually, we should be able to make a distinction between this kind of "normal for the ordinary people" behavior, that is just simple unawareness of an athletes' heightened obligations under the WADA Code, and the intentional clandestine taking of drugs for the express goal of benefiting performance, rather than lumping them all together with umbrella terms like "cheating" to invoke emotional reactions.

So few words, yet so little right.

Technically, the AIU didn't say 40%, but Coe did -- not in writing in an AIU approved report, but in a press conference.

Technically it wasn't "doping violations", but "positives". We know from WADA reports that, for various reasons, a significant number of "positive" test results do not end up as "violations". (Hard to say from media reports exactly what Coe's exact quote was, as, despite media reports putting it in quotes attributed to Coe, it has been reported as "positives", "doping positives", and "[positive drug tests]".)

Technically, it wasn't for the year 2022, as Coe said it after a Rome meeting in Nov. 2022, before the year ended.

The real question is how can we properly interpret what 40% represents in a normalized perspective within the bigger picture? It does not show doping prevelance by country, and, the AIU told us that their testing is not representative, but disproportionately targets Africans and distance events.

With the large number of Kenyan runners getting busted (drugs must be easy to get and cheap) does this make you suspicious of any non Kenyan going there to train?

"Technically" blah, blah. If not all positives end up as "violations" then the same point applies to the 60% who weren't Kenyan, which means Kenya remains proportionately much the same as 40% of those caught doping - whether it is ultimately slightly more or less than that figure. You offer no alternative estimate because you can't. You are merely speculating.

If doping control "disproportionately" targets Africans and distance events it is because some of their athletes clearly dope more than anyone else. Yet no other African country shows doping of Kenyan proportions. It is like targeting organized crime - it is targeted because it is the main source of crime as its type - as Kenyan doping is. It is only "disproportionate" targeting if the results of that targeting produce few infractions. The results in Kenya say it is eminently justified.

So what if "2022" isn't for 12 months but 11 months? The point is that for a significant period of measurable time Kenyan doping far outstripped anyone else - and still does, as the near weekly busts so dramatically show.

Your pathetic pedantic - and irrelevant - distinctions show only your unswerving efforts to somehow reduce either the incidence of Kenyan doping or its effects. It is like a sickness with you.

You are so totally full of sh*t. If a country had very few instances of doping it would not be banned. Russia was banned because its level of doping was near a 100%, which was the result of it being enabled by sports governance bodies. If Russia had had only a mere handful of cases it would not have been banned even if there had been attempted cover-ups.

Kenya has been on the verge of being banned because of the incidence of doping but has only avoided it through the efforts being made to catch the dopers, which Russia did not do.

You may think it is pedantic, but maybe you are more annoyed because you don't want to admit to yourself that you aren't really very well informed. If you are getting so many little things wrong, how can I trust you to explain the big picture accurately, and draw accurate conclusions and express them accurately?

I find it better to go to the AIU website where all these things are explained in much more detail, and share what I find with the group here.

For example, now you want to say that the AIU's testing strategy is driven only by doping, apparently unaware of what "proportion" and "disproportionate" means, when the AIU has long explained that it is a product of high performance too. The AIU will test countries from Category A (high performance x high doping) the most, from Category B (high performance x low doping plus low performance x high doping) less, and Category C (low performance x low doping) even less, if at all. In fact, in Rule 15, they list 6 different factors plus a 7th (paraphrased) "anything else we forgot that we think is important in our absolute discretion" -- it is a combination of "objective" and "subjective" assessments. Only 1 of these factors is "doping history".

The AIU uses this objectivity+subjectivity to fill in the gaps which, at their sole discretion, are left by the national anti-doping organizations. This is why AIU testing figures alone are not representative.

Very very well said.

Back to being an unpleasant foul mouthed poster …. yet again.

I await an other ban; hopefully for life this time.

Of course you are wrong again, not fully understanding the history as it played out.

Doping positives, even a lot of them, alone only permits to ban the athletes that test positive. It is insufficient to ban a nation.

The Russian Federation (ARAF) was banned because they had too few instances of sanctions. The IAAF had identified several positives, and the ARAF was not prosecuting them in a timely way. Instead, they were extorting money from the athletes.

The Russian anti-doping (RUSADA) was banned because of their role in covering up positives and interfering with testing, e.g by swapping samples through a whole in the wall.

Did not Coe say that Kenya was not going to be banned because doping was not institutionalised rather than they have no powers to ban Kenya.

And the Wada code does seem to allow to ban nations.. eg Weight Lifting.

If state or a 'group' it does not matter, a systematic doping is a systematic doping whatever Coe says. Idiotic defence line from him. Very weak from him to keep that 'alive' and a belly kick for the running sport. Possible some serious money involved here, this is very obvious.

I don't know.

There were many reports about it in various media about a ban being considered, but I have not seen Coe nor World Athletics officially announce or confirm that a Kenyan ban was ever being considered.

Although WADA has the power to declare signatories non-compliant, I don't know by what authority the World Athletics/Athletics Integrity Unit would be able to ban a country on their own.

Maybe but no one has found Kenyan doping to be systematic. According to a 2017 WADA study, Kenyan doping is "unsophisticated, opportunistic, and uncoordinated."

Whether Coe's response is weak or not, the situation in Kenya is different than Russia because the World Athletics/AIU are getting the co-operation of the Kenyan Athletics Federation, Kenyan Anti-doping, and the Kenyan government.

Indeed, ADAK is testing and catching athletes, AK is sanctioning athletes tested by the AIU, and the Kenyan government has just agreed to invest $5 million a year for the next 5 years into anti-doping.