Kip Keino and six other senior Kenyan officials charged with corruption

Noting to see here, move along please.

Man, this really sucks. I suppose none of us are above temptation. Just a horrible thing to see one of your boyhood heroes succumb to it. Hurts my heart.

Wrong. My wife is above temptation, absolutely.

She is pure as the driven snow. Sometimes it drives me nuts.

Btw, this is a bit ridiculous. I know I am the biggest anti-doping guy on here or anywhere, but let’s face it, corruption in this scene is rampant and ubiquitous—in fact, if you’re the best at corruption, you are lauded as a hero, beyond reproach.

Who is charging them? Who is prosecuting them? Who would replace them?

I’m not suggesting to not prosecute them, but these piecemeal attacks on national federations are good for mostly show...while Kenya is kicked down, Bahrain, Morocco, and Algeria will rise.

Maybe part of a real solution would be to ban an entire nation for a certain number of years if one or a small number of their athletes is busted, regardless of whether the doping is proved to be systemic. A kind of vicarious liability, or a secondary liability for failing in their anti-doping effort. That would switch 180 degrees the role played by national federations from supporting and covering up their own cheaters, to acting in an anti-doping policing capacity.

We need to use to our advantage the fact that the landscape is now composed of a great number of individual nations, rather than experiencing that fact as a complicating liability. We need to incent them to do good work rather than bad.

Anybody listening? If you need help figuring out the legalities, give me a call.

In 68, Keino trained (and raced) far more intelligently than Ryun.

Doubtful Keino has anything to do with corruption, but he could make a great scapegoat.

As for Ryun, didn't he find some controversy of his own as a congressman?

I've always thought cross-federation testing would help. USATF supports the testing of Kenyan/Russian athletes, maybe GB federation tests Ethiopian athletes, so on and so forth. Create a web of cross border testing. This would change the incentive structure to let your own athletes slide.

That is also interesting, although it has its own difficulties.

My suggestion rested on the premise of supra-national agency testing—i.e. testing at majors, DL, and other international or regional meets.

Of course national federations could do internal testing as they wished, at their own peril if it failed.

Yes there would still be the possibility of corruption in the supra-national organizations, as we saw with Diack.

Yes random tests would need to be done to catch OOC doping, same as now.

dsrunner wrote:

In 68, Keino trained (and raced) far more intelligently than Ryun.

Doubtful Keino has anything to do with corruption, but he could make a great scapegoat.

As for Ryun, didn't he find some controversy of his own as a congressman?

Yes, Ryun should have done the 5 and 10 in addition to the 1500.

dsrunner wrote:

In 68, Keino trained (and raced) far more intelligently than Ryun.

Doubtful Keino has anything to do with corruption, but he could make a great scapegoat.

As for Ryun, didn't he find some controversy of his own as a congressman?

You mean like siphoning off/stealing money? Um, no.

Coevett wrote:

Personally, I would like not only athletes with failed tests to have all their results scrubbed and medals handed back, but former athletes charged with corruption (or any crime relating to financial gain). We don't know for sure of course, and Keino hasn't been found guilty yet, but anyone who thinks there isn't a cloud of suspicion over his 1968 gold probably also still thinks Kiprop is innocent. Haven't got through it all again right now, but his victory over Ryun (where he literally climbed out of his hospital bed and ran to the stadium after missing the bus) was absolutely dodgy as hell, and yet he's always been given a free pass on this forum. In fact, Ryun has had far more doping accusations against him than Keino.

You’re such an idiot.

Look at the IAAF report on doping from the 1968 Olympics. Everyone was tested - drugs were not illegal at the time. ALL of the Jamaicans and Kenyans were on drugs. Charlie Francis (Ben Johnson's coach) went into this in his book "Speed Trap". Of course, things are so PC this can't be mentioned.

Btw, Keino did not rise out of a sick bed and run to the stadium. That's a myth created by Keino. He always made things up, like the "death threats" he received at the Commonwealth Games. Jipcho and others said Keino was full of #@it but made up the excuse as a way to explain losing. When Liquori beat Keino in a meet Keino then claimed he was letting Liquori win in front of "his people" rather than admit he merely went out too fast and ran out of gas.

Keino was a great runner but full of bull@#it on a lot of occasions.

This is about the shambolic management of the 2016 Olympics team and siphoning of funds for the team that led to, among other things, athletes and officials sharing village passes as happened with Ferguson Rotich and sprint coach John Anzrah who was accused of impersonating him for a doping test when in reality he had just borrowed his pass to get into the cafeteria for breakfast.

That corruption is Kenya's most debilitating vice is no secret and it's good that those responsible for making Rio 2016 hell for our athletes will be brought to book. But Kip Keino will probably be cleared as his issue as president of Olympic Committee was more incompetence than active pilferage. He appears to have been completely oblivious to the mess in his organisation. As for Ryun, he LOST to a better athlete on the day. I can't believe you're all still whining about it half a century later.

Oh, and Sebastian Coe has been embroiled in his own corruption scandals over the years as a British MP.

Kip had gall stones and was set to miss that 1500m. And yes, he ran to the stadium. Ryun lost by 20 METRES! Get over it.

A set up. Kipchoge Keino won't suffer humiliation regarding said circumstance.

KripKreeno wrote:

the 1968 Olympics. Everyone was tested - drugs were not illegal at the time. ALL of the Jamaicans and Kenyans were on drugs.

Yes they were illegal, since 1928. No, they did not test everyone in 1968, and they only caught one guy, and not for a PED but for being drunk. Anti-doping wasn't even about performance enhancement, it was about image. A lot of people were flipping out about drug-using hippies at the time.

Ryun, like most milers since the late 1930's, probably raced on amphetamines. There is no more effective PED in the world; since their introduction, the mile WR dropped 15 seconds in barely 30 years, after dropping only 6 seconds in the previous 50. In-comp testing eradicated them nearly immediately 50 years ago, and the record has dropped only 8 seconds further.

If amphetamines were legalized, the 1500m wr would soon be 3:22.

KripKreeno wrote:

Look at the IAAF report on doping from the 1968 Olympics. Everyone was tested - drugs were not illegal at the time. ALL of the Jamaicans and Kenyans were on drugs. Charlie Francis (Ben Johnson's coach) went into this in his book "Speed Trap". Of course, things are so PC this can't be mentioned.

Stimulants were banned and more-or-less detectable in 1968, but I'd like to know if there is an independent source for the claim that steroids were detected from the 1968 samples?

It would be nice to have a source for this claim, because (as far as I know) the reluctance by the IOC to ban anabolic steroids was specifically related to the detection problems and the RIA method was introduced only several years later. Whereas urine samples from the 1974 European Athletics Championships and from the 1974 FIS Nordic World Ski Championships were later tested and there were traces of anabolic steroids, I can't recall anywhere a reference that the 1968 urines were retested for steroids.

As one interesting anecdote, Kipchoge Keino was tested among other well-trained endurance athletes around 1965 by Swedish physiologists Per-Olof Åstrand and Bengt Saltin and the results were published later in an academic journal. As expected, his BMI was very low 18.9 (178 cm / 60) and his relative Vo2MAX of 82.0 ml/kg/min was one of the highest any runner had yet measured. His maximal pulmonary ventilation relation to his body size was at the top end of the athletes tested and blood lactate level was by far the lowest (9.7 mM).

Keino (and the other top Kenyans - including Rudisha's father) were having dreadful seasons in 68 after ousting the Dutch doctor who had singlehandedly turned Kenya into a distance running powerhouse. There had apparently been a clash of egos with Kip accusing the Dutch guy of colonialism and taking all the credit. Nevertheless, just before Mexico peace was restored and Dutchie got his job back. The rest is history.

Bad Wigins wrote:

Ryun, like most milers since the late 1930's, probably raced on amphetamines. There is no more effective PED in the world; since their introduction, the mile WR dropped 15 seconds in barely 30 years, after dropping only 6 seconds in the previous 50. In-comp testing eradicated them nearly immediately 50 years ago, and the record has dropped only 8 seconds further.

If amphetamines were legalized, the 1500m wr would soon be 3:22.

Out of curiosity, do you have any academic research papers showing that amphetamine improves significantly mid-D times, because as far as I can recall, the improvement in the few studies (Peter Karpovich, Gene M. Smith...) from the 1950's and 1960's was more in the range of some 1-1.5 %.

I do have a recollection seeing at least one paper where the improvement in watt output was significantly larger from the 2000's (conducted in the central governor - context).

There's also a story that Ryun , knowing how seriously ill Keino was supposed to be, didn't follow his pace in the final because he was sure he (Keino) was literally going to die.