Man on a mission

Sawe wants to be drug tested as much as possible to win the race for integrity

- Sean Ingle

Last week the world’s best marathon runner, Sabastian Sawe, looked me straight in the eye and told me “doping is a cancer”. Then he insisted he was clean.

You hear such oaths and affirmations all the time. But, uniquely, Sawe recently backed up those words by asking the Athletics Integrity Unit to test him as much as possible.

Sawe believed he could break the world record in Berlin in September. And he also understood that Kenya’s abysmal doping record meant that success would be met with more raised eyebrows than a plastic surgeon’s clinic in Hollywood. So the call went into the AIU. Test me. Repeatedly. Throw everything at it. My sponsors, Adidas, will pick up the bill.

“The main reason was to show that I am clean, and I am doing it the right way,” Sawe, who won the London Marathon in April, told me. “As Kenyans we have been challenged because of doping cases. So before the Berlin Marathon I was tested 25 times, blood and urine, around two or three times a week. And one day I was even tested twice - first thing and late at night.”

In the end, hot weather put paid to Sawe’s dreams of a world record. But his approach to the AIU tells you something about Kenya and doping. It is now so routine that when Sheila Chelangat, who ran in the Tokyo Olympics, was banned for six years for taking EPO last week, it barely made a ripple.

How bad is the problem? Well, since the AIU was set up in 2017 it has sanctioned 427 elite athletes for doping offences. And, staggeringly, 145 of them have been Kenyans. The next on the list? Russia with 75.