Double Olympic marathon champion Eliud Kipchoge has called on the athletics stakeholders to handle the doping menace properly in the country.
Speaking in Iten during the Iten International Marathon over the weekend, the world marathon record holder in 2:001.09 said that running has no short cut and athletes should use the right process of training and working hard towards their goals.
“All athletes should trust the process, have the right systems and you would get what you have been training for”, said Kipchoge.
As one of the best marathoners of all times, winning 17 out of 19 he has run so far, who has on many occasions defied human limits, took also the issue with coaches and camps that have not been registered and are also managed by people that are not known or their data captured anywhere.
“If we are serious about doping, which I know we are not serious, if we are, then all coaches and training camps should be registered and people running them known. This is the only way we shall know the people who are in every camp and those who manages them,” he said.
His sentiments were echoed by three time world half marathon champion Geoffrey Kamworor who was the race ambassador, who said, “Athletes should be patient and work hard towards achieving their life time goals but not to use banned substance for quick money.”
World Athletics Council recently spared Kenya from global competition partly because the Kenyan government has pledged to spend Kshs 500m per year to combat the problem.
“I know the Kenyan government feels this has been a disfiguring period in what should have been a Herculean period for Kenyan athletics,” Sebastian Coe said. “But I’m really delighted, because actually, all the stakeholders that matter, both domestically and internationally, are now aligned in coming together to really do everything we can to resolve this situation.”
Kenya is among four countries included in Category A – member federations the World Athletics believe are most likely to have doping problems – along with Ethiopia, Belarus, hosts of next year’s European Games, and Ukraine and this has subjected its athletes to increased testing in the last ten months leading up to a major event to be eligible.
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