Kenyan athlete Rhonex Kipruto faces severe penalties, including the loss of his 2019 world 10,000m bronze medal and the 10km world record from 2020, after receiving a six-year ban for doping violations.
As a result of the ban, Kipruto’s achievements from September 2018 will be nullified, leaving only his world under-20 10,000m title from July 2018 in Tampere, Finland intact.
This sanction follows a decision by the Anti-Doping Agency of Kenya (Adak) to provisionally suspend 33 Kenyan athletes for doping offenses.
Additionally, the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) banned Kenya’s Josephine Chepkoech for seven years due to repeated doping offenses and the use of prohibited substances.
The AIU acted swiftly to enforce the stringent penalty against Kipruto, a promising 24-year-old distance runner, following a Disciplinary Tribunal’s dismissal of his appeal. The tribunal found irregularities in Kipruto’s Athlete Biological Passport (ABP), indicating potential doping activity.
Kipruto was provisionally suspended in May 2021 for violating World Athletics Anti-Doping Rules after irregularities were detected in his ABP dating back to July 2018.
The ban extends until May 2029, during which Kipruto faces disqualification of several top honors. However, he retains the option to appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).
According to a statement from the AIU, expert submissions supported the tribunal’s decision, which concluded that the abnormalities in Kipruto’s ABP were likely due to blood manipulation, such as the use of recombinant human erythropoietin (EPO).
The tribunal, consisting of Tanja Haug (Chairman), Sentodji Roland Adjovi, and Julien Berenger, determined that Kipruto was engaged in a deliberate and sophisticated doping regimen aimed at artificially enhancing his performance over an extended period.
“Several abnormalities found in the Athlete’s ABP were linked to important competitions including the Valencia Half Marathon in 2020 and Kenyan Olympic trials in 2021,” the tribunal said.
The statement explained that blood doping outside of competitions can also be used to gain an advantage as it permits more intense training and this has an obvious effect on performance even after a significant period of time.
“This is corroborated by the fact that in recent years many athletes have been found positive for EPO far outside of competition,” said the tribunal.
Following the ban, Kipruto’s 10km road-running world record in Valencia in 2020; 10,000m bronze medal in the 2019 World Athletics Championships in Doha and 10,000m victory in the 2019 Stockholm Diamond League, among many other honours, will now be annulled.
“The ABP is a critical tool in the quest to combat doping in elite athletes and this decision upholds important principles relating to ABP cases,” said AIU Head Brett Clothier.
Clothier said it can be difficult to directly detect the substances or methods used by sophisticated dopers, but the ABP gives them a chance to observe the telltale signs of blood doping over time.
For this reason, Clothier said AIU conducted more than 4,700 ABP tests in 2023 on elite athletes and that they will continue to invest heavily in our ABP programme going forward.
The ABP, introduced in 2009 to fight blood doping, is an electronic record that collects an athlete’s biological data over time to indirectly detect the effects of doping.
