Frank Shorter, the American marathoner who won an Olympic gold medal in 1972 and made running cool, isn’t the kind of guy to say, “I told you so.”
So I will say it for him: He told you so.
For years, when someone would ask him who he thought would win the next major marathon, he told me, his answer was always the same: “I don’t know who it will be, but the person will be from a country without an antidoping agency that is totally independent, audited and doesn’t have a dog in the fight.”
Save for a few victors here and there, Shorter — a former chairman of the United States Anti-Doping Agency — was right.
African countries like Kenya have dominated the major marathon scene for years, and Sunday’s New York City Marathon was no different. It was a Kenyan sweep when Wilson Kipsang and Mary Keitany finished first and grabbed their $100,000 paychecks.
But when Rita Jeptoo, a Kenyan who has won the Boston Marathon three times and the Chicago Marathon twice, failed an initial doping screening last month for the endurance-boosting substance EPO, it raised questions about the credibility of every Kenyan winner. Unfair, for sure, but that’s how corrosive doping can be.
One major athlete tests positive — in this case, the highest-profile Kenyan ever to test positive — and it taints everyone around her.
In this case, unfortunately, there is good reason to question the Kenyan distance running community, and Jeptoo’s positive test is a reminder of the gaping holes in Kenya’s antidoping system.
The harsh truth is that Kenyan athletes and athletes from poorer countries are generally not tested as rigorously as, say, British runners or American runners. Richer countries have the money to finance national antidoping agencies that focus on testing out of competition, which is when most athletes dope.
Antidoping officials have criticized Kenya for being lax in monitoring its athletes for doping. But at least the testing in Kenya is getting tougher by the day. It used to be virtually nonexistent.
Kenyan athletes are now tested by a regional antidoping agency that consists of several countries that have banded together because each cannot afford to finance the testing of its athletes on its own. Kenya has been a part of that program for the past four or five years, said David Howman, the director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency.
Kenyans runners are also tested by the International Association of Athletics Federations, the world governing body of track and field. But with countless athletes in the I.A.A.F.’s testing pool, each top marathoner — especially those training in far-off Kenya — can be tested out of competition only so often because of cost and logistics.
The World Marathon Majors series has been aware of the potential problems of the Kenyan system. After a German news report in 2012 exposed just how easily doping products like EPO and testosterone could be obtained in Kenya, and after the Kenyan marathoner Mathew Kisorio tested positive and admitted that he and many of his countrymen were doping, the marathon group knew it had to act.
The group’s antidoping efforts culminated in a partnership with the federations that Nick Bitel, general counsel of the World Marathon Majors, said was helping finance a future blood-testing laboratory in Kenya, and was also helping pay for more target-testing of marathoners by track’s governing body.
“Rita’s test likely would not have happened without the funds we put forth,” Bitel said. “I don’t believe that anyone else is doing this much in our sport, not the Diamond League, or any other entity. It’s a priority for us.”
The World Marathon Majors has given a unified voice to the sport, and now it is trying to be at the forefront of antidoping. Bitel wouldn’t say how much the group had given to the I.A.A.F., but he called it “a significant amount.”
One person with knowledge of the amount, who was not authorized to speak on behalf of the group, said it was more than $100,000. Whatever the amount is, though, Shorter thinks it is not enough.
He said his first indication that Kenyans might be doping came in the 1980s, when athletes began to use Italian doctors as agents.
“Of course, doctors would be good coaches and agents, right?” he asked, sarcastically. “My statement to my friends then was: ‘Kenyans on drugs, it’s all over. Nobody has a chance.’ ”
Shorter said that he had a quick fix to doping in the sport, though, and that for many years, he had been advising the marathon group to use it. In his view, the World Marathon Majors should mandate that any elite runner in its races be in the marathon group’s own registered testing pool.
An accredited antidoping agency would then test those athletes seven or eight times a year out of competition to ensure that those marathoners would be clean and that the races would be fair, he said.
“If you’re paying $100,000 for an appearance fee, why not spend $5,000 on somebody to make sure they aren’t doping?” Shorter said. “If they would have listened to me years ago, maybe they wouldn’t be embarrassed right now about their big winner.”
(Last Sunday, Jeptoo was supposed to receive a $500,000 check for winning the World Marathon Majors. Instead of cashing in, she is waiting for her backup sample to be tested for EPO, and if that’s positive, she will have officially failed the drug test.)
Howman, of the World Anti-Doping Agency, said he would welcome Shorter’s plan because “you can never do enough” in the fight against doping, especially in parts of the world where the incentive to win is so great.
“In some countries, winning is an escape from poverty to a richer world, and therefore there should be intense scrutiny” to prevent shortcuts, he said.
Mary Wittenberg, race director of the New York City Marathon, said she would love to use Shorter’s plan in the future. For now, though, she said that Jeptoo’s initial positive sample should at least be a reason to investigate possible widespread doping in Kenya.
“This has to be a moment of digging deeper,” she said. “If we let this moment go by and there’s systematic doping involved, then shame on everybody.”