Educate Kenyans and their sportsmen on doping.

A marathon has no half –times, no time outs and no substitutes. It must be must be the only true sport! Kenyan athletes have conquered the world by easily setting and breaking world records when it comes to long distance races. A combination of hard work, talent, mursik and the benefit of high altitude have favoured our athletes to win the races. We have now a number of high altitude training camp in Iten where athletes from all over the world train. Sadly, we have started reading about involvement by our athletes in this ‘’sports vice’’ called doping the other day.

 Doping did not start yesterday; it has been with us since the days of ancient Greece. Perhaps what has changed only is the level of sophistication as noted by Matthew Hard his paper titled Caught in the net: Athletes’ Rights and the World Anti-doping Agency. Where he states that ‘’...the evolution of doping substances and techniques has been tremendous. What began as “cocktails” comprised of heroin, cocaine, alcohol, and nitroglycerin, has evolved to designer steroids, gene therapy, and sophisticated masking techniques. The rise of doping coincided with pharmaceutical developments following the Second World War.52 Athletes soon discovered the physical benefits of substances originally intended for restorative medical purposes, such as human growth hormone (“HGH,” used to treat patients with deficient pituitary glands and lacking growth hormone) and erythropoetin (“EPO,” used to treat kidney disease and anaemia). Athletes weighed the potential impact a substance may have had on health against the impact it would have had on performance and made a calculated decision.’’

Though doping is as old the sports it is associated with, we remain ignorant about it as a nation. To begin with, most of our sports men and women do not even know what they are entitled to when they sign contracts with different clubs they play for or their sponsors. They always end up getting a raw deal. As a country we also do not care much about our sports heroes. A combination of these factors becomes a toxic mix when doping is thrown in. The implications of doping are far reaching. We have witnessed our athletes suffer the ban silently, forgotten. A red card in most sports is devastating enough for any sports man or woman. Being banned from any competition for two years because of doping for any sportsman or woman is a death sentence. It gets worse due to being branded a cheat especially if the sportsman or woman had no knowledge of what she ingested or was injected with. Things get even more difficult where millions of money is lost in sponsorship and endorsement deals. Most of the sponsors do not want to associate with such sportsmen or women.

Unfortunately, their agents, coaches or doctors who might have lured them to ingest or inject banned substances are let off the hook. This cannot be ruled our especially with the huge money the races attract nowadays. Yet the ministry of sports and the various sports federations who are supposed to work together to educate Kenyans about doping and its implications in sports are only interested in making a quick buck at the expense of the sportsmen and women. To date no robust attempts have been made especially by the concerned ministry to address this issue apart from forming a task force which came up with a report whose veracity has already been questioned in several forums. However, the Anti-doping task Force led by Prof Moni Wekesa is a good starting step in the right direction. Notably the bill it proposed to deal with doping is something I hope all the parties concerned will fine tune and ensure it is enacted into law soonest for the benefit of our sports  and the country at large.