A winter’s day, 2015, New York. Investigator Victor Burgos turned over the conversation he was about to have in his mind. In the next minutes, he was either going to recruit an ally in the fight against anti-doping or have a hostile, frustrating encounter that would send him back to the drawing board. Chances were it would be the latter. The omertà of dopers matches the mafia. No one talks. Few inform on their peers.
He was meeting a distance runner who was blissfully unaware of what was coming. The man was superb by normal standards, his marathon personal best well within what might be regarded as world class. In Kenyan terms, though, he was a mid-ranker and never going to be an Olympic superstar. He also had tested positive for 19-nortestosterone, a hardcore steroid.
The man appeared. Burgos approached him with a United States Anti-Doping Agency (Usada) business card in hand and a copy of the letter containing all the details of the positive test. Burgos introduced himself and was required to read the athlete his rights, especially regarding the opportunity to check the positive finding by having his B sample tested. (Laboratories always split an athlete’s urine sample, test half – the A sample – and leave half – the B sample – so that it can be used to corroborate the first test with the athlete and advisers present. It almost always produces the same result.) Burgos chose his words carefully. “This is not the end of the world,” Burgos recalls telling the athlete. “This doesn’t define who you are. If you made a mistake, we can talk about that.”
The way Burgos tells it, he was offering an opportunity to lessen the gravity of his punishment, an opportunity to provide “substantial assistance” to Usada to help catch other dopers. It is a provision of anti-doping rules open to all but rarely used, because most athletes remain in denial, insisting they have done nothing wrong and that their positive test is mistake. “He was shocked, and he was dishonest at the beginning,” said Burgos. “He said: ‘I don’t know how the substance entered my body, this is a lie.’” “Why don’t we take a walk,” suggested Burgos. “Let’s grab a coffee.”
As they walked, they talked. It was deliberately far removed from the classic good cop-bad cop interrogation scene, sat behind a table in a darkened room. Burgos is chief investigator at Usada and he sees the results of all positive tests in the United States. Something in this one caught his attention. The substance, for one: 19-nortestosterone is a red flag for intentional doping.
Then the athlete’s competitive record was intriguing, plying his trade on the US road race circuit, a subgenre of the sport but lucrative, especially for a young African, because you might win $10,000 (£7,750) prize money at a marathon or $5,000 at a 10k race. The races take place in mid-sized American cities, less exalted locations than London, New York and Chicago, and prize money isn’t the $55,000 on offer for winning a major marathon. But clock up a few of these wins in a year and it’s a decent living. The athlete was unlucky. In many of these lower-level road races, there is no anti-doping. His misfortune was Usada turned up at his event.
Burgos had weighed all this up. An established Olympian with a reputation to lose is less likely to talk; this guy, more so. The final piece of the jigsaw was his address in New York. Burgos lives in the city. So it was not a huge call to go to his apartment.
“Ninety-nine per cent of the time when athletes tests positive an organisation will email them,” said Burgos. “We send a list of options in a very legalised notice letter and that’s the end of it.” That email comes with a blizzard of acronyms and legalese. “Usada collected a sample, your A sample shows an adverse analytical finding [AAF], which is a potential anti-doping rule violation [ADRV] …”
Burgos spoke with Usada’s general counsel and asked him to hold off sending the email notification. “I want to notify him personally,” he told him. “I’ll go to his apartment, tell him face to face.”
After the initial confrontation, the athlete accepted the offer of coffee. “We walked around Manhattan and I was trying to soften the blow,” said Burgos. “I don’t want him to walk away distraught. People handle bad news in their own way, and I don’t want to be the bearer of news that leads to somebody harming themselves. All I know about him is what I’ve pulled up online.” They went to Starbucks. “OK. Let’s talk it through,” said Burgos. “Let’s talk about where you were before you arrived in the US to compete in this event.”
Burgos knew that he had come from a camp in Kenya and that this athlete trained with a well-known group. (The camp has a strong anti-doping policy and several measures in place to enforce it. Many athletes train there without using performance-enhancing drugs.) Burgos quantified the athlete’s responses. “How much of an investment am I going to make in allowing him to be dishonest? He’s not going to spill his guts to me. I just met him. He needs to understand who I am, am I trying to trick him?”
The young Kenyan was preparing for a new training camp with a group in the US where athletes make use of long mountain trails and altitude, which benefits their oxygen-carrying red blood cell production. Many runners go there and do not take performance-enhancing drugs. But some take advantage of the extensive networks of drug dealers operating there with the favoured performance enhancers, EPO – the drug that increases oxygen carrying red blood cells – and steroids.
What was on offer was a deal. Go undercover and provide the authorities with information about other dopers he was in contact with and he could keep running. It was more than a week before they met again. By then a formal cooperation deal was on the table and the federal Drug Enforcement Agency was now involved. The performance-enhancing drugs commonly used by distance athletes who dope potentially break US federal law, so the athlete became a DEA undercover informant.
‘There’s a certain level of desperation’
It’s the stuff of Hollywood, Donnie Brasco with an anti-doping context, though that shouldn’t trivialise the seriousness. A working model became apparent to investigators from the athlete’s experience. Young Kenyan athletes were encouraged to the USA, entered in the B-list road races where no anti-doping was expected. They were provided with the means to dope and with their natural talent and pharmaceutical enhancement, they often won. Whether the athletes received all the prize money and how much was deducted for “expenses” was unclear.
“There’s a certain level of desperation in athletes who allow themselves to be sucked into this doping scheme because of the level of poverty, the lack of education and promises to travel outside Kenya,” said Burgos. “These are the systemic reasons why this happens. The ones we are trying to hold accountable are those who are facilitating this, recruiting these young athletes, promising them the world and doping them, some unwittingly, some not. That’s the real layer we want to uncover.”
The athlete was in effect placed back into the training group, with no initial sanction, as that would have attracted suspicion, and he was allowed to compete. (His performances at the races at which he had doped previously would be annulled later when his reduced sanction was applied.) There was one condition: no doping.
“We were actively testing him during that period, so he was not allowed to dope and he was to tell us right away if he did,” said Burgos. “We had notified the World Anti-Doping Agency [Wada] and the international federation for track and field, and they all signed off.”
But now the drug testers had an inside man. “It was absolutely not something we could [enter into lightly],” said Burgos. “I stayed plugged in and we communicated with him regularly to make sure he was mentally OK. And this particular training group was not the only one. There was another training group we spent a lot of time on.”
The benefit for testers is that training time is when doping is rife. “Intentional dopers who test positive in competition have generally erred or something has gone horribly wrong, like they took too great a dose, too close to competition,” said Burgos. “Doping occurs during training. It allows you to train harder and to recover from that training and from injury.”
Many drugs have a specific and short window in which a test can detect them. This kind of intelligence means that the anti-doping authorities can target their testing precisely and catch cheats out. However, it isn’t just about testing. Anti-doping agencies don’t have to have a positive test to ask for a ban. Testimony from whistleblowers, evidence from email chains, possession – offences known as non-analytical violations – can also be used to ban an athlete.
The decimation of Kenyan distance running
In May 2015, an athlete living in Albuquerque found himself pulled over in his car by DEA agents. He hadn’t known he was under surveillance, but the agents had a good idea of what would they were looking for because of their inside line. With few good options, he consented to their request to search his premises.
What they found was vials of AICAR, a muscle-building, fat-burning drug favoured by cyclists and long-distance athletes. Though a distance runner himself, his best days were behind him. He was supplying elite athletes training in Albuquerque. He would receive a four-year ban and left the US. An associate, also identified and tested by intelligence several years later, received an eight-year ban.
In this period around when the intelligence operations were running, Kenyan distance running was decimated. The image of the Kenyan runner effortlessly striding past European and American counterparts on the back of their clean-living lifestyle and 10-mile runs to school in the high-altitude Rift Valley in one of the most enduring in sport. But it was shattered by target testing.
The most high-profile Kenyans to face sanctions during that period included Wilson Kipsang, the former marathon world record-holder and 2014 London Marathon winner. He did not fail any drugs tests but received a four-year ban for four “whereabouts failures” between April 2018 and May 2019, meaning he wasn’t at the address he specified to drug testers at the appointed hour he had requested.
That is a condition all elite athletes have to fulfil so that they are available for testing. More than two missed appointments in a 12-month period results in a ban. Kipsang insisted that he had never used prohibited substances or methods and that drug testers had made procedural errors, wrongly rejecting his reasons for missing tests. However, the hearing found against him, concluding he had falsified evidence.
Jemima Sumgong, the 2016 Olympic marathon champion and London Marathon winner the same year, was banned for eight years in January 2019 after World Athletics, the sport’s governing body, ruled there was “compelling evidence” she had fabricated her medical records and lied about her whereabouts after a positive test for EPO in 2017. Sumgong contested the findings and claimed emergency medical treatment was likely responsible for the positive test.
Daniel Wanjiru, the 2017 London Marathon winner, was banned in October 2020 until December 2023 after the blood passport, which athletes have to provide, showed “abnormalities” which the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) concluded were “highly likely … caused by the use of prohibited methods”. He had been tested 16 times between April 2017 and 2019 and his 14th test had shown elevated levels of haemoglobin concentration. He denied ever using performance-enhancing methods or drugs and his management company expressed their “disappointment” with the decision.
Asbel Kiprop, 2008 Olympic 1500m champion and triple world champion, was banned for four years in April 2019 after testing positive for EPO, a red blood boosting product. He has consistently protested his innocence.
There are currently 91 Kenyan track and field athletes listed as banned by the AIU, an agency which worked with the Usada intelligence gathering programme. That makes them top nation on the doping list, ahead of India on 90 and Russia on 78. Burgos’s informant did eventually receive a sanction and have their races before the dope test annulled from the record but long after the original test, during which time he was an undercover runner.
For some it seems extreme but Burgos insisted: “Testing is not enough. Just look at the hard numbers. Globally we collect 250,000-300,000 samples annually and less than 0.5% come back positive. That’s just not acceptable. This is the level of action you require. You need to get creative. But it comes with a level of risk and many organisations are risk averse. It is just very scary for them to sign off on something like that. Fortunately we have a chief executive in Travis Tygart who is like-minded. Only through the power of investigations are you going to peel back layers of organised doping schemes. That’s what we employed in this case.”
It was 1968 at Mexico City that the Kenyans first made their mark on the Olympics, Kip Keino the most-remembered of their three gold medals in an era when their athletes were clean, fuelled only by the Rift Valley mountain air. Their subsequent domination of running and the small fortunes to be made from it means that today’s picture seems an awkward juxtaposition with that age of innocence.
For legal reasons and to protect the identity of those involved in undercover operations the Observer has agreed not to name individuals