Something rotten in the state of athletics
Now that the embodiment of sporting purity has ended, the Paris Olympics, our attention turns back towards the juggernaut of English football which encroaches on our lives more each year. It is simply unavoidable and dominates sporting headlines at the expense of other, often more relevant, sporting stories. A prime example being last Saturday morning, hours after Clonmel’s Donnacha Keeley and his Queen’s University partner, Ciaran Purdy, had won gold for Ireland at the World Under 23 Rowing Championships in Canada.
Salwa Eid Naser
RTE Sport filled their main morning sports program with news of Manchester United against Brighton later that day and zero mention of Irish gold medal success at a world championship.
Very poor from the National Broadcaster.
No mention in either the print or the online editions of the Irish Times, the paper of record, apparently. But plenty of coverage of the new Liverpool manager’s first home game at Anfield.
Our local interest in the story, as it involves a Clonmel native, might cloud our view, but this was surely a story of national interest.
And it got me thinking about another sports story that broke during the week which received little or no coverage in our national press and I had to resort to the Washington Post website to learn more.
You are no doubt aware of the top four placings in the women’s 400-meter final in Paris. Ireland’s Rashidat Adeleke finished fourth. Bahrain’s, Salwa Eid Naser, won silver and her presence on the podium denied the young Irish girl an Olympic medal.
For reasons that are not apparent, World Athletics waited until the Olympics were concluded before announcing the restrictions that had been imposed on Bahrain BEFORE this year’s Games took place.
Firstly, they were restricted to just 10 athletes in track and field and this cap on participants will also apply to next year’s World Athletics Championships in Tokyo. Also, Bahrain are being forced to pause its rather successful strategy of naturalizing athletes from Africa.
Naser was born, Ebelechukwu Agbapuonwu, in Nigeria. She declared for Bahrain in 2014 and went on to win the World Championship 400 meter title in Doha in 2019, running the third fastest time, ever. Naser would later serve a two-year ban, upheld by the Court of Arbitration in Sport (CAS) for missing three out-of-competition tests. The CAS decision to uphold the ban, on appeal, described her behaviour as ‘undeniably negligent and cannot be excused’. Naser’s ban ended last year and she was free to compete in Paris.
But what was deliberately withheld from the public and the media until last week was the fact that the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU)of World Athletics has found that Bahrain has some serious questions to answer. My problem is that those questions were not in the public domain when their athletes competed in Paris and so journalists would be oblivious to the inconsistency. No hard questions at press conferences, apart from a handful of Irish journalists who tried to press Naser on her ban. Would that they had been in possession of the full facts?
The AIU has forced Bahrain to spend $7.3 million over four years to address the doping and integrity risk in athletics in Bahrain. It begs a fundamental question, why wasn’t Bahrain given an outright ban? Why were 10 athletes allowed to compete? Where did the number 10 come from and what allowed an already banned athlete to be included in this group of 10?
Bahrain has form in this regard. The men’s 1500-meter gold medallist in Beijing was Rashid Ramzi of Bahrain. If you look back at the race, Ramzi literally runs away with it, and seemed barely out of breath as he crossed the finishing line.
Ramzi was an average athlete, born in Morocco and named Rachid Khoula. He joined the Bahrain military in 2001, and a name change was part of the deal. He was allowed time and space to train as he wished and burst onto the world stage at the 2005 World Championships in Helsinki winning the 800 meter and 1500-meter double.
He was subsequently stripped of his Olympic gold medal when samples, taken in Beijing in 2008, were retrospectively retested in 2009 and traces of CERA were found; CERA is a modern version of EPO, previously thought to be undetectable. Kenyan, Asbel Kiprop was awarded the gold 14 months after the gold medal ceremony had taken place in the Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing. Before you feel sorry for Kiprop, he was handed a four-year ban in 2018 for doping. He still has his Olympic Gold and three World Championship gold medals.
Bahrain won two track medals in Paris, Kenya born Winifred Yavi won gold in the 3000-meter steeplechase and Naser’s 400-meter silver. It is important to note that neither athlete was accused of any wrongdoing when World Athletics made its announcement last Thursday.
The Bahrain Athletics Association admitted a charge of “conducting itself in relation to doping, negligently and/or recklessly and/or so as to prejudice the interests of World Athletics or bring the sport of athletics into disrepute,” and another related to its employment of staff to work with athletes. That followed an investigation into allegations two athletes used blood transfusions at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 and into the BAA having “engaged” a coach who was under a doping-related ban.
A ban has also been imposed on Bahrain from competing in any other World Athletics Series events for 12 months from June 1, 2024. Their athletes, such as Naser, can continue to run in the Diamond League series as it is not part of the World Series. Hence Naser took to the track, and again finished second, in the Diamond League event in Silesia, Poland last Sunday.
Apart from Ramzi and Naser, Bahrain athlete Kemi Adekoya, a former world indoor champion in the 400, got a four-year ban in 2019 in a steroid case and marathon runner Marius Kimutai was banned for three years in April after failing a drug test.
If you are not disgusted by all of this, then you should be. The timing, if nothing else, places governance and credibility question marks over World Athletics. Moreover, it forces us to ask if the oil rich Gulf state is being treated a little differently to, Russia, for example.
The scandal of Russian athletes taking illegal performance-enhancing drugs burst into public view in 2015 after a series of leaks and investigations. In November 2015, the entire Russian track and field team was suspended after an investigation by the World Anti-Doping Agency found what it called a “culture of cheating.”
A 2016 report from the World Anti-Doping Agency identified more than 1,000 individuals linked to a Russian state-sponsored doping scheme between 2011 and 2014. Some of the individual athletes had won medals — including gold medals — in the 2014 Winter Olympics held in Sochi, Russia.
The report referred to the doping scheme as an “institutional conspiracy” involving Russia’s secret service.
The International Olympic Committee banned Russia in 2017 because of the scheme, but it gave individual athletes the chance to apply for admission to compete as “Olympic Athletes from Russia.”
While 168 Russians passed the vetting process to participate in the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, many others were banned. Dozens filed appeals with the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and Russia’s desperate attempt to get 45 banned athletes into Pyeongchang failed just hours before the opening ceremony.
In 2019, the World Doping Agency voted to ban Russia from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the 2022 Beijing Winter Games over manipulated doping data. The ban not only ruled Russia out of the following Olympic cycle but also barred Russian government officials from attending major events. Russia also lost the right to host or even bid for tournaments.
Whilst the size of athletics in Bahrain is smaller to that in Russia, the penalty that is being applied to Bahrain is far smaller than the one Russia faced. Incidentally, Russia’s non-participation in Paris was more to do with the invasion of Ukraine than any extension of a doping ban.
So, where are we after all of this?
Not a great deal is being made of this announcement around the world possibly because Bahrain only secured two Olympic medals and so the number of athletes affected by not medalling amounts to just two. Ireland’s Adeleke and the lady who finished fourth in the 3000-meter steeplechase, Alice Finot of France.
That is a little simplistic as for some athletes, just making it to an Olympic Games is a huge achievement, the pinnacle of their athletics career. For others making an Olympic Final represents their Mount Everest. In short, whatever crimes Bahrain may have committed on the doping front, they are not victimless crimes.
There are more Bahrain’s out there of course. Samples that tested negative in Paris will be retested in subsequent years as new agents emerge and doping authorities continue to play catch up with athletes. It took events at the 2008 Tour de France to alert doping authorities to the substance that might have been in Ramzi’s urine at that year’s Olympics.
Regrettably, it seems that doping authorities are always one step behind. The revelations this week about Bahrain show clearly that something is rotten in the state of athletics.