I love Sebastian Coe, the World Athletics boss. If he were a used Range Rover out of Glossop, I’d buy the bugger and endure the breakdowns. When I was a kid, he was a middle-distance runner, our races, and ran like us, broke records. He set the 800m world record in 1981, one for the ages, which endured until the London 2012 Olympics when David Rudisha in that ramrod-straight commanding performance in the final, broke it. The young champion dedicated his victory to Seb Coe who, in return was very kind to Rudisha, terming his victory the standout performance of the games.
Now, there is a particular Kenyan talent for the last-minute save, the dramatic finish, the photo taken one second before disaster. We have turned crisis management into an Olympic event of its own, and if there were a medal for it, it would probably be tested for banned substances too – the irony would be too rich to resist. So it is with some relief that Kenya has once again pulled itself off the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA)’s naughty list, this time inside six months rather than the two years it took last time.
In September 2025, WADA’s Executive Committee did what it had been threatening to do for a while and declared the Anti-Doping Agency of Kenya formally non-compliant with the World Anti-Doping Code – stripped of funding, locked out of WADA’s programmes, and told, in effect, that its officials could no longer eat at the grown-ups’ table, until it washed its dirty hands. The timing was exquisite, arriving just as our athletes were lacing up in Tokyo for the World Championships, which is the sporting equivalent of being served a court summons at your own wedding – and to the love of your life, no less.
By March this year, ADAK was off the watchlist entirely. The turnaround was fast, the paperwork was thorough, and the government, for once, put its money where its press statements are. In the revised 2025/26 supplementary budget that President Ruto signed into law, ADAK walked away with an extra Sh100 million, earmarked not just for chasing marathoners around Iten, but for testing across every sporting code in the country – a small but telling admission that doping was never solely an athletics problem, merely an athletics scandal.
The point needs to be made: Kenya does not need dope to win at athletics. And it has. WADA’s own president, Witold Bańka, told Reuters that the Kenyan government had made a “strong declaration” and, unusually for a strong declaration made in this country, it was followed by an actual disbursement rather than an even stronger declaration. The corrective action plan that ADAK submitted – inside the mandated 21 days, no less, a punctuality so uncharacteristic it deserves its own inquiry – went after precisely the rot the 2024 audit had exposed: an agency with no operational independence to speak of, a results-management system that couldn’t manage results, an athlete whereabouts system that seemed to have lost track of the athletes, and a testing regime too thin to catch a cold, let alone a cheat. IT systems were overhauled, the database was fixed, investigative muscle was built where there had been none, and the legal department, presumably, learned where the filing cabinet was.
None of this happened by Kenyan willpower alone, and it is worth saying so plainly, because we do love to write our redemption stories as solo acts. WADA and the Athletics Integrity Unit convened a joint taskforce with ADAK last year – a coalition, WADA’s own officials said, that needed law enforcement, athletes, government and Athletics Kenya all pulling in the same direction, which is a bit like asking four cats to walk in lock and step. The AIU put money behind a new blood-testing laboratory in Nairobi, a concrete acknowledgment that Kenyan athletes now account for 22 per cent of its entire global out-of-competition testing programme. That is not a statistic to be proud of. It is a statistic that explains why the world was watching us with folded arms rather than open arms.
On the legislative front, the Ministry of Youth Affairs, Creative Economy and Sports is running three bills at once – an amendment to the Anti-Doping Act, new ADAK rules, and a national policy, all currently doing the rounds for public comment. Between them they would make ADAK the sole doping authority in the land, extend its reach into the gyms and fitness centres where a worrying number of ordinary Kenyans are apparently juicing themselves for Instagram rather than for medals, and permit no-notice testing anywhere, any time.
There is a catch to this whole good story. We have been here before. In 2016, Kenya went non-compliant, panicked, reformed, and came back into the fold – and then, within a few short years, produced doping case numbers that made us one of the most sanctioned nations in world athletics. The scorecard improved. The disease did not go away. It simply learned to keep better appointments with the testers.
We deserve to host the 2029 World Athletics Championships; this time we’ve fixed our problems yet again. But now we must stay the course, whatever it takes.
