NAIROBI, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Former World marathon record-holder Paul Tergat said Monday that subjecting dopers to criminal charges will help curb the spread of the vice in the country.
Tergat, who heads Kenya's National Olympic Committee (NOC-K), said it is time for the country to create a new law that will criminalize the offense.
We all ran clean and we want our current crop of athletes to run clean. There's no shortcut to clean sports except training hard. So many things have been happening right, left and center regarding doping in Kenya, Tergat said in Nairobi.
Barely a month goes by without a new culprit being caught by the country's anti-doping agency ADAK, the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) or World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).
The latest case is Honolulu marathon bronze medalist Vincent Yator, whose urine sample taken after the Gold Coast Marathon showed the presence of Prednisone, Prednisolone and metabolites of testosterone, all of which are banned substances.
Kenya now needs to be tough on dopers by criminalizing their offenses. They will suffer double loss to revenue and time in jail if they are found doping, said Tergat.
With their high number of dopers, Kenya has been placed under category A on the list of countries being watched together with Nigeria, Ethiopia, Bahrain, Morocco, Ukraine and Belarus.
At the current rate, Kenya risks being banned from the Olympics or big city's marathons. What we need to do is make the punishment for offenders more punitive. This will also bar offenders from putting on our national colors and make them ineligible to compete elsewhere, Tergat added.?