This year’s London Marathon winner deserves credit for offering more than enough proof he is clean while setting a new standard for other athletes to follow
L
ast week the world’s best marathon runner, Sabastian Sawe, looked me straight in the eye and told me “doping is a cancer”. Then he insisted he was clean. You hear such oaths and affirmations all the time. But, uniquely, Sawe recently backed up those words by asking the Athletics Integrity Unit to test him as much as possible.
You see, Sawe believed he could break the world record in Berlin in September. And he also understood that Kenya’s abysmal doping record meant that success would be met with more raised eyebrows than a plastic surgeon’s clinic in Hollywood. So the call went into the AIU. Test me. Repeatedly. Throw everything at it. My sponsors, Adidas, will pick up the bill.
“The main reason was to show that I am clean, and I am doing it the right way,” Sawe, who won the London Marathon in April, told me. “As Kenyans we have been challenged because of doping cases. So before the Berlin Marathon I was tested 25 times, blood and urine, around two or three times a week. And one day I was even tested twice – first thing in the morning and late at night.”
