By Dr. rer. nat. habil. Dr. Seronei Chelulei Cheison
Matt Lawton, Chief Sports Correspondent of The Times, reacted to Nairobi's award of the 2029 World Athletics Championships by calling it an "incredible decision", his first stated objection being that it meant "three consecutive champs away from Europe". When challenged, he added: "Massive doping problem in Kenya." He has now expanded that objection into a column headlined "It's wrong London lost out on World Championships to nation tainted by doping", arguing that it is "far too soon" to entrust Nairobi with the championships. Let us take the argument seriously, because it deserves a serious answer.
The complaint that indicts itself
Mr Lawton's first grievance, stated in his own words, was that Nairobi 2029 means three consecutive championships held outside Europe: Tokyo, Beijing, Nairobi. Consider what that sentence confesses. The World Athletics Championships have been staged twenty times since Helsinki in 1983. Twelve of those twenty editions were held in Europe, the most recent in Budapest three years ago. Africa, the continent that has supplied the sport's distance running for two generations, has hosted precisely none. That a British correspondent should regard three championships in a row beyond Europe's shores as a scandal, rather than as an overdue correction, tells us where his compass points. It points home. Munich will host in 2031. Europe will go eight years between championships. Africa waited forty-six years to receive its first.
A host city is not a defendant
Mr Lawton's argument rests on collapsing three things that must be held apart: the culpability of individual athletes, the performance of a national anti-doping system, and the capability of a city to stage a championship. A host city is not a defendant and a championship is not a sentence. Once those three are separated, the case against Nairobi comes apart in the hand.
If the proposition is that a country's doping record should disqualify its cities from hosting, then let it be stated as a universal rule and let its author explain how it would have applied historically. Moscow staged the 2013 championships while what the McLaren investigation would later establish as an institutionalised and systematic state doping programme was operating, one that implicated medallists at those very championships and more than a thousand Russian athletes across sports. Where was the editorial thunder from The Times demanding that Moscow be stripped? Eugene received the 2022 championships without a competitive bid at all. None of this excuses a single Kenyan doping offence. It demonstrates why individual violations, national anti-doping systems and the suitability of a host city must be analysed separately, and why a rule discovered only when the beneficiary is African is not a rule.
What the numbers actually say
The figure being brandished, 318 Kenyan athletes sanctioned since the Athletics Integrity Unit was created, is serious, and nobody defending Nairobi should pretend otherwise. But a sanctions total is simultaneously evidence of a doping problem and evidence that athletes are being detected, prosecuted and removed from competition. Kenya sits in the Integrity Unit's Category A, the tier subject to the most intensive testing in the sport, and its athletes are tested accordingly. The relevant question is therefore not whether Kenya has had a doping problem, for it plainly has, but whether that problem makes Nairobi incapable of staging a clean World Championships.
On that question the evidence runs the other way. Kenya criminalised doping by statute in the Anti-Doping Act of 2016, which vests the Anti-Doping Agency of Kenya with authority over testing, investigation, results management and prosecution. The government has committed five million dollars a year to testing and education, a commitment World Athletics itself cited this week in defending the award. Asbel Kiprop and Ruth Chepngetich were caught, charged and sanctioned. That is what a functioning system looks like. Mr Lawton offers Kenya's convictions as evidence of Kenya's guilt. A lawyer who argued that a country with many prosecutions must be lawless would be laughed out of chambers. World Athletics, for its part, has not presented Nairobi 2029 as absolution. Lord Coe said there were four outstanding bids and that the decision was difficult; the evaluation weighed government guarantees, budgets and growth potential. Nairobi won on the merits of a bid, not on the erasure of a record.
London's own scoreboard
Since the London Marathon was first run in 1981, Kenyan athletes have won its elite men's and women's races thirty-five times: twenty men's victories and fifteen women's. Eliud Kipchoge holds the men's record with four titles. This April, the greatest moment in the history of the event, the first sub-two-hour marathon ever run in open competition, was authored on the streets of London by Sabastian Sawe of Kapsabet in 1:59:30. British runners are welcomed each year to train in Iten and Kaptagat; Kenyan runners arrive each April to win in Greenwich. The sport's capital has been on the Rift Valley escarpment for decades. World Athletics has merely updated the postal address.
The galaxy of generalisation
Here is the true objection, and it must be named. Mr Lawton has taken the offences of individual athletes and draped them over fifty-five million people, a government, a city, a stadium, and a bid. That is the galaxy of generalisation. One need not speculate about Mr Lawton's motives; the asymmetry is visible in the argument itself. Individual Kenyan offenders become evidence against Nairobi. Comparable integrity crises elsewhere, Moscow above all, have not ordinarily been treated as permanent indictments of the cities and populations around them. When a European athlete falls, he falls alone; when a Kenyan athlete falls, a nation stands convicted. Whether that asymmetry is conscious or unconscious matters less than the fact that it exists, and that it has a long and unlovely history in how African achievement is reported in Britain. A standard enforced in only one direction is not a standard of integrity.
What Nairobi has already done
Kasarani hosted the World Under-18 Championships in 2017 and the World Under-20 Championships in 2021, the latter during a pandemic, and delivered both. The stadium is being rebuilt ahead of the 2027 Africa Cup of Nations. The bid was contested against London and Rome, and it won on the votes of the World Athletics Council under a president who is himself British, an Olympic champion, and the architect of the very governance reforms Mr Lawton concedes are exemplary. Lord Coe did not lose his judgment on Tuesday. He exercised it.
A closing word
Kenya does not require Mr Lawton's permission to host the world, any more than it required his permission to win London's marathon, break the two-hour barrier, or fill the medal tables of every championship he has covered. In 2029 the fastest men and women on earth will run at Kasarani, at altitude, before a crowd that knows every split, watched by a continent that has waited since 1983. Mr Lawton is welcome to attend. He will find the testing rigorous, the welcome warm, the stadium full, and Africa, after forty-six years of waiting, finally at home.
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Dr. rer. nat. habil. Dr. Seronei Chelulei Cheison was born in Nandi County, Kenya, the birth county of Kipchoge Keino, Eliud Kipchoge and Sabastian Sawe. He writes from Langwedel, Lower Saxony, and Cheptabach, Nandi County.
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