Unexpected fortunes for our doping runers

In May last year, 10 kilometres road race world record holder Rhonex Kipruto became the latest Kenyan athlete to be suspended for doping.

With 70 Kenyan Kenyan athletes, mostly long-distance runners, having been banned at that point over the previous five years for doping, reports broke out about how Kenya was in a grip of a drugs crisis that had “tarnished its reputation as a track and field powerhouse”.

Those athletes have been thrown a lifeline by American billionaire and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who has thrown his money into a drug-fuelled Olympic-style game that would allow competitors to take performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) and, as the reporting put it, to “push their bodies to new limits”.

Also read: The story of doping among Kenyan athletes

Men’s Health magazine noted that “Styled as a ‘modern reinvention’ of the Olympics minus the drug testing, the for-profit ‘Enhanced Games’ will initially focus on ‘smashing world records’ in athletics, swimming, gymnastics, weightlifting and combat sports.”

The critics came out in droves, saying it undermines the spirit of sport and poses a great danger to athletes’ health. Thiel is just one of several high-profile venture capitalists backing the project, said lawyer Aron D’Souza, the man behind the games, and that he had raised “enough to produce the first Games”.

The contest will allow athletes to use whatever substances they wish “out in the open and honestly”, D’Souza said.

Also read: Drug cheats taint Kenya’s sparkling image

The Enhanced Games website cites a 2018 study, published in the journal Sports Medicine, that found almost 44 per cent of athletes used PEDs at the 2011 World Athletics Championship.

The Enhanced games, therefore, would be a great levelling of the playing field. Understandably, drug-fuelled games would be reprehensible, but this was a disruption waiting to happen.

Too many Kenyan athletes, and hundreds more sportspeople in the rest of the world, are being denied livelihoods because they failed a single test, or simply failed to appear at an appointed time for a scheduled drug test off-season.

The current anti-doping regime harks back too much to the puritanism of the 16th and 17th centuries. You are caught once, and burnt at the stake. Doping authorities need to adopt a two-strikes rule.

On the first offence, the doper should be warned and allowed to race under caution. On a second violation, he or she would be banned for life

However, the world is also changing. The population of the world today is estimated to be 8 billion. Of these, 3.32 billion – or 41.5 per cent – play video games.

Video games, where the virtual characters are enhanced to the extreme, are how most of the general public experience sports. Comparatively fewer people are out there in the field or roads directly participating in sports.

The next generation of digital-era citizens will want to see some convergence of their virtual sport with the real world.

Athletics also suffers from the problem that it expends too much effort and talent, mostly to give only thrills. It does not save the world, as it were.

Contrast it with Formula E, for example, which is fully electric, and is thus helping automakers develop clean energy engine technology – and ultimately transport that keeps greenhouse gas emissions down.

Enhanced games would also be a kindergarten for the coming enhanced humans. Body implants that aid motor function, allowing people with paralysis to control computers, wheelchairs and other devices are advancing. Implants are enabling people to walk again.

It is not impossible that in the next 15 years, someone who was paralysed could run the 100 metres faster than Usain Bolt with implants. On present rules, such a person wouldn’t be allowed to compete in a FIFA-regulated sporting event because they would be cheating.

Over 700,000 Olympic fans gathered in London for the 2012 Games. There were about 11,000 athletes for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics where spectator attendance was restricted by the Covid pandemic in 2021 when the games finally took place.

The carbon footprint of the Olympics is huge, yet it ends, everyone goes home, and they leave nothing that can be used to make the world a better place. It needs to give back.

Happily, a small window has opened. Nike’s Vaporfly running shoes, which were cleared for use at the Olympics, have been shown to make runners faster.

From this endeavour, in the near future, we should get sneakers that allow us to walk to the office 50 per cent faster, and reduce the need to use a polluting vehicle instead. That is the kind of stuff that is good for humankind.

There are opportunities galore. A “doped up” pole vault stick that hurls the jumper a couple of metres higher would surely be great in developing flexible material. In recent years cycling has been in uproar over “mechanical doping”, the use of clever innovations to propel the bicycle.

The benefits of these kinds of technologies in the real world are obvious, and a path to getting a legal sporting platform to develop them cannot be blocked forever.

East African long-distance champions need not worry. They will still win with bigger margins, and take home bigger cheques.

- Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3