Kenya’s Anti-Doping Agency Says 800m Runner Noah Kibet Was Not the Athlete It Suspended

Noah Kibet, the Kenyan 800m runner who won a World Indoor silver medal when he was only 17, spent part of this week being reported as the country’s latest doping case, over a suspension that belongs to someone else. The Anti-Doping Agency of Kenya (ADAK) said in a statement dated Nov. 5 that the runner it provisionally suspended is Cherokony Noah Kibet, who races 3,000m and longer, and that the 800m runner “is NOT the athlete subject to the provisional suspension and should not be associated with the matter.”

Anyone checking ADAK’s public list of provisional suspensions would have found a single row under the name “Noah Kibet,” with the sport, the athlete’s sex, the charge and a start date of Oct. 8. Nothing on it says which event he runs, when he was born or where he trains. When the case came out on Thursday, at least one Kenyan sports site reported it in the same story as the suspension of Kenya’s 400m record holder Mercy Oketch, and named the 800m runner as the athlete involved.

Kibet’s management company, Elite Sports Marketing & Management, answered on Instagram with a statement that spells the other athlete’s name Cherogony: “We want to make it unequivocally clear that Noah Kibet has NOT been suspended and has NOT committed an anti-doping violation.” A second post, from the Elite Running Team and shared with Kibet’s own account, thanked Athletics Kenya for spotting the error. Kibet commented under it: “I believe in clean sport, fair competition and justice.” He added, “My conscience is clear, and my focus remains on the track.”

He has been on the senior circuit since his teens. Kibet took bronze at the 2021 World U20 Championships in Nairobi in 1:44.88, and seven months later he won silver at the World Indoor Championships in Belgrade in 1:46.35. At this year’s World Indoors in Toruń, Poland, he won his heat in 1:45.84 and ran a season’s best of 1:45.73 in the semifinals, though fourth place left him out of the final that Cooper Lutkenhaus went on to win. Then in April he finished third at the Kip Keino Classic in Nairobi in 1:44.44, a personal best, according to World Athletics.

The case against the long-distance runner rests on triamcinolone acetonide, a glucocorticoid steroid, and ADAK has not said how it came to be in his sample. Cherokony Noah Kibet has not commented publicly, and the agency stressed that a provisional suspension “does not constitute a final determination of an anti-doping rule violation.” Inhalers, creams and eye drops containing glucocorticoids are still allowed, but since Jan. 1, 2022, any injected glucocorticoid has been off-limits in competition, which ended the exemption for joint and epidural injections, according to USADA. Triamcinolone acetonide also stays in the body a long time: USADA’s guidance set a 60-day washout for an intramuscular injection, where the other intramuscular glucocorticoids on its table needed just five to 10 days. Michael Manella was provisionally suspended over the same substance from the same Oct. 8 date, and Clinton Mutai Kibet in March.

Nine suspensions on ADAK’s list now carry October or November dates. World marathon champion Peres Jepchirchir was provisionally suspended by the Athletics Integrity Unit last month over an EPO finding, and a bill that would raise the penalties for supplying banned drugs is before parliament. ADAK has asked the media and the public to fix whatever they published linking the 800m runner to this one, and to stop passing around “misleading information or photographs.” As of Friday, the row on its own list still read only “Noah Kibet.”