When the researchers behind a new study sat down with Kenyan athletes sanctioned for doping, they expected emotions. But they didn’t quite expect the kind of emotional freefall they actually heard.
Ten runners, including sprinters, hurdlers, middle-distance athletes, and long-distance specialists, agreed to be interviewed. Some had completed their bans and returned to competition. Others were still ineligible, stuck in the no-man’s land between former glory and an uncertain future.
Their stories shared a common pattern. A phone call or email arrives. The room tilts. Hands shake. Sleep disappears. Friends go quiet. Families strain. A few athletes reach a point where they question whether carrying on is worth it.
The research, published in Performance Enhancement & Health, focuses specifically on Kenyan track and field athletes, and it does something we rarely see in anti-doping conversations: it focuses on what happens after the news breaks.
Not the initial outrage. Not the legal arguments. The long months when an athlete is alone with a ruined career, a damaged reputation, and a mind that keeps replaying the moment they were told their sample was “adverse.”
The picture is uncomfortable. It’s meant to be.
What the Study Actually Shows
The paper follows 10 Kenyan athletes who tested positive for various prohibited substances, anabolic agents, glucocorticoids, beta-2 agonists, hormone and metabolic modulators. Their bans ranged from two to four years.
Some were employed by Kenya’s military or police forces, others were self-employed, one was unemployed. Three officials from the Anti-Doping Agency of Kenya were also interviewed.
A few things stand out.
1. The Notification Hits Like a Physical Blow
Athletes described the moment of notification with vivid detail.
One was woken from an afternoon nap after training and couldn’t process the words at first. Another said he walked in and out of his house without any clear direction, until his wife asked what was wrong and realized he was shaking.
The letters from authorities did not feel like guidance. They felt like verdicts, written in dense language that few understood. Several athletes said they Googled terms or substances late into the night, trying to piece together what had happened.
There was a deep sense, especially among those who believed they’d made medical errors rather than deliberate choices, that the ground had dropped away without warning.
2. Shame, Withdrawal, and Dark Thoughts
Once the adrenaline of the initial shock faded, a pattern of withdrawal emerged.
Some athletes stayed inside for weeks, avoiding training grounds, markets, and social events.
One woman said she slept as much as she could because it was the only time she wasn’t thinking. Another turned to heavy drinking. One developed ulcers and debilitating headaches, which doctors linked to stress.
Seven of the ten athletes described having suicidal thoughts. One woman attempted to end her life.
Kenyan anti-doping officials interviewed in the study admitted that while they know many athletes are struggling, there is no established mental health pathway for them. In a context where counseling is stigmatized and psychiatric care is scarce, most athletes simply endure it.
3. Social Circles Shrink Fast
The social response to a doping ban is blunt.
Athletes are labeled “cheaters”, “drug users”, or nicknamed based on their banned substance. Training partners fade away. Old contacts stop picking up the phone. People in the community start avoiding eye contact or conversations.
Several athletes described being greeted by the name of the drug they were sanctioned for, as if that one detail had replaced everything they had ever done on the track.
Longstanding friendships inside the sport were the most fragile. One sprinter recalled a teammate telling her, “I believed in you. I didn’t know you could do this”, and then cutting off contact completely.
At the same time, some athletes spoke about discovering a smaller circle of people who stuck around, a sibling who came over each day, a spouse who refused to leave, a neighbor who sat with them when they drank too much.
The big, noisy social world of elite running collapsed into a much smaller, more uncertain one.
4. Families Become Collateral Damage
In Kenya, an elite runner is often a walking livelihood for an extended family.
A good road season in Europe can pay school fees for multiple siblings or cousins. A marathon win can buy land, livestock, or a house. Everyone knows this. So when an athlete is banned, it isn’t just a personal crisis, it is a fiscal shock to dozens of people.
Some athletes hid their sanction from parents and siblings for months out of shame. Others faced conflict at home when income dried up. One man’s wife left with their children for a period, and only his son stayed to look after him as he drank and spiraled.
Officials in the study raised a point that deserves more attention: children.
The kids who see their parent’s name in the news with the word “doping” attached. The kids who have teachers or classmates bring it up. The kids who suddenly sense that the hero in their house is being talked about as a villain outside of it.
There is currently no structure in Kenya’s sporting system that even recognizes these children as affected, let alone supports them.
5. Careers Don’t Bounce Back Cleanly
Professionally, athletes described being cut off from Athletics Kenya, from race organizers, and from agents. Those with service jobs in the army, police, or prisons were pulled back into regular duties and lost their athlete status and perks.
For some this meant stability, while for others it felt like a demotion.
A handful of athletes did return to competition after their bans ended, but they walked into an environment loaded with suspicion. They spoke about feeling watched, doubted, and judged even when they believed themselves to be clean.
Others left competitive running altogether.
Some started coaching, using their experience, including their mistakes, to warn younger athletes about shortcuts. Others turned to farming or small businesses and tried to build a new identity that had nothing to do with lane draws or start lists.
Why the Kenyan Context Makes This Especially Tense
Running in Kenya is not just “a sport”. It is a national industry, a cultural pillar, and for many talented kids, the most realistic shot they will ever have at financial security.
Prize money from a mid-level European track circuit can transform a family’s prospects. A major marathon win can buy land, build homes, and set up businesses that feed generations. At the same time, sponsorship deals, appearance fees, and performance bonuses are largely denominated in euros and dollars, while most everyday expenses are in shillings.
The gap is huge and the incentives are obvious.
When that kind of money is on the line, temptation creeps in. So does exploitation. It is not hard to find stories of athletes given pills or injections without proper explanation, or promised “vitamins” that turned out to be steroid cocktails. Some of those stories are convenient excuses, but some are not.
Layer on top the reality that many athletes come from rural areas with limited access to qualified sports doctors, reliable supplements, or even clear anti-doping education, and the picture becomes even more complicated.
All of this is the stage on which this new study sits.
And it leads to the question that has been circling around the edges of anti-doping debates for years, if sanctions create this much shame, is that a failure of the system, or part of how it works?
Shame Hurts, But It’s Also Doing a Job
Reading this study, I feel a lot of things at the same time.
I feel a gut-level empathy for the Kenyan athletes who can barely leave the house after they’re named. I feel angry at the lack of mental health support. I feel uneasy that children end up absorbing the fallout of decisions they didn’t make.
And I also believe something far less comfortable: the shame is supposed to be there.
When an athlete knowingly takes a banned substance, they’re not making a victimless choice. They are making a calculation that their need, for a contract, a medal, a bonus, an escape from poverty, or simply an ego hit, matters more than everyone else’s right to a fair race.
We talk a lot about the person who doped. We talk much less about the person who finished second. Or fifth. Or tenth. The athlete who stayed in a camp at altitude for months, skipped family events, worked two jobs, and showed up at the start line clean.
That athlete doesn’t get their moment back. They don’t get the headline, the sponsor deal, or the prize purse that could change their life.
So when someone is caught cutting that corner, I don’t think the reaction should be neutral. I don’t think the community should shrug and say, “Well, that’s unfortunate, but let’s make sure they feel comfortable.”
There should be emotional weight. There should be awkward silences. There should be embarrassment.
If a ban doesn’t carry those things, it stops being a real deterrent and slips into something like a “time-out”, a temporary administrative inconvenience. That is not a system built to protect clean athletes. That’s a system that invites risk taking.
Shame, used properly, is a social signal.
It tells the community what the boundaries are. It tells young runners watching from a small town, if you go down this road, you won’t just sit out a few seasons, you will feel it in your relationships, in how people look at you, in the way the sport talks about you.
That matters.
Not All Shame Is Equal
At the same time, I don’t think all shame is equal, and I don’t think every athlete deserves to carry the same weight.
In Kenya, the mix of poverty, poor education, and the lure of prize money creates a messy landscape.
Some athletes swallow whatever a self-styled “doctor” or coach gives them because they’re scared of losing their only shot. Others genuinely misunderstand medicines and rules. Some are barely literate in English, yet their entire legal fate is written in it.
When those people test positive, the shame they experience feels less like justice and more like collateral damage from a system that never really offered them a fair footing in the first place.
But I also can’t pretend that everyone is an innocent victim of bad luck or bad translation. In a lot of cases, athletes do know what they’re taking. They see how fast someone improves. They understand, even if they don’t say it out loud, that these shortcuts are not legal.
In those cases, shame isn’t a tragic side effect, it is an earned consequence.
What I Think a Fair Anti-Doping World Looks Like
In my ideal version of this system, three things are true at the same time.
1. Shame exists and it bites.
If you intentionally dope and get caught, you should feel it. In your pride, your standing, your relationships. That discomfort is part of what protects the sport.
2. Support exists and it’s real.
Even when someone has messed up badly, they’re still a person. They still have kids, parents, siblings. There should be automatic mental health checks, basic counseling, and a path back into society, even if not into elite sport. Accountability shouldn’t equal abandonment.
3. Context matters.
A wealthy athlete with access to doctors and legal teams is not in the same position as a teenager relying on a village chemist. The rules can stay the same while the way we talk about cases reflects that reality.
Right now, in Kenya and elsewhere, we’re not doing this well. The shame is heavy, often overwhelmingly so, but the support is thin. The bans land hard. The deterrent effect is strong. But the collateral damage is real.
We Should Not Be Comfortable In a World Without Shame
It is tempting, especially when reading about suicide attempts and ruined lives, to say that maybe shame has gone too far. Maybe we should soften it. Maybe sanctions should be private.
I understand that instinct. But whenever I lean too far in that direction, I think of the athletes who lose because someone else cheated. The ones who never get their medal. The ones whose careers wither quietly. The ones who are forgotten.
For their sake, I want bans to hurt. I want the story of a ban to be something a young athlete is afraid of. I want the memory of seeing a national hero fall to be a warning that echoes.
I can care deeply about the mental health of dopers and still believe that feeling ashamed is part of what tells the rest of the field that cheating isn’t worth it.
Living With the Discomfort
The hardest part is accepting that there is no neat solution.
Any serious anti-doping effort is going to break hearts somewhere, in the families of the banned athlete, or in the families of the clean athlete who never got the win.
But I am sure of this, a doping ban that doesn’t carry shame is not a deterrent. It’s paperwork.
If we want a sport that means something, then bans have to carry emotional weight. At the same time, if we want a sport that doesn’t push people into despair, then we need better support for those who fall, even if they never return to competition.
That tension isn’t going anywhere. We can only decide which side we ignore. I don’t want to ignore either.
