Peter Eriksson, former head coach of Athletics Canada, has printed a web based petition accusing the three governing our bodies—the World Anti-Doping Company (WADA), World Athletics (WA), and the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU)—of failing to stop widespread doping within the sport of athletics.
Eriksson has requested that the three entities launch the assessments and information of girls’s marathon world file holder Ruth Chepngetich, as he believes her 2:09:56 efficiency “exceeds the bounds of feminine human potential.”
In October, Chepngetich turned the primary girl to run below two hours and 10 minutes for the marathon, reducing the earlier mark set a yr earlier by Ethiopia’s Tigst Assefa by practically two minutes. Her file was greeted with combined opinions, given Kenya’s ongoing doping scandal, which has greater than 100 runners serving suspensions (based on the AIU World Checklist of Ineligible Individuals.)
Within the petition, Eriksson writes: “The ratification on 11 December 2024 of Ruth Chepngetich’s 2:09:56 marathon efficiency in Chicago on 13 October 2024, which has been greeted with profound skepticism by main athletics specialists as a result of it exceeds the bounds of feminine human potential, is an embodiment and image of the abject failure of World Athletics (WA), the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU), and the World Anti-Doping Company (WADA) to detect and management rampant doping in worldwide athletics.”
Eriksson additional states it’s a “…dereliction of their obligation to guard the pursuits of and alternatives for clear athletes…”
Opinion: there needs to be an asterisk across the girls’s marathon world file
World Athletics formally ratified Chepngetich’s world file in early December, simply two months after she ran it on the 2024 Chicago Marathon. This ratification confirms her marathon time was discovered to be clear.
The governing physique follows a rigorous course of to ratify all world information, together with course certification, timing accuracy and anti-doping assessments. Amongst these, the anti-doping course of is the longest, normally taking a number of months to acquire check outcomes from a lab.
Eriksson is asking for signatures to compel WA, AIU, and WADA to reveal all testing carried out on Chepngetich within the 12 months earlier than the 2024 Chicago Marathon on Oct. 13, 2024. He’s additionally demanding that these organizations take pressing measures to eradicate doping in athletics, together with:
- “Disclosing and suspending coaches and brokers linked to athletes who check optimistic for doping.
- Enhancing testing, notably in East Africa.
- Reporting again on the improved testing on a half-yearly foundation.
- Instantly suspending all athletes from competitors for the rest of the calendar yr from any nation that has greater than 10 of its athletes check optimistic in the course of the yr.”
The 72-year-old took on the pinnacle coach place at Athletics Canada in August 2013, a task that included each the Paralympic and Olympic applications. The mandate for hiring Eriksson was to enhance the medal depend at main occasions, such because the Paralympic and Olympic Video games, and different main championships. From 1996 to 2013, the typical medal depend for the Canadian observe and discipline groups at main occasions was between zero and two. Beneath Eriksson’s tenure, this elevated on the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Video games in Rio, the place Workforce Canada gained six Olympic medals and 7 Paralympic medals.
He was named Athletics Canada Coach of the Yr in 2008 and was awarded the Medal of Confederation by the Senate of Canada in 2017 for his work on the Rio Olympics.
Eriksson left the Athletics Canada place in December 2016 and labored as a high-performance adviser for Personal the Podium, a Canadian funding company for elite sports activities. Since 2021, he has labored as an unbiased high-performance guide.