AK rubbishes damning leaked ABP report on top athletes

Athletics Kenya (AK) has urged athletes to ignore a report leaked by Fancy Bears hack team on Thursday morning, with several top track and filed athletes listed as being alleged to have cheated.

The team released a document that they claim comes from the Athlete Biological Passport (ABP).

The Fancy Bears claimed the documents were from the International Athletics Association Federation (IAAF) where the athletes are being listed as being alleged ‘likely doping’ or ‘passport suspicious’.

“Good afternoon.  For athletes mentioned in today’s (Thursday) article, we are in touch with IAAF and would like to advise all not to make any conclusions at this stage.

“We shall continue to follow up and advise when any other development is received. For now, continue with your normal training. Good luck,” said AK president General Retired Jackson Tuwei in a statement.

The hack team maintained that the materials were allegedly leaked from the IAAF officials, to show the scale of doping violations in track and field, adding that they intend to expose the inefficiency of anti-doping control.

“ I only saw the details on social media going rounds. Confidential information like that is not usually released in such a manner. The IAAF makes it official to the mother federations affected” explained Tuwei.

“The mentioned athletes should not worry; this information should just be treated as propaganda until otherwise confirmed.

“The athletes from Kenya who were mentioned should not take it serious because it’s just a ploy to distract them before the World Championships in London,” said the national youth chairman Barnaba Korir.

Earlier in the day, elites athletes in the country were in a panic mode after their names were flagged in the hermatological expert report opinion.

According to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), ABP is the monitoring of selected biological parameters over time that may indirectly reveal effects of doping on the body.

The athlete’s passport is compared over a period of time after about 10 samples are taken to give more accurate results. This differs with the leaked data from the hack team which show single tests taken from various athletes ranging from 2013 to early 2016, hence there was no conclusive finding.

Most Kenyan athletes train in high altitude areas hence they will have high hemoglobin HBC, which will be proportional to young red blood cells (Ret).

In a case of an athlete who has used Erythropoietin (EPO), a banned substance by WADA, they will have high HBC but no production of Ret.

This would be detected easily through the hermatological markers that is the EPO. The ABP data is then used as corroborating evidence of doping during an anti-doping rule violation case.