Kenya’s doping reckoning has a missing piece: Who gets caught and who gets away?

© Copyright – 2026 – Athletics Illustrated

At 17, Kenyan 800 metre runner Angela Ndungwa Munguti received a four-year ban. She had tested positive for the banned performance-enhancing substance nandrolone. The law did what it was built to do, and that is to treat a teenager from a poor corner of Kenya as a doping offender in the eyes of sport, not a criminal in the eyes of the state.

An Indian national, Aman Malik, was arrested in Iten in possession of HGH, meldonium, mannitol, IV equipment and syringes. He pleaded guilty to illegally importing and transporting prohibited substances and, in September 2025, was sentenced to three years in prison. Athlete Florence Jepkosgei Chepsoi was sentenced to a year of community service for presenting false medical documents to the Anti-Doping Agency of Kenya (ADAK) in connection with her defence against a doping violation. Meanwhile, Federico Rosa, one of the most recognizable names in athletics management, was charged in Kibera Law Courts on six counts arising from allegations that he administered prohibited substances to Rita Jeptoo and Elijah Kiprono Boit. The prosecution eventually withdrew the case before trial, and Rosa was never convicted.

If the law is meant to protect vulnerable athletes from those who exploit them, Kenya has some explaining to do about whom it is actually catching.

Kenya’s Anti-Doping Act, enacted in 2016, separates anti-doping rule violations by athletes and athlete-support personnel from certain criminal offences. Under the Act, violations such as the presence or use of a prohibited substance, whereabouts failures, tampering, trafficking and complicity are handled through the anti-doping rules and their associated sporting sanctions. Separately, the Act makes conduct such as the unlawful transportation or supply of prohibited substances, administering them to athletes, and presenting false documents to ADAK criminal offences.

Kenya’s thriving running economy has long drawn foreign agents and managers who recruit, finance and sign athletes directly from its training camps. Gianni Demadonna, a former runner who finished second in the 1987 New York City Marathon, operates Demadonna Athletics, one of the best-known management operations working with East African talent. The operation has historically occupied some of the same territory as Rosa Associati, the firm founded by the Rosa family. Claudio Berardelli is another important part of that history: he worked within the Rosa orbit before becoming closely associated with Demadonna’s Kenyan training operation.

Nothing in the public record establishes that Demadonna has been charged with wrongdoing in connection with the doping cases discussed here. That is precisely why the distinction matters. A handful of foreign agencies and managers have exercised considerable influence over athletes who can have comparatively little leverage in the business of professional running, while Kenya’s criminal prosecutions have, at least in the cases visible in the public record, produced relatively few cases against people operating at that level.

Athletes can face severe sporting sanctions for doping, while criminal liability can arise from related conduct such as trafficking, unlawful supply, obstruction or forgery. Chepsoi’s case demonstrates the distinction. She received a sporting ban for her positive test for prednisolone and was later convicted in a criminal court for presenting forged medical records in an attempt to defend herself against the anti-doping case.

The most striking recent criminal case involved 18-year-old Malik rather than an established athletics power broker. Kenyan prisons are well documented to be suffer from severe overcrowding, hygiene issues and violence. That is no place for a teenager.

To be clear, nothing here argues for locking up runners simply for testing positive. For a young athlete who may have had little real say in what went into her body (Munguti), a career-ending sporting ban can be punishment enough. There is, however, a separate and legitimate question about whether organized dealing, unlawful supply, forgery and systematic attempts to obstruct anti-doping investigations should attract criminal consequences.

Ultimately, the real test of Kenya’s anti-doping framework is whether it reaches the influential figures who have the capacity to supply, administer, organize or conceal doping rather than merely those who are caught at the end of the chain.

So far, the public record gives us an Indian teenager jailed after transporting prohibited substances, an athlete sentenced for presenting forged medical records, and a high-profile foreign manager who was charged but whose case was withdrawn before trial. What it does not readily provide is a comprehensive public accounting of how many coaches, agents, managers, suppliers and other athlete-support personnel have been investigated, charged and convicted since the Anti-Doping Act came into force.

Kenya should publish that data.

If the number of convictions among the people operating above the athlete level is close to zero, the question becomes unavoidable. Is the law protecting runners, or is it merely producing a press release?

Demadonna-linked athletes and anti-doping cases