Sport Without Integrity Is Just Performance Art

In October 2024, Ruth Chepng'etich ran a marathon in 2 hours, 9 minutes, and 56 seconds in the Chicago Marathon. The time was extraordinary: the fastest women’s marathon in history, and the first recorded sub-2:10 by a woman. Spectators gasped. Commentators grasped for words. Running media lit up with analysis and awe. There were skeptics, of course, but even they struggled to say what, exactly, they were skeptical of, except perhaps the audacity of the performance itself.

Ruth Chepng'etich at the 2021 Chicago Marathon

Then, last week, Chepng'etich was provisionally suspended after testing positive for hydrochlorothiazide, a banned diuretic and masking agent. (Diuretics like hydrochlorothiazide, aka 'HCTZ', can increase urine volume and alter its pH, potentially diluting the presence of other prohibited performance-enhancing substances in doping control samples. This makes it more difficult to detect the abuse of substances like steroids or stimulants.)

The positive sample was taken in March, months after her Chicago performance. Her world record still stands. And that’s where the story gets uncomfortable.

This is not an accusation, and it is not a verdict. But it is a reckoning. Because if you care about running - not just the sport, but the meaning of the act itself - then this story is not just about Ruth Chepng'etich. It’s about us.

We like to believe we live in the post-doping era. That the dark days of state-sponsored Soviet doping, the Armstrong years, the EPO-fueled carnage of the 1990 were isolated, closed chapters. We want to think that today’s systems are better, technology is better, testing is better, consequences are harsher. And maybe, to some degree, they are.

It’s tempting to dismiss this as an elite problem. After all, most of us aren’t competing against Ruth, or Shelby, or in the 2012 Olympics Women's 1500m final (a race considered one of the dirtiest in history, where the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 7th, and 9th place finishers were disqualified - some of them years later - for doping violations).

Ruth's positive test didn’t take our medals, our paychecks, our Olympic dreams, our sponsorship deals, our place on the team. But something else was taken: trust. And trust, in running, is not a luxury. It’s the foundation.

Running has always promised a ruthless kind of honesty. There are no referees, no judges, no point deductions for style. There is only effort, and the time it produces. You do the work. You toe the line. You run your race. And the clock records the truth.

Unless, of course, it doesn’t.

That’s the psychological rupture at the heart of a doping scandal. Not just that someone cheated. But that someone may have cheated, succeeded, and kept their success. That someone may have bent the reality we all agreed to live in, and we may never know for sure.

In this case, the positive test result does not officially affect Chepng'etich’s world record. The sample was not taken during the Chicago race. But its presence in her system, months later, and in such high concentrations, raises unanswerable questions. What do we do with that? What are we supposed to believe?

This ambiguity is not neutral; it is corrosive. We can no longer look at a breathtaking performance and take it at face value. We flinch. We squint. We wonder. And slowly, that wonder turns into wariness.

This is the quiet damage of doping. It is not confined to podiums or sponsorships. It doesn’t just rob competitors of their place in the rankings. It robs everyone of their belief in what they’re seeing, and, by extension, in what they’re doing.

The irony is that runners are used to doubt. We live in it. We train in it. We spend hours, months, years chasing times we’re not sure we can hit. But that doubt is internal; it’s part of what we expect as runners. The problem arises when the doubt comes from outside the body. When the race is no longer against the clock, but against the legitimacy of the clock itself.

And yet, the conversation about doping seems stuck. Every scandal is met with the same rhythm: outrage, an investigation, a statement. Sometimes a suspension. Sometimes a stripped title. Sometimes not. The timeline stretches. Months pass. Careers continue.

The most extraordinary performances remain in the record books, even when they times are later engulfed in a miasma of suspicion (like the current women's 3000m World Record of 8:06.11 set in 1993 by Chinese distance runner Wang Junxia - seriously, Google it). The result is a liminal zone between innocence and guilt, where the story stalls out and our collective sense of clarity falters. That the Ruth Chepng’etich doping scandal involved a World Record instead of an Olympic medal or Diamond League win only seemed like a matter of time

It would be easy to say, “Well, doping will always exist.” And maybe that’s true. But it’s not an excuse for apathy. We may not be able to eliminate doping entirely, but we can do far more to detect it quickly, penalize it consistently, and uphold the integrity of competition.

We need testing that moves faster than public opinion. We need provisional records that can be reversed, not enshrined, until investigations are complete. We need transparency and urgency, not silence and stalling.

Because right now, the damage isn’t just to the sport. It’s to the people who still believe in it. The damage is to ALL OF US. The ones who show up at 5 a.m. to train, who cross finish lines with tears in their eyes, who mark their lives by mile splits and goal races and a deep, personal commitment to becoming better, honestly.

Those runners may never break world records. But we are the ones who keep the sport alive.

When we allow doping to flourish in ambiguity, we tell those runners their honesty is optional. That the rules are flexible. That the stopwatch can lie, and no one will really do anything about it.

That message is a betrayal. And it doesn’t go away with a press release or a suspension. It lingers. It sticks. It shows up in every post-race interview where we hesitate before we celebrate. In every finish time that feels too good to be true.

We don’t need a perfect system. But we need a better one. We need to treat performance-enhancing drugs not as an occasional hazard, but as a systemic issue that demands real accountability. We need to remember that the real work of sport is not just to entertain or inspire, but to be worthy of the belief it asks of us.

Because when runners stop believing the clock, they don’t stop racing.

They just stop caring.

Elisabeth Scott is a run coach and founder of Running Explained.