By Yavuz Yavuz in Tokyo National Stadium

Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) organised a media roundtable during the 2025 World Athletics Championships in Tokyo to address issues of concern of the sport in recent days.

Reacting to remarks by Jimmy Gressier, the French winner of men’s 10,000m gold medal, that the efforts of AIU was helping to “level the playing field a bit more”, AIU chair David Howman said it was “gratifying” to have the backing of athletes in their work.

“We of course have meetings regularly with the World Athletics Athletes Commission. I talked this morning with Valerie Adams (the head of the commission). They’re very, very happy with the way it’s going. They do want more aggressive sanctioning, and they do want more aggressive approaches from all sports in relation to those who are intentionally cheating. They feel that it could be a six-year ban for that, and they feel that there could be extra sanctions in relation to whereabouts fails.”

For Kenya, which has seen a number of distance runners — among them very prominent ones like women’s marathon world record holder Ruth Chepngetich — banned and was declared non-compliant by World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) the week before Tokyo 2025, AIU head Brett Clothier said, “There have been huge amounts of progress and huge amounts of work that have been done but the code compliance issues they have right now are not good enough.”

Clothier added, “We have more cases but less doping, but there is still a lot of doping in Kenya,” underlining how the number of tests per year rose from 400 to 4000, while the number of registered athletes in the testing system saw an increase from 30 to 300.

The panel was also asked about Ethiopia’s Diribe Welteji and Erriyon Knighton of the USA, suspension of whom were overturned by their respective National Anti-Doping Agencies (NADAs) and were reinstated after the AIU intervened, and whether it created an issue of confidence on the part of the AIU with NADAs, Howman said:

“Mistakes can be made and sometimes you have to appeal. For Knighton, WADA, as well as AIU appealed. It was one of those cases that needed extra scrutiny. It has nothing to do with our lack of confidence.”

Finally, the media roundtable came upon the news that Fred Kerley, currently suspended by AIU for whereabouts failures and has not raced since May when he was arrested in Miami on charges of assaulting his ex-girlfriend, was declared as the first track athlete to join Enhanced Games — a project running on the premise of allowing athletes to use performance-enhancing substances without being subject to drug tests.

The AIU followed World Athletics head Seb Coe’s footsteps, who had dismissed the event before saying, it is “not going to be a page turner.”

Howman, calling the event “grotesque” said a way of connecting with people who were curious about Enhanced Games was asking them if they would be happy watching their loved ones “drug up and go racing.”

On the issue of Fred Kerley, Clothier said, “I don’t want to give the Enhanced Games too much oxygen, quite frankly. Our biggest concern is about the health of Fred Kerley and other athletes that sign up to them. We are not spending a huge amount of time on the event other than that.”