Kenya-born Yasemin Can and Meryem Akda, competing for Turkey, won gold and silver respectively at the 2016 European Cross Country Championships in November. The Irish Independent wrote that Ireland’s Fionnuala McCormack, who finished fifth, was “denied” a medal by the naturalized Turks, and Irish running icon Sonia…

Max Siegel, CEO of USA Track and Field, is enjoying first class travel, private jets, luxury hotels, and $1.7million in compensation—seven times what an average CEO at a similarly sized nonprofit makes—according to the Washington Post. This is all part of a “culture change” he and USATF board members implemented,…

What the heck is that, above? It’s years of 24/7 grind going down the tubes in a hundredth of a second. It’s dreams dying and being made. It’s bad luck and dumb luck. And according to USA Track & Field, it’s incidental contact. It’s the sport of track and field.

Track coach Jama Aden has been arrested after police raided his hotel room outside Barcelona and found traces of EPO and other banned substances, according to the Associated Press.

The run-up to this summer’s Olympics in Rio have been a disaster, between the prevalence of the Zika virus, Brazil’s political upheaval, and deadly problems with Rio’s Olympic infrastructure. It doesn’t help matters that the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) is in the midst of a meltdown, with all manner of shoddy…

Nikita Kamayev, the former head of the Russian anti-doping agency RUSADA, died on Monday at the age of 52. “Presumably, the cause of death was a massive heart attack,” wrote RUSADA in a press release.

In 1993, the Chinese women’s track team ran crazy; they set insane world records, times so fast, over such a range of distances with almost no recovery in between that, well, they were widely believed to be dirty. The women themselves admitted doping in 1995, but we’re just seeing the evidence now. The South China…

January 14th occasioned anticipation on the order of the Second Coming for track fans and athletes. Indeed, it was the second revelation (press conference) of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s independent investigative commission, headed by former WADA director Dick Pound.

Executives of the International Association of Athletics Federations—world track and field’s governing body—“could not have been unaware of the extent of doping” among Russian athletes nor “the level of nepotism that operated” within the organization, according to a report released Thursday by the World Anti-Doping…

Late last year, the World Anti-Doping Agency released a bombshell report detailing all manner of doping, bribing, and cover-ups by Russian track and field athletes, the Russian federation, and the Russian government. Russia received an indefinite ban from track and field for their wrongdoing, and could miss the 2016…

The real problem in track and field might not be the endemic corruption, but defeatism, the feeling that everybody’s in on it—administrators, coaches, athletes, watchdogs. The feeling that the problem is just too big to solve. There’s a nagging sense that telling the Russian federation it’s not okay to dope, and…

It has come to track and field athletes’ attention that during all those gutting workouts, dark-thirty in the morning, when the rent was due and cupboards bare, and it seemed like no one had their back—they were right. No one had their back. While they were pounding out repeat 1000s, the organizations in charge of the…

Back in July, when in Sebastian Coe’s telling he was as pure and innocent as a spring lamb in the #2 spot at the International Association of Athletics Federations, he was in fact mulling over whether “we” in the West (meaning the US and Europe, maybe Canada, but definitely not Mexico) were being too hasty in our…

When the World Anti-Doping Agency published its damning report accusing Russia of running a state-sponsored doping program for international athletes, it asked the International Association of Athletics Federation to ban Russian track and field athletes from international competitions. Today, the IAAF went ahead and…

The corruption at the top of track and field and the institutionalized doping miasma makes me tired. It’s supposed to. If it is ugly and confusing enough, lousy with unintelligible acronyms, most observers will just say, The hell with it, they’re all juiced to the gills, and most athletes will say, I’ve got a tempo…

Brit Sebastian Coe, better known to friends and family as Lord Coe, was voted in as the president of the International Association of Athletics Federations over the only other contender, Russian Sergey Bubka. For the past eight years, Coe has been an IAAF vice-president, and also takes credit for putting on the 2012…

The Court of Arbitration for Sports, the final word on disputes in Olympic sports, threw out the baby with the bathwater. I’m talking about the recent CAS decision to allow Indian sprinter Dutee Chand (above) to compete again. Chand was banned from competition last year because she is hyperandrogenic—her body…