Blame it on Rashid Ramzi. If you want to know exactly why I’ve always had zero trust in any athlete even pretending to run under the disguise of Bahrain then blame it on Rashid Ramzi.
Here’s the scene. The Bird’s Nest in Beijing, the Tuesday evening of August 19th, 2008, and we are awaiting one of the crowning moments of the Olympics – the men’s 1,500m final. And it turns into an act of high treason.
Ramzi runs away with it, hardly even breathing as he crosses the line, and with that the words of James Nolan are ringing in my ears. “He’s doped up to his eyeballs.”
Nolan said that to me three years previously, after Ramzi, who was born in Morocco and named Rachid Khoula, first broke on to the global athletics stage at the 2005 World Championships in Helsinki, winning the 800m-1,500m double.
“He’s doped up to his eyeballs.”
Nolan knew, we all knew, but of course we couldn’t print that.
Nolan was the absolute best 1,500m runner in Ireland at that time, and had missed out on the final in Helsinki, denied a place by Ramzi, who had been a perfectly mediocre runner in Morocco before taking the advice of a training partner and gaining Bahraini citizenship in 2001, joining their armed forces and changing his name as part of the deal.
When Bahrain realised the running artist formerly known as Rachid Khoula perhaps had some potential they gave him as much money as he wanted and total freedom to train – and by whatever methods he deemed fit.
The scary thing is how close he came to getting away with it, because without cycling’s intervention Ramzi may never have been caught.
During the 2008 Tour de France, testers first realised that good old-fashioned erythropoietin (EPO) was no longer the blood-boosting drug of choice, and instead the cheaters had moved on to the newly modified version, continuous erythropoietin receptor activator (Cera).
Not only was Cera stronger, and longer-lasting – thus requiring far less injections – it was also deemed undetectable in tests. It’s a larger substance than EPO and mostly blocked from the kidneys, thereby eliminating traces in the urine.
In January of 2008, Cera was approved for the treatment of anaemia and chronic kidney disease, under the trade name Mircera. Professional cycling, given its historic addiction to such substances, quickly indulged, and early in the 2008 Tour, traces of Mircera were found in the urine of Italy’s Riccardo Ricco.
Truth is Ricco was unlucky. He was caught by chance rather than design, yet gave the testers the tip-off they needed. When the International Olympic Committee (IOC) got wind of this they reckoned they better live up to their promise, and in January 2009 started retesting a select 948 samples given in Beijing, focusing on possible Cera use in athletics, cycling, swimming and rowing.
The endurance events, in other words – and six of those tests, including Ramzi, came back positive. He was stripped of his gold medal and the rest is Olympic asterisk history.
Ramzi was evidently not acting alone. Ruqaya Al-Ghasra, a Bahraini native, became the country’s first woman to compete in the Olympics in 2004, running the 100m in Athens, and again in Beijing in 2008. Two years later, Al-Ghasra was also done for doping, and banned for two years.
As was El Hassan El-Abbassi and Sadik Mikhou, both also Moroccan-born, before later declaring their allegiance to Bahrain, the Gulf island with a population of around 1.5 million people, and with zero athletics tradition.
El-Abbassi ran the marathon at the Tokyo Olympics, and Mikhou ran the 1,500m, after which both athletes tested positive for homologous blood transfusions. Mikhou had tested positive before, in 2018 – the sort of incident that would have moved the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) to look closer at Bahrain.
All of which brings me to Salwa Eid Naser, evidently implicated in the story which broke on Thursday that the AIU had issued a notice of charge against the Bahrain Athletics Association (BAA) for “serious anti-doping rule violations” and “historical breaches of the World Athletics anti-doping rules” just eight months before the Paris Olympics.
Naser was born in Nigeria and named Ebelechukwu Agbapuonwu, and declared for Bahrain in 2014, five years before she won the World Championship 400m title in Doha in 48.14 seconds, the third fastest time in history behind East Germany’s Marita Koch and Jarmila Kratochvilova from the former Czechoslovakia (both those times run during the known doping period of the early 1980s).
Although the AIU stopped short of recommending an outright ban, it resulted in Bahrain being limited to entering a maximum of 10 athletes in Paris, and again for next year’s World Athletics Championships in Tokyo, and the BAA agreeing to spend up to $7.3 million over four years to address the doping and integrity risk in athletics in Bahrain.
Of the 10 Bahrain athletes who did compete in Paris, two won medals – the Kenyan-born Winfred Mutile Yavi winning the women’s 3,000m steeplechase in an Olympic record of 8:52.76, before Naser won the silver medal in the women’s 400m in a season best of 48.53, in a race where Rhasidat Adeleke finished fourth.
The 26-year-old Naser was previously banned for two years in June 2021 for an anti-doping violation, missing three tests within a 12-month period. According to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) which upheld her ban on appeal, her behaviour was “undeniably negligent and cannot be excused”.
A ban was also imposed on Bahrain from competing in any other World Athletics Series events for 12 months from June 1st, 2024, although it’s still unclear why the AIU decided against making this case known until after the Olympics. And who decided on the 10 athletes that were allowed compete in Paris?
Naser, meanwhile, is still free to race for the rest of the season, the Diamond League being not part of the World Athletics Series events, and she will line-up in Sunday’s Silesia Diamond League meeting in Poland alongside the two other Olympic medal winners in Paris, Marileidy Paulino from the Dominican Republic who won gold, and Poland’s Natalia Kaczmarek who won bronze.
Adeleke will also race for the first time since finishing fourth in Paris, but she can’t have missed the news this week. In the immediate aftermath of that Olympic final in Paris, she was asked about Naser’s presence.
“Each athlete to their own,” she said. “All I know is I do my very best. I train hard, I work hard, and I hope every other athlete does the same.”
Only in Bahrain, it’s impossible to believe that.
Blame it on Rashid Ramzi.
