No big city marathon these days could offer any sort of guarantee that everyone is running entirely clean, but Dublin Marathon race director Jim Aughney is confident that every protective measure against doping will be in place for this month’s event.
Two recent Dublin Marathon champions were provisionally banned for doping offences in August — 2022 men’s winner Taoufik Allam from Morocco, and 2015 and 2017 women’s winner Nataliya Lehonkova from Ukraine — and it also emerged on the eve of the 2019 race that Othmane El Goumri from Morocco, who went on to win that year, had just returned from a two-year ban for doping offences.
Each received the top prize of €12,000 on the day, although Aughney also admits the Dublin Marathon organisers had little hope of getting any of that money back after it was announced in August that Allam and Lehonkova were among the latest pending cases announced by the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU), both testing positive for the banned blood-booster EPO.
Changes were made before last year’s race, when granted elite global marathon status, Dublin had to submit all elite entries to World Athletics in advance, to help ensure they were in good standing, and they must also have come through an agent approved by World Athletics.
“A soon as we start inviting them, even though the list may change, we send them to World Athletics,” says Aughney. “And if there’s anything there they say, ‘well listen, you can’t do this’.
“And the agent we use has to be an official World Athletics agent. So we can’t just pick Joe or Mary from down the road and say, ‘well listen, can you get me an athlete’, it has to be an agent accredited with World Athletics.
“And because it’s an elite event, you actually have to expand the testing afterwards. That happened in 2023 and we’re doing that again in 2024. So I’d be confident we have all the controls in place, absolutely.”
It’s no secret that the credibility of elite marathon running has suffered in recent years, particularly given the high number of Kenyan positive doping cases, with 109 of their distance runners, mostly in the marathon, banned.
When Kenya’s Ruth Chepngetich won Sunday’s Chicago marathon in 2:09:56, the first woman to break 2:10 and shattering the previous mark by almost two minutes, some suspicions were inevitably raised, and Chepngetich was questioned extensively on the matter afterwards, denying any possible link with previous Kenyan doping cases.
Aughney is at least certain the improved shoe technology has had a big impact on marathon times. “Well, the shoe technology has come on hugely ... certainly you see anybody that has them [the shoes] in their local 5 or 10k and they’re seconds up.”
The 43rd running of the Dublin Marathon, set for Sunday, October 27th, is once again a 22,500 sell-out, and after some talk of moving the start and finish out of the city centre, only minor adjustments were announced in April — starting on Leeson Street Lower and finishing on Mount Street Upper, remaining within the Dublin 2 area.
This represents only a minor adjustment to previous years, when the race started on Fitzwilliam Street Upper and finished on Merrion Square North, with the rest of the course similar to recent years.
“Well it’s a new start and finish, so effectively it’s like starting all over again,” says Aughney. “It’s amazing the different footprint just throws things up differently. Normally it takes two to three years to bed into a new start-finish, to get everything the way we want it to be. That will be a concern on the morning but, hopefully, we can plug any gaps before somebody else sees them.
“But we’ll have this footprint for a while, that’s where we want to be. And that’s what the city wants to support.”
