Ruth Chepng'etich, marathon world-record holder, gets 3-year doping ban - ESPN

MONACO — Women's marathon world record-holder Ruth Chepng'etich has been banned for three years after admitting to a doping violation, track and field's Athletics Integrity Unit said Thursday.

The AIU said Chepng'etich admitted to anti-doping rule violations over the presence and use of the banned diuretic hydrochlorothiazide, or HCTZ, which can be used to disguise the use of performance-enhancing drugs. She had been suspended in July.

The AIU also said Chepng'etich had accepted the charges and sanction following a positive test for the banned diuretic from a March 14 sample.

The 31-year-old Kenyan runner broke the world record by almost two minutes at the Chicago Marathon last year, clocking 2 hours, 9 minutes, 56 seconds.

All of Chepng'etich's achievements and records before the March 14 sample will still stand.

The AIU said that while diuretics are known to be abused by athletes to mask the presence in urine of other prohibited substances, HCTZ has also been identified as a potential contaminant in pharmaceutical products.

Chepng'etich could not provide an explanation for the positive test when she was first interviewed in April. At a later interview on July 11, she was confronted with evidence acquired from her mobile telephone indicating «a reasonable suspicion that her positive test may have been intentional,» the AIU said.

At the time, Chepng'etich maintained her position that she could not explain the positive test and that she had never doped.

The AIU said that, on July 31, Chepng'etich changed her previous explanation.

«She wrote to the AIU to state that she now recalled that she had taken ill two days before the positive test and she had taken her housemaid's medication as treatment, without taking any steps