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Athletics Kenya (AK) president Jackson Tuwei has raised a red flag on age cheating in the sport after the association identified 26 irregularities in athletes’ documentations recently.

“We have discovered in the recent past that there are a few athletes who have amended their documents to show different dates as opposed to the actual dates when they were born and this is a very serious issue. This is because we are already managing the issue of doping but now their is a new vice that has cropped up and it is very important for everyone to know that age cheating is currently rampant,” Tuwei stated.

He added: “We are investigating to find out where this problem is emanating from and how we can deal with it because it requires detailed investigations. We are dealing with documents that are either forged or bought or whatever it is, but the few that we have come across prove that we actually have a major challenge here.”’

Ethical and legal issues

The athletics boss said they had identified 26 athletes who are suspected to have cheated about their age and and that they were planning stiff measures when the investigations are complete.

“We took the athletes’ documents to the civil registry for verification and what came out was shocking. We are currently waiting for the investigation to be completed before we announce our next cause of action,” Tuwei explained.

He added: “Age cheating is very unfair to our sports and also immoral. When you talk about birth certificates and passports, they are government documents, they are not our documents, so we would like to ask those dealing with these documents to make sure that these documents are correct, official and certified. When children join primary schools they are supposed to have birth certificates, so the question is where does this brith certificate change or get amended?”

Tuwei urged parents and teachers to help in the war against age cheating and also called on the government agencies like immigration to be vigilant and also help in the fight.

“We at Athletics Kenya we are doing everything possible to ensure that this does not continue so that it does not give us a problem and more importantly give the individual athlete more problems as they go into the senior level. It would affect an athlete even after retirement, because we are soon going to announce stringent measures.”

Tuwei announced that the association had already embarked on updating their data to enable them get athletes data right from primary schools all through to the senior level.