Age-cheating rocks Athletics Kenya

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’ documentation 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 severe issue because they are already managing the issue of doping but now there is a new vice that has cropped up and everyone needs to know that age cheating is currently rampant,” Tuwei said.
He added: “We are investigating where this problem emanates 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.”
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 said.
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 birth certificate change or get amended?”
Tuwei urged parents and teachers to help in the war against age cheating and also called on 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 said.
Tuwei announced that the association had already embarked on updating its data to enable them to get athletes’ data right from primary schools all through to the senior level.