Kenyan road runner Betty Wilson Lempus has been banned for five years from competing after being found to have twice violated World Athletic anti-doping rules.
Lempus is best-known for smashing the Paris women’s half-marathon record on 5 September 2021 – the date that a sample she gave tested positive for the banned metabolite Triamcinolone Acetonide.
She then falsified medical documents to explain the presence of the metabolite, the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) found in a report.
She has been disqualified from the Paris half-marathon and all races since, the AIU said.
The punishment is two years for the doping violation and four for the attempt to cover it up, but a year was subtracted from the ban owing to Lempus’ admitting to doing both.
Lempus had claimed that she had been injected with Triamcinolone Acetonide at a Kenyan hospital some 16 days before the Paris race. But in June 2022 the Medical Superintendent from the hospital in question stated that though Lempus had been present that day, she had not received “an intramuscular injection of Triamcinolone Acetonide at the hospital on this date”.