Norah Jeruto, who won gold for Kazakhstan at the 2022 World Championships in the women’s 3,000m steeplechase, finds herself facing an appeal on previously cleared blood-transfusion allegations just weeks before this summer’s Paris Olympics, the Toronto Star reported.
In April 2023, nine months after her victory in Eugene, Ore., irregularities in Jeruot’s Athlete Biological Passport (ABP) put the 28-year-old’s world title in question and she was issued a provisional suspension. The investigation prevented her from defending her title at the 2023 World Championships in Budapest. But in November 2023, an independent tribunal found insufficient evidence to uphold Jeruto’s suspension, after she claimed that bleeding ulcers and a severe bout of COVID in 2020 had led to the ABP irregularities and cast “reasonable doubt” on the Athlete Integrity Unit’s (AIU’s) case against her. (An expert witness said internal bleeding from Jeruto’s ulcers could explain why some of her samples indicated she had lost blood, which led the AIU to suspect blood doping, but there was no evidence she had received any transfusions.)
Jeruto’s suspension was lifted, but World Athletics appealed, and the new hearing is scheduled to start June 17–just five weeks before the Paris Olympics begin.
The 29-year-old was born in Kenya but moved to Kazakhstan and received citizenship in January 2022 in order to be selected for the World Championships; her win that year made her the first woman from that nation to win a world championship in her event.
Former world champion Norah Jeruto’s doping suspension lifted
Jeruto has not yet qualified for the 3,000m steeplechase at the Olympics this summer. The Olympic standard in the women’s steeplechase is 9:23.00.
