Tanzania, Feb. 15 -- In May last year, 10 kilometres road race world record holder Rhonex Kipruto became the latest Kenyan athlete to be suspended for doping.

With 70 Kenyan Kenyan athletes, mostly long-distance runners, having been banned at that point over the previous five years for doping, reports broke out about how Kenya was in a grip of a drugs crisis that had "tarnished its reputation as a track and field powerhouse".

Those athletes have been thrown a lifeline by American billionaire and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who has thrown his money into a drug-fuelled Olympic-style game that would allow competitors to take performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) and, as the reporting put it, to "push their bodies to new limits".

Also read...