PARIS, France (AFP) — Kenya’s marathon world record holder, Ruth Chepngetich has been banned for three years for doping, the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) announced on Thursday.

The 31-year-old, a former world marathon champion and a three-time winner of the Chicago Marathon, tested positive for the banned diuretic hydrochlorothiazide (HCTZ) in March. She had been provisionally banned from July.

AIU chair David Howman said that the case against Chepngetich underlined that “nobody is above the rules”.

The Kenyan “accepted the charges and sanction”, the AIU said.

The March 14 test showed that Chepngetich had 190 times the allowed limit of HCTZ in her positive urine sample.

The athlete at first denied all knowledge of having taken the diuretic, with the AIU saying “that she could not explain the positive test”, with Chepngetich maintaining that she had never doped.

But she later changed that explanation, instead saying she had taken her “housemaid’s medication” as a treatment after falling ill two days before the positive test — an incident that she claimed she had failed to disclose to AIU investigators.

The AIU said it considered her new explanation “to be hardly credible”.

“The case regarding the positive test for HCTZ has been resolved, but the AIU will continue to investigate the suspicious material recovered from Chepngetich’s phone to determine if any other violations have occurred,” said AIU head Brett Clothier.

All Chepngetich’s achievements and records pre-dating the March 14, 2025, sample stand, Clothier confirmed.

The Kenyan set the current women’s world record of 2hr 09min 56sec at the 2024 Chicago Marathon.

She won the world marathon title in Doha in 2019 and was also the first woman to break the 2:11 and 2:10 barriers in the marathon.

Chepngetich’s ban is the latest in a long line for Kenyan athletes, including other high-profile figures such as 2016 Olympic marathon champion Jemima Sumgong.

At least 140 Kenyan runners have been suspended by the AIU since 2017 — the most of any nation.

Following numerous scandals, Kenya has invested millions to tackle doping problems.

But the government last year cut funding for its anti-doping agency by nearly half, following protests over the national budget.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) said earlier this month that Kenya had made “significant and demonstrable progress” towards cleaning up its systems, delaying a threatened non-compliance order.