NAIROBI, Kenya — When a Chinese clothing company swooped in and offered to sponsor Kenya's famed runners, Nike panicked, Kenyan officials say.

肯尼亚内罗毕——肯尼亚官员说，当一家中国服装公司突然表示，可以为肯尼亚著名运动员提供赞助时，耐克公司急了。

“Can we talk about the situation?” a Nike executive wrote to a Kenyan official after hearing the news that the Kenyans wanted to end their deal with Nike. “You and I go back a long way.”

“我们能不能谈谈这个情况？”一名耐克高管在听到肯尼亚人想结束他们与耐克的合同后，给肯尼亚官员写信问道。“咱们的关系可不是一时两时了。”

What followed — according to email exchanges, letters, bank records and invoices, provided by a former employee of Kenya's athletics federation — has led to a major scandal in Kenya, a country in the midst of its biggest war against corruption in years.

据肯尼亚田径协会的一名前雇员提供的电子邮件交换、信件、银行记录及费用清单，接下来发生的事，已引发了肯尼亚的一大丑闻，这个国家正处在多年来最大的反腐败努力之中。

In a contract signed several years ago, Nike agreed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in honorariums and a one-time $500,000 “commitment bonus,” which the former employee called a bribe.

在几年前签的合同中，耐克同意支付数十万美元的专家酬谢金、以及一笔该前官员称之为行贿的50万美元的一次性“签约奖金”。

The money was supposed to be used to help train and support poor Kenyan athletes who dream of running their way out of poverty.

这笔钱本来是用于帮助培训和支持贫困的肯尼亚选手实现他们通过长跑摆脱贫困的梦想的。

Instead, it was immediately sucked out of the federation's bank account by a handful of Kenyan officials and kept off the books.

现在却被几名肯尼亚官员从联合会的银行账户立刻抽走，并没有记录到账上。

Nike has denied any wrongdoing, saying in a statement that its payments were intended to help athletes, and it does not appear to be under investigation by U.S. authorities.

耐克否认有任何不法行为，公司在一份声明中说，这笔支付的目的是为了帮助运动员，公司也似乎并没有受到美国当局的调查。

But Kenyan authorities are suspicious. They have opened an extensive investigation, and all three Kenyan athletics officials accused of taking money from Nike have been suspended. Investigators with Kenya's Directorate of Criminal Investigations said they had asked Nike repeatedly to provide more information. So far, they say, Nike has refused.

但肯尼亚当局觉得此事可疑。他们已经开始了一个大范围的调查，而且所有三名被指控拿了耐克钱的肯尼亚田径官员都已停职。肯尼亚刑事调查部门的调查人员说，他们已多次要求耐克提供更多的信息。他们说，耐克到目前为止一直拒绝提供。

“Why was such a huge sum of money paid as commitment?” said one of the detectives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. “It's only Nike who can tell us.”

“为什么这么一大笔钱是为签约支付的？”调查人员之一问道，他要求不透露姓名，因为没有得到公开发表评论的授权。“这只有耐克才能告诉我们。”

John Githongo, one of Kenya's leading voices against corruption, said the U.S. government should pick up this case and “run with it.”

肯尼亚一位大声呼吁反腐败的人士约翰·吉松戈(John Githongo)表示，美国政府应该调查一下这件事，而且要“一查到底”。

For more than 20 years, Nike Inc. has been paying the Kenyan national runners' association millions of dollars in exchange for the Kenyans wearing Nike's signature swoosh, superb advertising in the running world.

20多年来，耐克公司一直在向肯尼亚的国家长跑运动员协会支付数百万美元的钱，作为肯尼亚运动员穿带有耐克标志的服装和鞋的交换，这是长跑界的一个精湛广告。

Kenyan athletes were so outraged when they learned in November that hundreds of thousands of dollars from Nike had been stolen by their bigwigs that they staged a protest at their headquarters in Nairobi, with elite athletes camped out in the grass and holding up signs that read “blood sucers.” (Some of the runners never finished school.)

肯尼亚运动员在去年11月得知，来自耐克的几十万美元已经被协会的头面人物盗用之后，极为愤怒，他们在内罗毕的协会总部外举行了一场抗议，一些精英运动员在草地上安营扎寨，还举着带有拼写错误的“吸血鬼”字样的牌子（有些运动员未曾完成中小学学业。）

Now, one question the Kenyan detectives are trying to answer is whether Nike intentionally made it easy for the officials to pocket the money.

如今，肯尼亚调查者试图回答的一个问题是，耐克是否故意为官员把钱装进自己的口袋提供了方便。

U.S. diplomats in Nairobi, Kenya's capital, said that the U.S. government would be willing to investigate any credible allegations of corruption by U.S. companies, but that they had no specific knowledge of the Nike deal beyond what had been reported in the Kenyan and international press.

在肯尼亚首都内罗毕的美国外交官说，美国政府愿意就任何对美国公司腐败的可信指控进行调查，但他们尚未得到超出肯尼亚和国际新闻报道的有关耐克合同的具体细节。

The allegations go back to 2009, when Kenyan officials, according to the email chain, accused Nike of treating Kenya as a “dumping ground” for substandard Nike clothing.

这些指控回溯到2009年，据一连串的电子信交换，当时肯尼亚官员指责耐克将肯尼亚作为处理不合格耐克服装的“垃圾倾倒场”。

But those complaints may have been a ruse by Kenyan officials to get out of the Nike contract so they could receive a bribe from another company, said a member of the executive board of Kenya's track and field federation, known as Athletics Kenya.

但是，这些抱怨可能是肯尼亚官员与耐克解除合同的脱身之计，让他们能够从另一家公司接受贿赂，名为“田径肯尼亚”(Athletics Kenya)的肯尼亚田径联合会执行董事会成员之一说。

Soon after complaining to Nike, officials at Kenya's running federation struck a new sponsorship deal with the Li-Ning Co., a Chinese sports empire founded by a famous gymnast, Li Ning. A marketing agent, working as a middleman between the Chinese company and the Kenyan federation, then sent nearly $200,000 to Athletics Kenya, money that a top official quickly withdrew.

在向耐克提出抱怨后不久，肯尼亚长跑联合会的官员与李宁有限公司达成了新的赞助协议，这是一家由著名体操运动员李宁创立的中国体育产品巨头。一位在这家中国公司和肯尼亚联合会之间担任中间人的营销代理，在签约后支付给田径肯尼亚近20万美元，联合会的一位高级官员很快把这笔钱取走了。

The sports-marketing agent who made the payment, Papa Massata Diack, was recently banned for life by the International Association of Athletics Federations, a global governing body for track and field. Both he and his father, Lamine Diack, a former head of the international athletics association, are under investigation by French authorities in connection with several allegations, including blackmail and bribery.

支付了这笔钱的上述体育营销代理是帕帕·马萨塔·迪亚克(Papa Massata Diack)，他最近已被全球田径管理机构国际田径协会联盟终身取消资格。法国当局正在调查他和他的父亲、曾经担任国际田径协会负责人的拉明·迪亚克(Lamine Diack)，他们与多项指控有关，包括勒索和贿赂。

The Kenyan officials even began talking about designing new Li-Ning uniforms, but they soon learned that shaking off the Nike sponsorship deal was harder than they thought.

肯尼亚官员甚至已开始讨论设计新的李宁制服的事情，但他们很快了解到，摆脱耐克的赞助合同比他们认为的要难。