It simply never ends. Doping has always been part of sport and it will continue to be. It can definitely help some athletes run, jump or throw faster. Sprinters Tyson Gay and Asafa Powel, who got caught in 2013, have been big fish, but they certainly weren’t the first or last to get caught in an anti-doping net.
While athletics has written many great stories in the past, there are some dark doping chapters in its history. We can probably find the most sinners among sprinters. Since the 1980s, the best runners on the shortest cross-country courses have been confronted with doping suspicions. While most of them remained adamant that they were clean, some of them admitted over time (often under the pressure of evidence) that they had taken banned substances. In the following, you will find an overview of the biggest doping scandals in sprinting history.
Two of the greatest Greek sprinting hopes at Athens’s “home” Olympics in 2004. That is until the opening ceremony. A day before the start, they ran away from doping control. Both athlete and female athlete jointly claimed that they had a motorcycle accident and were hospitalized the night before the test. That didn’t help them. None of them was allowed to compete.
“People think it was a stupid kid’s excuse. I cannot deny that we behaved very stupidly during this period but were not stupid enough to dope when we knew we could be tested at any time. I was champion, and I couldn’t risk losing everything in such a foolish way,” Ekaterini Thanou told the BBC in 2005.
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