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.
Carl Lewis
One of history’s biggest athletic names. Carl Lewis won ten Olympic gold medals and collected the same number of the most valuable medals at world championships. Before he said goodbye to his sporting career in 1997, he was hailed as the “Athlete of the Century.”
In 2003, however, it became clear that even Ben Johnson’s greatest rival was under a shadow of doping suspicion. He should not have been at the Olympics at all in 1988 when he took gold at the expense of the disqualified Johnson.
He had tested positive for ephedrine before the Games. On the other hand, the Olympic committee granted the sprint star a reprieve so he could compete in Seoul. The analysis found that the amount of ephedrine was so low that it did not affect Lewis’ performance.
A few years ago, Lewis antagonized the fastest man on the planet – Usain Bolt of Jamaica. He hinted that doping might be behind his phenomenal times. The reaction of Bolt was not long in coming – he said that he had no respect for Lewis and was only saying nonsense to get his name in the papers.
Linford Christie
Linford Christie was the first European to run the 100 under ten seconds. He has Olympic, European, World and Commonwealth Games gold in his collection. He also tested positive for pseudoephedrine at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Christie got away with it, though – with 11 of the 21 anti-doping commission members voting to pardon him on the grounds that he had unknowingly taken the substance in a drug.
He said goodbye to the Great Britain national team in 1997 but continued to accept invitations to athletics meets and compete. Following a race in Dortmund, Germany, he had tested positive for the steroid nandrolone in 1999 and was given a two-year suspension.
Marion Jones
American sprinter was one of the stars at the Sydney Olympics when she won three gold and two bronze medals. From 2005, there were rumors that Marion Jones was not clean, but it vehemently denied all the accusations.
All changed in 2007, as she admitted to taking steroids before the 2000 Olympics. She subsequently lost all of her five medals. She was forced to serve a six-month prison sentence for lying under oath one year later. “I want people to understand that everyone makes mistakes. Now, what can I do about it?” she told Oprah Winfrey in a 2008 interview.
Ben Johnson
The Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson won the 100m at the 1988 Olympics with a fantastic time of 9.79 seconds, beating his biggest rival Carl Lewis. The joy lasted only until his urine sample ended up in a laboratory, where it was found to contain banned steroids. And overnight, a hero became the ultimate villain. Johnson lost his record and his medals.
After a two year ban from racing, he attempted a comeback, but it was inglorious – another doping scandal. Johnson later confessed that he was introduced to doping by coach Charlie Francis. “I said to myself: Well, what’s the point of me being clean when everyone else is cheating. This is not fair,” Johnson told British newspaper The Guardian in 2010.
Tim Montgomery
A prominent sprinter from the turn of the millennium, he set the world record for the 100m in 2002 with a time of 9.78 seconds. The US Anti-Doping Agency accused him of doping before the 2004 Olympics. Nevertheless, Tim Montgomery still tried to make it to the Athens Games, but he failed. After he was found guilty, all his results since 2001 were annulled.
He confessed in 2008 to doping before the Sydney Olympics. “I was taking testosterone and growth hormones four times a month. I got a gold medal in the sprint relay, but I don’t have it because of my talent,” he told US TV channel HBO. Montgomery was sentenced to five years in prison for selling heroin in the same year.
Konstantinos Kenteris and Ekaterini Thanou
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.
Aham Okeke
Norway is not a country that regularly produces the fastest sprinters in the world. However, there was an exception in the case of Aham Okeke. He first tested positive in 1994, but he returned to the track and field scene.
The Nigerian native finally gave up in 2006 when he admitted that a doctor had injected him with testosterone to speed up treatment for a muscle injury before the World Championships in Gothenburg. “It was just a desperate attempt to reach the championships,” Okeke later admitted at a press conference.
Merlene Ottey
It was the first woman to win an Olympic medal for Jamaica. She won bronze in the 100 meters at the Moscow Games in 1980. She accumulated fourteen gold medals at the World Championships and another eight Olympic medals in the years that followed.
She tested positive for the steroid nandrolone in 1999 and was excluded from the 1999 championships in Seville. Soon after, following a review of a urine sample that did not contain an above-limit concentration of the steroid, she was reprieved. It was later revealed that the test was conducted using the wrong method, so Ottey should not have passed.
The Jamaican sprinter was accused of doping several times after 2000, but she still has a collection of all the medals she won during her long career sitting in a display case at home.
