2012 THE DIRTIEST GAMES EVER?
Special Olympics investigation
THEY promised to be the cleanest Olympic Games — but are, in fact, contenders to be the dirtiest. It was hailed the greatest track and field programme in history — yet an investigation by The Mail on Sunday can now reveal that almost one in seven of the finalists had been sanctioned for doping offences.
And while capacity crowds at London roared on track and field stars at the 2012 Olympics, few of those in the £430million stadium, which their taxes had paid for, would have imagined that more than one third of those competing in finals had some kind of connection to doping.
And yet, as the stars descend on London once again for this week’s World Athletics Championships, which was a promised legacy from those tainted Games, the full truth of the London 2012 track and field programme is only now emerging.
The Mail on Sunday has analysed the London 2012 athletics results over the past month in the light of the Russian drugs scandal and the ongoing revelations of doping around the world, and the shocking results, which have been hailed as ground-breaking by senior Olympic officials, athletes and coaches, show:
Out of 656 track and field finalists at the London 2012 Olympics, 87 finalists or 13 per cent had previously committed a doping violation or have since done so; that’s almost one in seven.
A further 138 finalists or 21 per cent fall into a category which suggests they have an association with doping, in that their coach, agent or doctor is associated with doping or has been investigated; or they have failed or missed a drug test but evaded a ban; or leaks from the Fancy Bears hacking website have revealed suspicions around their blood profiles.
That means more than one third of the stars of the London 2012 athletics programme — 34 per cent — were either dopers or have support staff or profiles which suggest some kind of connection to doping.
The worst country was unsurprisingly Russia, whose systematic doping has since been exposed. Of their 56 finalists, 28 have committed doping violations, with gold medallists Sergey Kirdyapkin ( 50km walk), Tatyana Lysenko (hammer) Mariya Savinova (800m) and Yuliya Zaripova ( 3, 000m steeplechase) all since stripped of their medals after re- testing of their samples.
Yet the scandal is a global issue rather than a Russian problem. Of Turkey’s nine finalists, four have been sanctioned for doping. Six of the 20 Jamaican finalists have been sanctioned — though one of these was only for cannabis. And half of Belarusian finalists, seven out of 14, have committed doping offences.
The dirtiest race of the games — now dubbed the dirtiest race in history — is the women’s 1,500m, where five of the top nine runners have since or had previously received doping bans, including gold and silver medallists Asli Cakir Alptekin, who has been stripped of her medal, and Gamze Bulut, both from Turkey.
The women’s 4x100m final alone featured seven sprinters who have been sanctioned for doping offences: two from Jamaica, two from Ukraine, two from Trinidad and Tobago, one from Nigeria as well as another sprinter from Brazil whose case is still in progress.
Other countries such as Ethiopia and Kenya, which have no athletes on the list who have been convicted of doping, have since been identified by the World AntiDoping Agency (WADA) as territories where testing has been inadequate, with Ethiopia placed on a ‘critical’ list prior to Rio 2016 by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF).
Last night International Olympic Committee (IOC) figures, former athletes and coaches expressed their shock at the figures and paid tribute to the depth of the research compiled by The Mail on Sunday.
‘These are impressive statistics,’ said Dick Pound, the most senior IOC member and the former head of WADA. ‘I think it’s a great story and a bit of a wake-up call to folks. With that amount of smoke, there is bound to be fire and it’s very troubling for athletics.’
Toni Minichiello, coach to Jessica Ennis-Hill, London 2012 heptathlon gold medallist, said: ‘That’s quite a shocking level. I’m stunned by that. I don’t know what to say. It’s very, very sad. It is a harrowing figure, a horrible figure and I feel embarrassed about my sport to hear those kind of figures. The man in the pub will just say: “You must all be at it.” The depth of testing and investment has to be increased.’
Jenny Meadows, the 2009 world bronze medallist over 800m and 2011 European Indoor champion, who lost numerous medals to athletes who have since proven to be cheats, said: ‘That is quite a staggering statistic. But I think it needs to be told. And it isn’t just Russia — it’s other nations as well. Russia are getting the brunt of it and were the biggest offenders but it’s going on in other nations and it spoils the authenticity of our sport.’
Pound, whose WADA Independent Commission in 2015 revealed the extent of what he described as state- sponsored and systematic doping in Russia, agreed and said: ‘In that commission I said that it would be naive to think that Russia was the only country involved and that athletics was the only sport. There are a lot of bad folks prepared to do whatever they think they have to do to win and that is a problem across sports.’ The full extent of the doping across nations in track and field at London 2012 has only emerged in recent years, with German TV broadcaster ARD’s documentary on Russian doping prompting Pound’s inquiry which showed that senior IAAF figures, including then president Lamine Diack, contrived to cover up doping so that athletes were clear to compete in London.
Much of the recent exposure of cheats has also been done by a reformed IAAF, but with the sport, now under the leadership of London 2012 chairman Seb Coe, attempting to showcase itself in London this week, our figures demonstrate quite how widespread and deep the doping culture was.
On Thursday it will be five years since track and field began at the London Olympics and, with even the morning sessions in the stadium sold out for heats, the track programme was judged the most-successful ever in the post-War era.
Diack, since disgraced for covering up doping, was particularly enthused and praised the British public in 2012 at a long and rambling press conference. ‘ Eighty thousand seats filled in the morning, afternoon and evening. Here you had people who know athletics, love it and react to it.’ Alongside him was his soon-to-be successor Coe, who said: ‘It’s an incredible opportunity to showcase our sport in the best possible light.’
Before the Games, the IOC had promised that London would be one of the cleanest ever. Coe said: ‘What I can say to athletes coming to London is that we will have the technology in place that is in excess of any technology that you have ever encountered anywhere in t he world.’ IOC member Denis Oswald, who now heads up one of the inquiries into Russian doping, said before the Games: ‘About 6,000 athletes will be tested during the Games and all participants will have been tested several times before the Games. We’ve done the best we could do to have the cleanest possible Games next summer.’
While the new-look IAAF and Coe have received praise for being one of the few federations which is now taking the problem seriously, Pound does not believe that his colleagues in the IOC or across federations are committed to ensuring clean sport.
He said: ‘I have said before, the percentage of dopers is in double figures and yet we catch around two per cent. That indicated to me that the testing wasn’t effective which is why WADA put together
the study group last year to investigate why. Our science is pretty robust, our system is good, so why isn’t it working? Our conclusion was people didn’t want it to work.’
Pound is also critical of the IOC for hiving off responsibility to WADA. ‘I think the leadership of sport is responsible for making sure that sport is clean,’ he said. ‘This business of trying to push it off on to an independent body on the basis that, well, you have a conflict of interest. The people promoting the sport and selling TV rights on the basis that it is clean sport are washing their hands of the doping and corruption side of it.’
Meadows and Minichiello echo those concerns. Meadows frequently raced Savinova, who was stripped of her 800m 2012 gold and was shown to have participated in systematic doping. Savinova has kept her gold medals from the 2010 world indoors, where Meadows was second, and 2009 European indoors, where Meadows was fourth. She has been disqualified from the 2010 European Championships, which she won and Meadows was third.
‘I feel really let down,’ said Meadows. ‘That was my time. The three years when I was winning medals, several are the wrong colour. We expect fans to turn out and we want them to believe what they see.’
Though Meadows will be at the championships this week and says she retains her faith in the sport to reform, she admits that the revelations about doping contributed to her decision to retire. ‘ In 2015, when all these allegations came out, I had just lost the heart for it,’ she said.
‘ When push came to shove in training and I had to take myself to a dark place, my mind wouldn’t connect with my body and I couldn’t do it anymore. It was just like I had lost the belief and the drive. It [doping] prevented me from getting medals at the pinnacle of my career and then meant I ran out of steam and love for the sport in the last 18 months of my career. And I walked away thinking, “I don’t want to be a part of this”.’
Minichiello will be in London this week as a BBC commentator and next Sunday will watch EnnisHill finally receive a gold medal from the 2011 world championships, originally awarded to Russian Tatyana Chernova, who beat Ennis-Hill into second but whose sample was later shown to contain steroids.
‘ It’s pleasing she’s getting the medal that she deserves,’ he said. ‘It’s just that it’s dragged out for so long. We’re looking at a sample which was taken in 2009 and we’re now in 2017. Chernova should have been caught in 2009 but she competed for four more years.
‘ If doping is at this level … it shows there’s isn’t enough anti-doping going on at the major championships. These stats wouldn’t occur if there was a greater depth of testing at the time and leading into a major championships.’
The IAAF has stressed that since 2012, the leadership has changed and they have been the most forceful in responding to the crisis, by banning Russia from t he federation.
They have set up the Athletics Integrity Unit — independently tasked with cleaning up the sport.
The IAAF said: ‘Eighty per cent of the disqualified athletes from London 2012 are from four countries, the largest offender of which being Russia. Their athletes were let down by their national system which in turn failed to safeguard the goals and ambitions of clean athletes the world over. The IAAF Taskforce is working with their counterparts in RusAF to establish a system which addresses those failings and protects the level playing field of competition.’
The IOC failed to respond to emails asking for comment.