How a Russian exposed London’s dirty Games
Re-testing of 2012 samples shows up level of cheating
JUST months before the London 2012 Olympics, executives at UK Sport, the Government agency responsible for funding Team GB at the games, were questioning whether a special forces ‘wonder drug’ could lead to Team GB athletes retroactively failing drug tests years after the London Olympics had ended.
UK Sport had been granted approval from UK Anti-Doping to supply the nutritional supplement, called ketones, to Team GB athletes in the lead up to London 2012. Ketones were not commercially available at the time and could only be used under the guise of ‘research’. However, the World Anti-Doping Agency reserved the right to re-test samples belonging to British Olympians if the experimental substance was later banned.
Confidential board papers, obtained by The Mail on Sunday in 2020, revealed that UK Sport went ahead with the secret research project, noting that the substance had not been added to the London 2012 prohibited list and that it would be unlikely to appear in drug re-tests anyway.
Re-testing of samples, which was allowed for the eight years after the 2012 Games — a statute of limitations now extended to 10 years — is always in the mind of athletes and the authorities. You can be ruled a cheat long after you have collected your medal. And the retesting of London 2012 samples has been the most-comprehensive to date, thanks largely to information supplied by the Russian whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov who, having previously run Russia’s state sponsored doping programme, fled the country and is now in witness protection in the USA. Largely because of Rodchenkov’s evidence, the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) drug re-testing programme, together with the anti-doping efforts from other sports federations, has transformed London 2012’s reputation from being billed as the cleanest games ever to the dirtiest.
It is now known that Russia corrupted the Games and that weightlifting events were a doping free-for-all. One in seven of all athletics medals and 42 per cent of all weightlifting medals won in London have now been stripped after samples collected during the games were re-analysed using new drug testing technologies.
It emerged earlier this month that Nijel Amos, from Botswana, who won silver behind David Rudisha in the 800metres in London, tested positive for GW1516 — a banned substance that is not approved for human use.
In 2017, an investigation by The Mail on Sunday found that one in seven of all 656 athletics finalists at London 2012 had tested positive for drugs at some point in their career. Amos’s name can now be added to that list.
Russia has been stripped of 21 medals in total, five times more than any other nation. But for all the medals that have been taken away from athletes in the East, it is the Western countries, and major sporting powerhouses, whose reputations have remained intact.
The USA, China and Great Britain won 261 medals in London but they have not had a single athlete disqualified because of re-testing. In fact, excluding Russia, this applies to the top 14 nations in the London 2012 medals table. This statistical anomaly makes one wonder, how willing was the Olympic movement to uncover the full extent of widespread cheating at London 2012?
Team GB cyclists won 12 of Britain’s 65 medals at London 2012 but in the lead up to the games banned testosterone was delivered to the Manchester velodrome. Months earlier, a British cyclist tested positive for trace amounts of steroids.
Usain Bolt dominated the sprint events in London but eight of the 21 Jamaican finalists at the Games have served a doping ban at some point in their career.
Rudisha broke the 800m world record in the Olympic Stadium in Stratford but comes from a country, Kenya, in which 138 athletes, over all sports, fail doping tests between 2004 and 2018. The USA 4x100m relay team were stripped of their silver medal in London after Tyson Gay was banned by the US Anti-Doping Agency in 2014.
The Chinese swimmer Sun Yang, who won four medals in London, is currently serving his second drugs ban. Between 1990 and 1998, 28 Chinese swimmers tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs.
Yet the IOC’s London 2012 reanalysis programme was unable to catch a single cheat from any of these nations. The Mail on Sunday understands that the IOC, understandably, relied on intelligence from reports into systemic doping in Russia and weightlifting to guide its re-testing programme.
But whether intelligence was gathered as widely from other nations, such as Great Britain, remains unknown.
However, UK Anti-Doping admitted, via a Freedom of Information request, that they have never asked the IOC for the list of Team GB athletes that were part of the re-analysis programme at London 2012.
The International Testing Agency, who now run the IOC’s anti-doping programme, did not provide The Mail on Sunday with a full breakdown of how many athletes, from which countries, competing in which sports, had their doping samples re-tested.
The London 2012 Chief Medical Officer and former Team GB Olympic doctor, Richard Budgett, was the IOC’s medical director throughout the London 2012 re-testing programme.