This is a version of a paper that Jon Crowcroft and I delivered at this week’s gikii conference.
She sounded shocked. But also: as though the word she had to pronounce in front of the world’s press was one she had never encountered before and needed to take care to get right. Stan-o-zo-lol. It was 1988, and the Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson had tested positive for it. It was two days, after he had won the gold medal in the 100m men’s race at the Seoul Olympics.
In the years since, that race has become known as the dirtiest race in history. Of the top eight finishers, just one has never been caught doping: US runner Calvin Smith, who was awarded the bronze medal after Johnson was disqualified.
Doping controls were in their infancy then. As athletes and their coaches and doctors moved on from steroids to EPO and human growth hormone, anti-doping scientists, always trailing behind, developed new tests. Recognizing that in-competition testing didn’t catch athletes during training, when doping regimens are most useful, the authorities began testing outside of competiton, which in 2004 in turn spawned the “whereabouts” system athletes must use to tell testers where they’re going to be for one hour of every day. Athlete biological passports came into use in 2008 to track blood markers over time and monitor for suspicious changes brought by drugs yet to have tests.
The plan was for the 2012 London Olympics to be the cleanest ever staged. Scientists built a lab; they showed off new techniques to the press. Afterwards, they took bows. In a report published in October 2012, independent observers wrote, the organizers “successfully implemented measures to protect the rights of clean athletes”. The report found only eight out of more than 5,000 samples tested positive during the games. Success?
It is against this background that in 2014 the German TV channel MDR, whose journalist Hajo Seppelt specializes in doping investigations, aired the Icarus, Grigory Rodchenkov, former director of Moscow’s doping control lab, spilled the story of swapped samples and covered-up tests. And 2012? Rodchenkov called it the dirtiest Olympics in history. The UK’s anti-doping lab, he said, missed 126 positive tests.
In April, Esther Addley reported in the Guardian that “the dirtiest race in history” has a new contender: the women’s 1500 meter race at the 2012 London Olympics.
In the runup to 2012, the World Anti-Doping Agency decided to check their work. They arranged to keep athletes’ samples, frozen, for eight years so they could be rested later as dope-testing science improved and expanded. In 2016, reanalysis of 265 samples across five sports from athletes who might participate in the 2016 Rio games found banned substances in samples relating to 23 athletes.
That turned out to be only the beginning. In the years since, athlete after athlete in that race have had their historical results overturned as a result of abnormalities in their biological passports. Just last year – 2024! – one more athlete was disqualified from that race after her frozen sample tested positive for steroids.
The official medal list now awards gold to Maryam Yusuf Jamal (originally the bronze medalist); silver to Abeba Aregawi (upgraded from fifth place to bronze, and then to silver); and bronze to Shannon Rowbury, the sixth-place finisher. Is retroactive fairness possible?
In our gikii paper, Jon Crowcroft and I think not. The original medalists have lost their places in the rolls of honor, but they’ve had a varying number of years to exploit their results while they stood. They got the medal ceremony while in the flush of triumph, the national kudos, and the financial and personal opportunities that go with it.
In addition, Crowcroft emphasizes that runners strategize. You run a race very differently depending on who your competitors are and what you know about how they run. Jamal, Aragawi, and Rowbury would have faced a very different opposition both before and during the final had the anti-doping system worked as it was supposed to, with unpredictable results.
The anti-doping system is essentially a security system, intended to permit some behaviors and elminate others. Many points of failure are obvious simply from analyzing misplaced incentives. some substances can’t be detected, which WADA recognizes by barring methods as well as substances. Some that can be are overlooked – see, for example, meldonium, which was used by hundreds of Eastern European athletes for a decade or more before WADA banned it. More, it is fundamentally unfair to look at athletes as independent agents of their own destinies. They are the linchpins of ecosystems that include coaches trainers, doctors, nutritionists, family members, agents, managers, sponsors, and national and international sporting bodies.
In a 2006
If you want to ban doping, or find out who was using what and when, retrospective testing is a valuable tool. It can certainly bring a measure of peace and satisfaction to the athletes who felt cheated. But it doesn’t bring fairness.
Illustrations: The three top finishers on the day of the women’s 1500 meter race at the 2012 Olympics; on the right is Maryam Yusuf Jamal, later promoted to gold medal.
Wendy M. Grossman is an award-winning journalist. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.