The tunnel in which athletes wait before they enter a stadium ahead of a major race is “by no means a friendly place to be”, says Lisa Dobriskey – and as a former Team GB athlete who won Commonwealth gold and world championship silver at 1500m, she has stood in enough of them to know. “Different people handle it differently,” she says. “Some people are really relaxed and friendly; other people just look right through you. It’s scary. I remember my coach saying to me, ‘When you go to the Olympics, you’ll be standing next to the meanest, toughest, hardest people that you’ll ever face.’ Everybody wants to win.”
As it turned out, the wait to walk into London’s Olympic stadium for the final of her event in August 2012 was even more stressful than she’d been warned. With British excitement at fever pitch, support and expectation for home athletes had reached near hysteria at times. “It was terrifying,” Dobriskey says of hearing the 80,000-strong crowd in the stadium. “People were yelling, people were screaming, it was overwhelming.”
Having come an agonising fourth in Beijing four years earlier, Dobriskey had battled her way into the London final after a nightmarish year. In early 2012 she developed a stress fracture of her thigh, delaying her track training for months; then in late May, a niggling problem with her breathing led to her being rushed to hospital with a life-threatening pulmonary embolism. Doctors advised her not to think about running for six months. Instead, less than three months later, here she was in an Olympic final, having won her heat and with commentators talking up her chances of a medal.
“That weight, that pressure,” she says, “I took it all on personally.” Footage of the race buildup shows the 13 athletes lining up jumpily on the track, with Dobriskey on the far outside lane. Her name is announced first, to a roar from the crowd. She bounces on her toes, then stands nervously, her eyes closed, breathing deeply.
A little more than four minutes and 10 seconds later, it was all over. Asli Cakir Alptekin, a Turkish athlete who had won the European championships title a month earlier, had again taken gold after leading from the front for the last 300m. Silver was claimed by another Turkish competitor, Gamze Bulut, after a surge to the line as several others faded. Bronze went to Bahrain’s Maryam Yusuf Jamal. Dobriskey, who had been near the rear of the field and unable to fight her way back, crossed the line in 10th place, almost three seconds off the pace.
She was bitterly disappointed, even embarrassed, at the result – but also deeply frustrated. A month earlier, after competing at a Diamond League meet in Paris at which a Moroccan athlete, Mariem Alaoui Selsouli, and Çakir Alptekin had raced seemingly effortlessly to a fast time, Dobriskey had privately contacted the world athletics governing body, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF, since renamed World Athletics), to say she believed the athletes were doping. Sure enough, days later Selsouli had tested positive for a banned diuretic – which can be used to flush other performance-enhancing substances out of the body – and been barred from competing at London 2012.
So when, moments after the London final, BBC Five Live’s Sonja McLaughlan asked how “comfortable” Dobriskey felt that Cakir Alptekin, the new Olympic champion, had previously served a two-year drugs ban, she told the truth. “I’m very uncomfortable with that,” she said. “I’m probably going to get in trouble for saying so, but I don’t believe I’m competing on a level playing field.” The then relatively new athlete biological passport scheme (ABP), designed to detect the use of banned substances by comparing multiple blood results over an extended period, would be a big step forward in the fight against doping, Dobriskey said: “But I think these Games came too soon. People will be caught eventually.”
Then she went back to the athletes’ village, packed her bags and headed to her parents’ home in Kent. She had wanted to see her teammate Mo Farah race for his second gold the following day, “but I couldn’t go back. I remember my dad saying, ‘Just go and soak it in, go and enjoy it.’ But I didn’t want to be there any more.”
Dobriskey didn’t watch a minute more of the Olympics on TV – and she still hasn’t. Now living with her family in Arizona, where she co-owns a pilates studio, she even found last summer’s Olympics in Paris too painful to watch. “I just had to detach myself from the sport,” she says. Watching it now “makes me feel like I didn’t do enough, I wasn’t good enough. Should I have trained harder? Should I have done better?”
Dobriskey may have said what plenty of others were thinking, but her remarks brought her a sharp and wounding backlash. Though some fellow athletes and commentators echoed her suspicions (“Hate hate hate drugs cheats #FUCKOFF” tweeted the British steeplechaser Hatti Archer), from others there was a brutal smackdown. “Don’t think post-race insinuations by athletes who’ve been beaten achieve anything at all,” sniffed the former triple jumper Jonathan Edwards.
But she would be vindicated in the end. In May 2013, Cakir Alptekin was suspended after abnormalities were detected in her blood profile dating back to 2010. After a lengthy period during which she was initially cleared by her own Turkish federation, the athlete was given an eight-year ban in 2015 and forfeited all her results from 2010 onwards – including her Olympic gold. (She would receive a life ban in 2017 after a third doping offence.)
The new champion, Bulut, upgraded from silver, didn’t last long either. The Turkish runner had shaved a near superhuman 17 seconds off her personal best time in the year leading up to London; those who had been sceptical about that achievement were proved right in 2017 when she was also banned for blood passport abnormalities and had her results annulled back to 2011.
In the interim, two further athletes from the 1500m lineup, the Belarusian Natallia Kareiva and Russia’s Yekaterina Kostetskaya, had also been suspended for ABP abnormalities. Their results, in seventh and ninth place respectively, were wiped from the Olympic record.
Yet another athlete, Abeba Aregawi, who came fifth in 2012 racing for Ethiopia before transferring to Sweden, was also provisionally suspended in January 2016 after testing positive for the banned substance meldonium, a heart medication that can be used by athletes to improve their endurance and recovery. Her ban was later lifted, however, as the authorities could not prove she had taken it after the date it became illegal.
Then, last September, more than 12 years after the race, there was one final twist. Tatyana Tomashova of Russia, who surged to fourth in 2012 and had since been bumped up to silver, was given a 10-year ban for using anabolic steroids, detected in retests of stored samples from 2012. Her results, too, were retrospectively wiped.
The penalty came as a surprise to some, given the length of time since the London Games, but in other respects, not so much. Tomashova won silver behind Britain’s Kelly Holmes in the 2004 Games in Athens, but she was absent at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing; at the time she was serving a two-year ban, handed down after her urine samples from different tournaments were found to contain more than one person’s DNA.
The revised results, then, would read as follows: the original bronze medallist, Jamal, was the new Olympic champion. Aregawi, who had been presented with a revised bronze medal in Paris last summer, would be upgraded again to silver. That meant American Shannon Rowbury, the sixth athlete to cross the line in 2012, would now be awarded bronze. Dobriskey’s disappointing 10th place finish had, in fact, been a highly creditable fifth.
And for the London 2012 1500m women’s final itself, its own ignominious reward: the title, widely attributed, of the dirtiest race in sporting history.
Rowbury was on a family holiday in Ecuador when she heard she was an Olympic medallist, after a journalist texted her agent with the news. She handed the phone to her husband, she told local San Francisco media soon afterwards. “He said, ‘Shannie! Oh my God, you’re going to get bronze!’ And I just started sobbing.”
London had represented a huge opportunity for the American, who had bounced back from a disappointing Olympics in Beijing to win bronze at the 2009 world championships. “It was like, OK: now London,” she says from her present home in California. “I have one medal, I can do it again. Let’s go after it in London.”
Once there and standing on the start line for the final, however, the race had presented a puzzle. As she waited for the gun, Rowbury says, she was acutely conscious of the others lined up beside her who had served doping bans. Her training had taught her to focus on her own race plan, “but it was tough, because some of these athletes I had never even raced before, because they had been either banned or had just come out of the woodwork. It was confusing to try to make a strategy.”
She, too, recalls an overwhelming atmosphere in the stadium, “like nothing I’ve ever experienced before or since. Whereas Beijing and Rio were loud, it was sort of monotone, but in London the crowd, their energy, raised to an emotional crescendo as the race was going on. You could tell they were actually watching it, really engaged, and it just built and built. I had this out of body moment of, whoa, this is something special.”
Her own strengths favoured a fast race, but it didn’t work out that way. Instead, first Jamal, then Bulut, taking a quick lead, slowed the early stages almost to a jog. The tactic is often favoured by those who know they have a strong sprint finish: slowing to what Rowbury calls “high school pace” forces their competitors either to sit behind at the leader’s favoured speed, or burn up their own energy in a spurt to overtake.
Some athletes are naturally fast finishers; others have some help. “When you’re competing against someone who’s cheated, their bodies don’t behave the way a normal, clean body would when everybody else is fading,” Rowbury says. “They seem to have these other gears. They don’t seem to be impacted by lactic acid in the same way as everybody else, because they aren’t like everybody else. They’ve cheated.” It is striking, watching the final metres of the race, that two athletes appear almost to be accelerating in the final metres, like a pair of e-bikes on a hill overtaking flagging pedal cyclists: Bulut and Tomashova.
When it was over, Rowbury went straight to her then boyfriend (now husband), the Mexican middle distance runner Pablo Solares, and sobbed bitterly. “The hardest thing wasn’t that I had missed the medal,” she says. “It was more that it felt like the race wasn’t fair, and that no matter what I could have done, I wasn’t on a level playing field. That injustice was hard for me to accept. If it was a matching of equals, I could accept that, well, today wasn’t my day. But it was very hard to accept in a scenario where I suspected people were cheating.”
The London Olympics, ironically, were supposed to be the cleanest ever staged. That, at least was the pledge made by Britain’s culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, in the early days of the Games. He was right that London had put in place one of the most rigorous testing regimes of any Olympics. Multiple doping positives aren’t just disastrous for the athletes and nations involved – no host country wants to be associated with them, either. A state of the art testing lab, the size of seven tennis courts and with a staff of more than 1,000, had been built for the purpose in Harlow, Essex. There, more than 5,000 tests were carried out during the event’s 16 days, more than any previous Games. During that time, just eight samples tested positive.
But Hunt’s assertion caused even some of those inside the drug testing establishment to raise an eyebrow. With athletes’ samples kept on ice and available for reanalysis for 10 years as testing technology improved, no one expected the number of athletes caught cheating in London – leaving aside those getting away with it – would remain in single figures. As the same samples have been reanalysed with newer technologies in the years since, more and more doping positives have been found. By 2022, when it concluded its 10-year reanalysis programme, the International Testing Agency had withdrawn 31 London medals from athletes from 11 different countries. In one men’s weightlifting event, six of the top seven finishers, including all three medallists, would be disqualified and banned for doping offences. Bronze was eventually awarded to the athlete who had originally come ninth.
Worse was to come. When a Russian discus thrower who had won a silver medal at London 2012, Darya Pishchalnikova, wrote to the World Anti Doping Agency (Wada) later that year, admitting she had taken banned substances and asking it to investigate systemic doping in her country, it declined to open an inquiry, instead referring her case back to the corrupt officials on whom she was attempting to blow the whistle.
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Other reports in 2013 were largely met with silence from the International Olympic Committee. But it was harder to ignore a German documentary the following year featuring astonishing revelations from two Russian whistleblowers, 800m runner Yulia Stepanova and her husband, Vitaly Stepanov, a former official at Russia’s drug testing agency Rusada. Up to 99% of the Russian Olympic team used banned substances, the couple told broadcaster MDR, and the country’s supposed anti-doping establishment was in fact mostly concerned with covering it up. “You have to dope, that’s how it works in Russia,” Stepanov said. “Functionaries and coaches tell you very clearly that you can only get so far with your natural skills. In order to get medals, you need help. And that help is doping.”
The head of the country’s Wada-accredited national anti-doping laboratory, Grigory Rodchenkov, would later flee to the US to tell his own story to documentary-maker Bryan Fogel and the New York Times. The details he had to add were even more extraordinary, particularly about the Winter Olympics of 2014 in the Russian city of Sochi, when he was the head of the laboratory coordinating all testing. That had allowed him to drill a tiny mousehole between the supposedly secure room in which test samples were stored overnight and his own “shadow” laboratory next door.
At night, a team member would pass cheating Russian athletes’ sample bottles through the mousehole; from there, a member of Russia’s secret service, disguised as a plumber, would take them to its nearby command centre where the lids of supposedly unopenable bottles would be removed. Back in the secret lab, the urine would then be swapped for clean samples from the athletes that had been frozen months earlier, to which Rodchenkov and his colleagues would add distilled water or salt to make them up to the right volume, before passing the resealed bottles back through the hole.
The agency charged with catching cheats, in other words, was carrying out the most audacious cheat imaginable – and without the whistleblowers, it is likely that no one would ever have known.
The revelations rocked the sporting world, and Russia was banned from the Rio and later Tokyo Olympics (the country’s Olympic committee has since been suspended by the IOC due to its actions in Ukraine). But Russia’s doping programme had been in place long before Sochi. In December 2016, Wada published its second major investigation into Russian doping. The country’s Olympic team, Canadian lawyer Prof Richard McLaren concluded, had “corrupted the London Games on an unprecedented scale, the extent of which will probably never be fully established”.
Rodchenkov would call London 2012 the “dirtiest Olympics in history” and, strictly speaking, judging by the number of positive tests recorded, he is right. But athletics has seen successive scandals over decades, making it hard to know how many historical results could be called into question.
Under East Germany’s state doping programme in the 1970s and 80s, for instance, at least 10,000 athletes were given performance-enhancing drugs, some without their knowledge. By Rodchenkov’s own account, the reason his country withdrew from the 1984 Games in Los Angeles was not a geopolitical snub in payback for America’s absence from Moscow four years earlier, but because LA port authorities had refused to allow Russia to anchor a ship containing its own doping control lab – designed to make sure Russian athletes’ urine appeared clean – in the city’s docks during the competition. Unable to be sure it could hide the extent of its cheating, he said, the politburo pulled out altogether.
The Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson became perhaps the most notorious Olympic cheat after his 100m gold medal in Seoul in 1988 was swiftly annulled after three days when steroids were detected in his urine sample. The Sydney Games in 2000 were dominated by the US track star Marion Jones who won three gold medals and two bronze; she would later be stripped of them all and sentenced to six months in prison after admitting she had lied about using performance-enhancing drugs. Also at those Games, Lance Armstrong, fresh from winning his second Tour de France of an eventual seven, won bronze in the Olympic time trial – all later annulled in one of the biggest doping scandals in sporting history.
Wada had been established a year earlier, in 1999, to harmonise international anti-doping efforts across hundreds of sporting federations; a succession of further measures have since been introduced to help authorities in the cat-and-mouse game between dopers and testers. The “whereabouts” rule, by which elite athletes are required to provide continual updates on where they are to facilitate surprise testing, was introduced in 2004, followed four years later by the ABP.
The Athletics Integrity Unit, an arms-length body to combat doping and corruption, was founded by the IAAF in 2017. Meanwhile, in response to the Russian revelations, the US government passed the Rodchenkov Anti-doping Act of 2019, allowing US prosecutors to pursue those engaged in international doping conspiracies.
How much of a difference have they made? It’s impossible to know for sure, says April Henning, an associate professor of international sport management at Edinburgh Heriot-Watt University, who has written in detail about the history of drugs in sport. “The most sophisticated and successful doping programme in the world is the one we don’t know about,” she says. “This is the nature of anti-doping. It’s all a shot in the dark, because athletes are incentivised to do it as quietly and discreetly as possible, telling as few people as they can.” The most sophisticated anti-doping mechanisms won’t stop cheats if the people involved don’t want them to, she points out. “[Russia’s doping scandal] didn’t have anything to do with the sophistication of the testing or the way it was was carried out. This was a concerted effort to undermine the system, and because these people were placed where they were, with a lack of independent oversight, they got away with it.”
In 2020, after all, no less a figure than the former president of the IAAF was convicted of corruption by a French court and sentenced to four years in prison. Lamine Diack, a Senegalese businessman, had run the sports body for 16 years until 2015; at the same time, however, he had been operating a scheme that he called “full protection” in which doping Russian athletes each paid hundreds of thousands of euros to make their positive drug findings disappear – so they could compete at, among other championships, London 2012.
What it means for the modern-day athlete is a non-negotiable daily ritual to comply with the bureacracy of anti-doping. Every evening for 13 years until her retirement in 2023, the British 1500m runner Laura Weightman would set an alarm at 9pm to check in with Wada’s Adams app, which she says every elite athlete has on their phone, to make sure she was where she was meant to be in case a drug tester turned up unannounced. “It’s just part of the job,” she says. “It is something you have to remember every single day, and it can be stressful if you’re travelling or have last-minute plans, but it’s your responsibility to make sure that you support the bigger global picture of clean sport.”
Weightman had just turned 21 at the London Games, her first major tournament, and hadn’t been expected to make the 1500m final but, thanks to a blinding personal best in the semis, she had fought her way to a place, lining up beside her British teammate Dobriskey.
Weightman, from Alnwick in Northumberland, had been dreaming of competing in London since, as a talented teenage club runner, she had watched the televised announcement of the city’s winning bid – hosted by Steve Cram, who would later be her own coach. “I’ll never, ever forget walking out into the London stadium for my heats,” she says. “In the tunnel about to compete, I felt so overcome with emotion that I was about to achieve that childhood dream. I felt I could cry because that emotion was so overwhelming.”
With that excitement, she admits, came an innocence about some of her competitors. “I was so naive about the world of sport that I had only had a handful of experiences of even being tested. I was aware of anti-doping in sport, but I just wasn’t aware of the severity. I wasn’t aware of how many would be cheating.”
In the end, exhausted from her semi-final, she crossed the line in 11th place – or sixth, as the records now show. At that stage, she was delighted just to have made the final. “But because of the consequences of that race, you do find it hard to trust,” she says. “You do wonder what’s happening, but you have to remember along the way, you can’t control what anyone else does. It makes you become incredibly proud of what your body can do. And to be one of the fastest in your country, one of the fastest globally on occasions, it makes you really proud to think, well, I did that clean, and I know I can say that, whereas not everyone else can.”
The new London 2012 1500m Olympic champion, Maryam Yusuf Jamal, was finally awarded the gold medal she should have won at a ceremony in Bahrain’s capital, Manama, in December 2021. Though it may not have quite had the atmosphere of the London stadium, the presentation by a member of the Gulf state’s royal family represented the culmination of a remarkable journey for the athlete, who had been born Zenebech Tola in the mountainous Ethiopian district of Oromia in 1984.
As a child, she would run 8km to school every day; by her teens she was training competitively. But, despite running very fast times, Jamal says she felt she was unfairly shut out of the national squad. “And I wanted to run.”
In 2002, while competing at one event in Lausanne, the then 18-year-old decided not to go home and instead applied for political asylum. Switzerland declined, as did the US, France, Germany and Canada, before Bahrain – eager to build athletic success, even if it meant adopting those from other countries – eventually came calling. “And in the end, everything was good,” she says. “Really, Bahrain has helped me a lot.” She couldn’t train there, though – it’s far too hot, she says. Instead Jamal now lives in Germany with her young family.
She laughs when asked if she knew, as she lined up for the London final, which of her competitors were likely to be doping. “Of course – every athlete knows,” she says. “You’ll see them once a year, maybe – they turn up and they go fast, even if they only run at the world championships or the Olympics. They don’t want to run the Diamond League races because they’re scared. But if you are strong, for sure, you can beat them – even with doping. I believe that. If you train hard and if you focus, you can beat them – like me.”
Like Dobriskey, Rowbury’s career ended in disappointment, after her seventh place finish in Beijing and sixth (she thought) in London was followed by a gutting fourth in Rio in 2016. When it emerged in 2021 that Shelby Houlihan, the athlete who had beaten Rowbury’s American record at 1500m at the 2019 world championships in Doha, had tested positive for the banned steroid nandrolone, “I just felt, I cannot do this any more,” she says. “I’d been burned so many times, I couldn’t psych myself up for it.”
There has been “a lot of pain, a lot of disenchantment and disillusionment” in the years since London, she says, “but I refuse to be sad about good news. And this is good news. Even after 13 years, justice can be served.”
She hasn’t yet been told when she can expect to be awarded her bronze medal. “It won’t feel real until I hold it in my hand,” she says. “That medal is a representation of so much more.”