For most athletes who compete in the Olympics,
it's the culmination of a lifetime of hard work and dedication. However,
there are many crazy stories of Olympians who've had victory snatched from their grasp
amid shocking circumstances. Here are the times athletes were stripped of their Olympic medals.
In 2017, NBC Sports reported that 18 Russian medalists from the 2008 and 2012 Olympics
had been disqualified for their association with doping scandals,
and an additional 10 had their medals stripped because they had been on a
team where at least one of the members had been caught doping. They were told
to return their medals to the International Olympic Committee, and promptly said, "Nope."
Some said more than that: Maksim Dyldin was disqualified from the
relay and ordered to give his bronze medal back, to which he replied,
"I've got the medal at home. Let them try to take it."
That was in February, and by August, there were still clear
holdouts. Reuters reported that among them was sprinter Tatyana Firova, who explained:
"I don't want to return my medals because I think no one would have deserved them more."
That was, of course, in spite of testing positive for steroid use. When the media
looked at whether or not the IOC could force them to give back the medals,
the answer from experts and historians was pretty much,
"We don't know." The IOC, meanwhile, has been a bit mum of what they've actually gotten back.
Romanian gymnast Andreea Raducan won a gold at the 2000 Olympics for the individual
all-around competition, and then it was almost immediately taken away. The reason was doping,
but according to The New York Times, it's complicated. The then-16-year-old Raducan
tested positive for pseudoephedrine, which — while being on the IOC's official list
of banned substances — is probably also in the medicine cabinets of most homes.
It's in over-the-counter cold medicine, and that's exactly what she'd taken.
Not only had she taken it, but it was her trainer who gave her the meds to fight off flu symptoms.
Raudcan appealed the decision. While the International Court of Arbitration for Sport
agreed that she hadn't gained any advantage from taking the medicine,
they also argued that anti-doping rules, quote, "must be enforced without compromise."
Not only did they refuse to return her medal and title, but her doctor was banned from
the remainder of the games, as well as the next two games. Raducan later said,
"I am disappointed. It's not for me to judge the decision,
but I am convinced and my heart is at peace that I did everything right and competed fairly."
In 2019, a film called The Golden Girl followed Raducan's journey for redemption. Having gone on
to become a journalist and sports announcer, she says that having all she'd worked for
taken away because of a technicality means there's no chance of fairness with the IOC.
Saying Usain Bolt is fast is the understatement of the year, and he famously has a ton of Olympic
medals to prove it. But he'll always know that he should have had one more. In 2008,
his team took the gold in the 4x100-meter relay — then they had to give it right back. At first,
everything looked on the up-and-up. However, when Bolt's teammate Nesta Carter was retested
for doping, the results came back positive for one of the stimulants on the IOC's no-fly list.
The retesting was done after officials realized just how far Russia's doping scandal reached. That
said, the Jamaican relay team sort of got caught in the fallout. Weirdly, retests aren't entirely
unheard of, and urine samples from athletes are often saved in case of the development of new,
more precise technologies that can be used to detect illicit substances. Bolt was, predictably,
not thrilled about the whole team losing their medals because of one person. He told NBC Sports,
"I'm not happy about it, but it's just one of those things that happen in life,
but I can't allow that to deter me from my focus this season,
so I am focused, but I am not pleased about the situation."
It wasn't until 2010 that Chinese gymnast Dong Fangxiao had the bronze medal she'd
won in the 2000 Sydney Olympics taken away, and according to The Wall Street Journal,
it's entirely possible that it was only because of her own oopsie.
When registering for the 2000 Olympics, they note that she had applied with a birth date
of January 20, 1983. That would have made her 17 years old at the time of the competition,
a year over the minimum age requirement of 16. But when the 2008 Olympics rolled around,
she listed her birth date as January 23, 1986. That meant at the time she competed in 2000,
she had only been 14 years old — well under the minimum age requirement.
Her bronze medal was stripped and given to the U.S., but the evidence suggests that
hers isn't the only such story. There were further investigations into the Chinese women's gymnastics
teams in 2008, and although those girls were ultimately found to be old enough to compete,
U.S.A. Gymnastics made it very clear that they doubted the verdict and condemned the
pressure put on pre-teen girls to not only compete, but to lie about their age to do so.
Cian O'Connor was one of the youngest showjumpers in Ireland
at the time he rode Waterford Crystal at the Athens Olympics in 2004.
"I've been lucky. I've had some great horses, some great results.
O'Connor took the gold medal, but didn't quite take it home when tests on Waterford
Crystal came back positive for two substances commonly used in humans as antipsychotics.
O'Connor and his team said that yes, they'd given the horse the drugs as a sedative to
keep him calm while he had been recovering from an injury, and it was when they appealed for a retest
that things got really weird. That, says The Irish Times, is when someone
intercepted the sample being sent for retesting, signed for it, then vanished.
Things got even more complicated when there was a break-in at the Irish
Equestrian [ih-KWES-tree-uhn] Federation, and some uncomfortable files were released to the public.
Namely, it was proof that another of O'Connor's horses had also tested positive for doping.
That kicked off a whole media frenzy, and ultimately, he went through with his appeal
even though there could be no retest. While the committee agreed that yes, they had given
the horse the drugs in enough time that they should have been cleared out of his system by
the Olympics, the bottom line was, they hadn't. As a result, O'Connor was stripped of his gold medal.
Here's something of a complicated tale, and it starts with the 2004 Athens Olympics. That's
when the International Olympic Committee handed down sanctions to Colombian cyclist Maria Luisa
Calle Williams. Williams had a drug test come back positive for a banned substance called Heptaminol,
and as a result, she was stripped of the bronze medal she had won in the women's Points Race.
That's by no means the end of the story, and Williams wholeheartedly denied ever taking any
such substance. The New York Times later reported that Calle Williams had appealed the ruling,
stating that she had taken some headache medication that had resulted in a false
positive for the banned substance. The Court of Arbitration for Sport ultimately agreed, and the
bronze — which had been given to U.S. cyclist Erin Mirabella — was taken away from her and returned.
Now, the footnote to the whole saga. In 2015,
Calle was competing at Toronto's Pan American Games when her drug test came back positive
for another prohibited substance. Cycling News said she was given a four-year ban.
The very first Olympic medal for snowboarding was awarded at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano,
and then it was promptly removed when gold medalist Ross Rebagliati's drug test
came back positive for marijuana. According to The Washington Post,
Rebagliati said that he personally hadn't smoked marijuana since April of the previous year.
However, when friends had a pre-Olympics going-away party for him, some of them
had been smoking. He was in the room, and that's how it had gotten into his system.
When it came time for the IOC to vote on whether he'd be handed a disqualification or just a slap
on the wrist, it was pretty close. At the time, there were no specific limits on marijuana use,
and while it wasn't listed as "performance enhancing," it was controversial because
it was said to be used to calm nerves. The ban actually didn't last long and
was overturned before he even had a chance to give the medal back.
"The most important thing was to have the support of my country, and, uh, my friends and my family."
But still, that's not the end of the story. Rebagliati later said,
"Cannabis [...] was seen as being for losers
and lazy stoners. [...] I became a source of entertainment, a joke."
He went on to embrace it though. With Canada's legalization of weed,
he has since launched his own "cannabis lifestyle brand," called Legacy.
The Smithsonian calls Jim Thorpe "the greatest American Olympian of all time,"
but it's not a sentiment that's reflected in any official records.
Why? It's a weird story. Thorpe — who was a Sac and Fox Native American who grew up hunting,
riding, and working in what was then the Oklahoma Territory — famously broke a high
school high-jump record when he hopped over a bar set above his own height in work clothes.
"I think Jim Thorpe represents a lot of the American myth."
When it came to the Olympics, Thorpe dominated in both the decathlon and pentathlon.
That includes events like the mile run — which, incidentally, he won
wearing unmatched shoes and after competing in nine other events in less than 48 hours.
Then, in 1912 — six months after the competition — the IOC stripped Thorpe of his medals.
Why? A few years prior, he had spent a season as
a minor-league ball player. The Olympics were only for amateurs,
and that meant the $25 he'd made had made him ineligible. In spite of rules stating that
Olympic medals could only be challenged for 30 days after competition, his medals were revoked.
In spite of a massive movement to see the records change and the medals go back to Thorpe,
The New York Times says that things still aren't right. In 1982, the IOC awarded him
posthumous gold medals that came with a massive catch: The medals were his, but
the official records and results of the Olympics he absolutely owned weren't going to be changed.
So, let's say you're traveling abroad and feeling kind of sick, so you grab some
Vicks nasal spray. It's an easy decision that's definitely not going to get anyone in trouble,
right? That's what the British skier Alain Baxter thought when he competed
in the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. According to The Telegraph,
his bronze in the slalom made him the only Brit to place in the top three in any alpine skiing
event. It was short-lived, though, when he tested positive for methamphetamine.
He was shocked, but a closer look at what he'd bought in a U.S. store made it pretty
clear what had happened. In the U.K., Vicks nasal inhalers contain Siberian pine oil,
camphor, and menthol as their active ingredients. In the U.S., however, the active ingredient is
something called Levmetamfetamine. He'd picked up an inhaler thinking it was the same completely
inoffensive thing he was used to, but he found out the hard way that wasn't the case at all.
Baxter appealed, and while the Court of Arbitration for Sport found him to be, quote,
"sincere and honest," and someone who never intended to obtain a "competitive advantage
in the race," they still ruled against Baxter and refused to give his medal back.
Baxter later said that he was relieved to have at least been cleared of cheating,
and added that he hoped the rules would eventually change.
Lance Armstrong's story is the stuff of legend. He was only 25 when he was diagnosed
with testicular cancer, and post-treatment he returned to the cycling world to take
title after title. It wasn't long, however, before rumors of doping started circulating.
Armstrong denied it until 2013, when he came clean during an interview with Oprah.
"Yes or no. Did you ever take banned substances to enhance your cycling
performance?" "Yes."
The IOC immediately stripped Armstrong of his bronze medal from the 2000 Sydney Olympics, and
it was almost as fast as the International Cycling Union took away his Tour de France honors, too.
It turned out that was just the beginning of the fall. Things only got worse when the
United States Anti-Doping Agency released findings that not only had Armstrong been taking a Molotov
cocktail of performance-enhancing drugs, but he'd been, quote, "ruthlessly" pressuring his
teammates to do the same. The report included the insane lengths he had gone to, including things
like turning hotel rooms into blood transfusion centers. A total of 26 people — including 11 of
his former teammates — testified, and it led to the unfolding of a scandal that the USADA called:
"[T]he most sophisticated, personalized,
and successful doping program that sport has ever seen."
After Armstrong was stripped of his medal, NPR says it took him eight months to return it.
The 2004 Athens Olympics set a record of their own. According to the Los Angeles Times, they were
the first Olympic games where more than one track and field competitor lost a medal for doping. But
here's the thing: Hungarian discus-thrower Robert Fazekas didn't actually test positive for drugs.
He wasn't tested at all, because he struggled with giving a urine sample. Why? Because IOC
rules dictate it's something that has to be done in front of witnesses. That's something that not
many places include in the list of things you'll have to go through to compete in the Olympics.
The IOC hinted at the fact they firmly believed that Fazekas couldn't fill the cup in front of
onlookers because he knew he was going to fail and wanted to carry in a clean sample
to submit instead. For his first sample, he produced just a third of the required amount,
and when it came time to give a second, he outright refused. In the end,
Fazekas was disqualified. His gold medal went to the next in line.
A book published in 2012 by author Richard Moore called the men's 100-meter race at the
1988 Olympics the, quote, "dirtiest race in history," because out of the eight finalists,
six would see their careers later tarnished by doping scandals.
For one — gold medal winner Ben Johnson — it didn't take long at all. After Johnson won,
he took part in a press conference where, in hindsight, he probably shouldn't have declared:
"[T]his world record will last 50 years, maybe 100. [...]
A gold medal — that's something no one can take away from you."
It turned out that when your drug test comes back positive for steroid use, they absolutely can take
that gold medal away — and they did. Johnson, it turned out, had been using steroids for seven
years by the time he competed. His trainer had started him on them, saying that everyone was
using, and it just leveled the playing field. It was so rampant that the area outside of the
practice field at the 1987 World Championships was described by Moore as a, quote, "drugs den,"
and it's pretty shocking that at the time, most of the IOC was kind of indifferent about it.
Even more shocking has been Johnson's beliefs about the whole thing,
which could be summed up with the idea that it's not a big deal. Johnson said:
"Regardless what the IOC thinks, it's definitely
the best race ever run. [...] You only cheat if no one else was not doing it."
Several Olympians have had their medals stripped because of poor sportsmanship,
so let's start with Unified Team weightlifter Ibragim Samadov. During the 1992 competition,
he had officially tied with the other Polish and Greek athletes. However, since he weighed just a
tenth of a pound more than they did, he was deemed to have an advantage and was given the bronze.
When it came time for them to head to the podium, Samadov threw his medal on the ground
and stormed off. In spite of a later apology, Samadov was stripped of his Olympic medal.
Then, in 2008, Ara Abrahamian tossed his bronze medal aside
after placing third for Sweden. He made it very clear how unhappy he was, saying:
"I don't care about this medal. I wanted gold. [...] I consider this Olympics a failure."
Abrahamian condemned his placement at third as, quote, "totally unjustified," and both he and his
coach claimed "politics" had heavily influenced the judges' decision. He announced his retirement
from wrestling at the same time, but the IOC still included a ban with the removal of his medal.
By the time Antonio Pettigrew was stripped of his Olympic medal, The Guardian says that his
career was already over. That didn't take away the shame, though, and Pettigrew became embroiled in a
massive scandal — despite the fact that he didn't have a single positive drug test on his record.
Pettigrew's coach was Trevor Graham, and in 2008, Graham found himself in court over accusations
regarding some very unsportsmanlike conduct. Pettigrew was one of the athletes subpoenaed to
testify and admitted that he had been taking human growth hormone drugs on Graham's instructions.
The time frame he gave was 1997 to 2001, and that led to the removal of all his titles
during that period — including a gold medal in the 4x400 relay in 2000's Sydney Olympics.
He wasn't the only one who had his medal taken away, and the admission nullified the results
for the rest of his team as well. However, it's also worth noting that many of them had already
been sanctioned for other doping instances — but not in 2000. Pettigrew later said:
"I want to play a role in teaching people, especially young athletes,
to know that the negatives far, far outweigh the benefits these substances may give you."
Two years later, Pettigrew's body was discovered in his car.
ESPN says that his death was ruled a suicide.
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts,
please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline​ at​ 1-800-273-TALK (8255)​.