Olympic historian expects more positives and possible medal reallocations from re-testing of London 2012 samples

Russian race walker Yelena Lashmanova was the latest London 2012 athlete to be stripped of an Olympic gold medal for doping, but historian Bill Mallon does not think she will be the last.

”There’s still more re-tests to come from London, so there will be more,” Mallon tells Around the Rings. “These things take forever with appeals. Basically the Russians delay, delay, delay, and I don’t why they keep delaying -- they lose most of them.”

Lashmanova, who won the 20-kilometer race walk at the 2012 London Olympics, also relinquished her gold medal in the same event at the 2013 World Championships in Moscow, according to the Athletics Integrity Unit.

In other doping news this week, Kazakh weightlifter Nijat Rahimov, who won the gold medal at 77kg at the 2016 Rio Games, has been banned for eight years and will be stripped of his medal.

”It’s really getting hard to keep track of these medals,” Mallon said. “They keep changing all the time.”

He and fellow statistics guru Hilary Evans keep a database of Olympic doping positives that is up to 498 cases dating back to 1968 – and that’s just the athletes who were busted. It also does not include any other events or out-of-competition testing unrelated to the Games.

They made the database public Wednesday and it is a fascinating study of the arc of cheating in Olympic sports. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1I-9BVAsGU_y8PcG3ksvUWY5abM5G_eGhg98NmJdyR3w/edit#gid=0

Almost one third of the cases – 153 – are from London 2012.

Mallon said the ongoing Operation LIMS, which stands for “Laboratory Information Management Systems” is still “evaluating all the findings they got from London and Sochi. That’s why there’s more to come.”

The operation is a partnership between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the Athletics Integrity Unit.

The database lists 86 positives in Beijing 2008 -- mostly athletics (track and field), with 18 from Russia. Of that number, 50 medals were reallocated, including nine golds.

There were only four doping positives in Vancouver 2010. The cases soared to 153 in London 2012, with 50 from Russia, primarily in athletics again – and 39 medals were reallocated. Russia won eight gold medals in athletics during the London Games, which has since been whittled down to two.

In Sochi two years later there were 28 positives, with 18 from Russia as a result of the state-sponsored doping program.

The overall figures are 28 doping cases from Rio 2016, keeping in mind Russia only had one athlete allowed to compete in track and field due to anti-doping sanctions. There were 11 doping cases from PyeongChang 2018, eight from Tokyo 2020 and five from Beijing 2022 (including Kamila Valieva, the figure skater from Russia who tested positive in December).

”What happened in London and Sochi,” Mallon said, “the tests for the PEDs (performance enhancing drugs) that they used to use weren’t very sensitive. And after London they developed much more sensitive tests. The athletes used to know they could take ‘x’ amount and get away with it.

”But the athletes have known about that since 2014 or 2015, so I don’t think they’re going to get caught nearly as much as they did in London. They know how sensitive the tests are now and they know they can’t get away with very much any more. They know they have to be more careful.

”The statute of limitations for re-testing samples following a competition used to be eight years, but it is now 10 years. With better testing methods over time, more substances can be detected.

“That’s one thing I actually don’t like about this whole thing -- they keep trying to push the statute of limitations back,” Mallon said. “I don’t think that’s really quite fair to the athletes. I think there should be a statute of limitations -- this is not murder or rape, after all.

”The 10-year window goes up to the point at which the investigation is started, and the investigation can often take years, followed often by appeals. That’s why announcements of the reallocation of medals can come more than a decade later.

Mallon, one of the founders of the website Olympedia, also notes that not all of the cases in his database are due to intentional cheating. He said some of the positives come from “weird supplements with stuff in it that they don’t know about. There are legitimately people who have been dinged for doping that really didn’t know they were doping, which is unfortunate for them.

”Anti-doping regulations were adopted before the 1968 Olympics. The first name in the database is Swedish modern pentathlete Hans-Gunnar Liljenwall, who tested positive for alcohol, which is a depressant, at the Mexico City Games. Liljenwall apparently had two beers to calm his nerves before the pistol shooting event and he and his teammates were stripped of their bronze medals.

Among the seven positives in Munich four years later, six were stimulants and one was a steroid. American swimmer Rick DeMont tested positive for ephedrine, which was an ingredient in his prescription asthma medication. He had declared his medications on a disclosure form, but the U.S. Olympic Committee slipped up by not clearing them with the International Olympic Committee medical committee. Through no fault of his own, DeMont was disqualified and lost a gold medal.

Russia has been stripped of more than 40 medals due to doping, which is more than any other country and four times more than the runners-up (Ukraine and Belarus with 11 apiece). This is not a medal table to boast about.

Some Olympic observers believe Russia should be banned from the next Olympic Games due to its invasion of Ukraine, especially since the invasion began during the Olympic Truce.

Others believe Russia’s doping record warrants making the country stay home from Paris and perhaps Milano-Cortina.

”I think they should be kicked out for something at this point,” Mallon said. “It’s kind of like someone is saying, ‘Don’t step over the line.’ They step over it, and they keep drawing the line further and further back and the big bully keeps stepping over the line. I think there gets to be a point where you’ve got to say, ‘That’s it, you’re out.’”

He said the doping violations could be an even more compelling reason to ban Russia than the invasion. “Doping directly affects the sport,” Mallon said. “It’s supposed to be part of the sport’s rules, and if you keep breaking them, you shouldn’t be able to compete any more.”

And Russia, the historian added, keeps breaking the rules. “We keep finding,” Mallon said, “more and more stuff.”