The Dirty Games: how London 2012 became tainted | Andy Bull

It was supposed to be the ‘cleanest ever’ Games, yet more than 100 athletes – and dozens of medallists – cheated the system

Super Saturday at the London Olympics, and at the ExCeL Centre a crowd of about 6,000 people are in arena three watching a young Kazakh called Ilya Ilyin, who is turning in what seemed to be one of the great performances in the men’s weightlifting 94kg division. With his very last lift of the competition Ilyin, 24, broke one world record in the clean and jerk, and another for a combined total. It won him the second of his Olympic gold medals. He put his success down, in part, to a diet of “horsemeat and chicken”. Four years later, it turned out that two performance-enhancing steroids, Turinabol and stanozolol, had helped too.

Ilyin was stripped of both medals. But the process of reallocating them was complicated by the fact that the Russian who came second, Aleksandr Ivanov, had been caught using Turinabol too. So had the Molodovan who came third, Anatolie Ciricu. And the Russian who came fourth. And the Azerbaijani who finished sixth. And the Kazakh who finished seventh. And the Armenian who finished 11th. By the time they had finished going through all the samples, eight of the Top 14 had been disqualified and banned. Which made it quite possibly the single dirtiest event in Olympic history, at a Games which had been sold on the promise it would be the “cleanest ever”.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3BbnadF