Here’s the final installment of Olympians stripped of their medals:
At the 1984 Los Angeles Games, long distance runner Martti Sakark Vainio tested positive for steroids and lost his silver medal. Vainio claimed he thought he was getting testosterone shots instead of steroids, but allegedly, he had already tested positive for steroids at the Rotterdam Marathon earlier that year, but that information was covered up.
In 1988, Canadian Ben Johnson was making a name for himself as a sprinter. He set the 100 meter world record at the 1987 championships and the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul. However, the records and his Olympic bronze medals were stripped when it was learned he was using stanozolol. Johnson tried to make a case that athletes had to use performance enhancing drugs to keep up with others that were using them, but not being caught. And he may have been right – of his peers, Carl Lewis, Linford Christie, and Dennis Mitchell all tested positive for drugs, just not at an Olympic games. They all still have their Olympic medals.
At the 1992 Barcelona games, weightlifter Ibragim Samadov, who really didn’t seem to want his medal anyhow, was the only one to have it stripped. However, the 2000 games in Sydney showed a slew of returned medals in weightlifting (Armenian Ashot Daielyan, Bulgarian Izabela Dragneva, Bulgarian Ivan Ivanov, and Bulgarian Sevdalin Minchev), track (Americans Marion Jones and Antonio Pettigrew), wrestling (German Alexander Leipold), and gymnastics (Romanian Andreea Raducan). Raducan tested positive for pseudoephedrine, which is found in over the counter cold remedies. She appealed the decision to remove her gold medal. While her appeal failed, the IOC did later remove pseudoephedrine from the banned list.
Three skiers saw their medals removed in the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. Britain Alain Baxter lost his alpine skiing bronze when he tested positive for methamphetamine. He said that the positive test was due to the fact that he had bought a Vicks inhaler in America, which has different contents from the UK version. Before you go throwing away your Vicks inhalers, know that our Vicks contain levamfetamine, a mild form of methamphetamine.
At the 2004 Athens games, three Hungarians had their medals removed. It was discovered that hammer thrower Adrian Annus’s urine sample was not his own. When asked to take the drug test, he refused, which was an automatic disqualification. Hungarian discus thrower Robert Fazekas is at the Beijing games, hoping to clear his name of the 2004 drug scandal, in which he failed to provide an adequate sample. Russian shot putter Irina Korzhanenko was a two time offender, having tested positive for drugs at the 1999 world indoor championships. She refused to return the actual gold medal, saying she was not guilty.
Finally, in the 2006 Turin Winter games, Russian biathlete Olga Pyleva was stripped of her silver medal after testing positive for carphedon. The Russian Anti-Doping Committee said she took an over the counter drug for an ankle injury. There was talk of her suing the manufacturer of the drug for not listing carphedon as an ingredient on the label.