How did the women’s 1500m in the 2012 London Olympics get its unenviable reputation? Athletes who were cheated out of medals talk about what happened that day – and how the results have slowly unravelledThe 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.Sign up to Inside SaturdayThe only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine.Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.after newsletter promotionOther 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