Time running out to nail the drugs cheats who shamed London 2012

One hundred and 40 athletes have been disqualified from London 2012, with another 10 doping cases set to emerge from those Games before the end of the month.

How many more may have got away with it will never be known. For these are the last days in which the final dopers from the London Olympics can be caught before the eight-year statute of limitations — extended to 10 for subsequent Games — is reached.

But whatever the final count, London has long since statistically been the dirtiest Games in history.

Its architect, Lord Coe (below), believes it is the wrong tag: “If you don’t go fishing, you don’t catch fish, and the level of technology applied to testing in London was a completely different order than at previous Games.

“I would rather have the ability and technology to retrospectively test and, on some occasions, come up with some embarrassing positives.

“It would have been nice to have been able to do it at the time but we were able to weed out people that did traduce their performances or traduce the performances of other athletes.”

The capital and its Games also hold the unwanted birthplace of sorts for Russian state-sponsored doping programme.

The architect of the cheating, Dr Grigory Rodchenkov, had been locked away in a psychiatric unit in Russia when he was officially invited to visit the anti-doping laboratory prior to London 2012. Rodchenkov remains in hiding in the US but his lawyer, Jim Walden, argues that invitation was key both to the subsequent story and him staying alive.

“They had introduced very powerful psychotropic drugs to him for a period of time and then suddenly stopped giving them to him,” he said. “So, it allowed his mind to reclear.

“What we know is that, until he was invited, there was no clear path for him getting out. As a result of the invitation, the Russians could not have substituted anyone else but him. So, in a way, it was his lifeline. He had a great deal of access to the London Olympics. He was there in the lab, understood the methodology Russia was using at the time to try to cover up dirty athletes.”

Quite what numbers of athletes will have been cheated at London 2012 will never be clear. Paula Radcliffe had targeted competing there but lost her fitness race to do so.

In the aftermath, she has seen the retrospective failed tests rack up, not least of all in the women’s 1500metres, generally regarded as the Games’ dirtiest race.

“Races like the 1500m in 2012 have been decimated,” she said. “I don’t think I would ever have imagined it would be as badly hit as it has been, and the results be so badly distorted. It’s heartbreaking and it’s happened over and over again.

“The ramifications from London 2012 are still huge and the battle is a long way from being won.”

There are some that argue London is not even close to being the dirtiest Games, notably World Anti-Doping Agency founding president Dick Pound.

“There were a lot of dirty Games when you could never get into countries like East Germany and the Soviet Union to do testing,” he said. “The Soviets used to have ships with laboratories and athletes would be brought to be tested just before their events. If they tested positive, they were declared to be injured or ill, so there were never any official positives. Now it’s a little better.”

The International Olympic Committee were responsible for drug-testing at London 2012. Their chief medical officer is Richard Budgett, who was in the same boat as Steve Redgrave in winning his first Olympic gold in 1984.

He puts the spike in positive retrospective numbers down to “more target testing than ever before” but admitted: “We may never know whether some cheats have got away with it. But I’m pretty confident the expert intelligence from the time of the Games, combined with further intelligence over the next eight years, means the vast majority of cheats have been caught. But you just never know whether some slip through.”

For lawyer Richard McLaren, who detailed the extent of Russian cheating in 2012 and beyond in a damning report in 2016, there is no question where the capital’s Games rank.

“What looked like the cleanest Games ever became the dirtiest,” said the Canadian. “Athletes would compete dirty knowing they might not get caught but they didn’t care. The glory of the moment is so important and, the fact you may get caught out years later, the thrill of what you’ve done is still there and can’t be taken away, even though the medals can be.”

For many who competed cleanly at London, they may never know where they might have legitimately finished.

Bloodsport, the story of systematic doping of London 2012 and Sochi 2014, is available on BBC4 and BBC Sounds: bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000kmjm