Doping infractions are often discovered well after the fact, and can result in the stripping of medals many years after their award.
The vast majority of these have occurred since 2000 due to improved drug testing methods, with only 20 stripped medals coming from pre-2000 editions of the Olympic Games.
The country with the most stripped medals is Russia (and Russian associated teams), with 54,[2] more than four times the number of the next highest, and 32% of the total.
[4] A member of the IOC Medical Commission, Manfred Donike, privately ran additional tests with a new technique for identifying abnormal levels of testosterone by measuring its ratio to epitestosterone in urine.
These athletes are not included in the list as they were disqualified before physically receiving their medals, and in any case were never guaranteed to win them going in to the final round of competition.
[20] Russian wrestler Besik Kudukhov failed a drug test in 2016 from a sample taken when he competed in the 60 kg freestyle wrestling event at the 2012 Olympics.
DeMont originally won the gold medal in the 400m freestyle swimming, but the International Olympic Committee (IOC) stripped him of his gold medal[22] after his post-race urinalysis tested positive for traces of the banned substance ephedrine contained in his prescription asthma medication, Marax.
The positive test also deprived him of a chance at multiple medals, as he was not permitted to swim in any other events at the 1972 Olympics, including the 1,500-meter freestyle for which he was the then-current world record-holder.
[150][151] In 2005, the Court of Arbitration for Sport restored the medals of the remaining five due to the fact that, according to the rules of the time, a team should not be disqualified because of a doping offense of an athlete who did not compete in the finals, but in 2008, Pettigrew admitted to the use of doping from 1997 to 2003, meaning that the team was disqualified.