The EM 2014 in Zurich is still not over
Nine years after the athletics festival, dopers who were subsequently exposed have had their medals withdrawn – bobsleigh pilot Beat Hefti once experienced how the cheated feel.
Appearances are deceptive because one of them is cheating: The Russian shot putter Evgenija Kolodko (left) was found to be doping and now has to hand in her medal.
Photo: Walter Bieri (Keystone)
The promotion came overnight and for a feat Anita Marton had delivered in 2014. At the European Athletics Championships in Letzigrund, the Hungarian won the bronze medal in shot put – now it suddenly became silver. Julija Leanzjuk from Belarus, the disappointed fourth-placed, is now even on the podium – she too will be handed a European Championship medal later.
Never experienced the pedestal emotions
What happened more than a hundred times in numerous Olympic sports over the past decade has happened again: Years after the title fights, doping fraudsters are exposed, subsequently banned and the results cancelled. In this specific case, three Russian track and field athletes were found to have used unfair means in post-tests thanks to improved methods. Marton and Leantsyuk inherit. Bitter for the latter: she was denied the big moment with just such emotions on the podium. She is 39 today, and the EM medal in Zurich is her only medal in international title fights.
However, the women’s shot put is not the only ranking list of the European Championships in Zurich that is being rewritten. The hammer thrower Sergei Litvinow, son of the Olympic champion and former world record holder Sergei Litvinow senior, also contributed to this dark chapter in top-class sport. He was also stripped of the bronze medal, and he then complained on social media that the Russian association had forced him to take performance-enhancing drugs.
When and if the new medal winners will be honored is not clear. For a long time, Olympic sport and with it athletics had a hard time dealing with those who were subsequently unmasked. And also with the award of those who moved up. When 31 athletes experienced belated satisfaction in front of an audience of 50,000 at the 2017 World Championships in London and received their medals, the breakthrough seemed to have been made.
Award ceremony in your own garden
It wasn’t quite him after all. There are enough examples of athletes who have not received an appropriate official award. also the Swiss bobsleigh aces Beat Hefti and Alex Baumann. They had to wait five years until their two-man Olympic victory in Sochi in 2019 was confirmed after winner Alexander Subkov was disqualified from doping. Five years in which the anger and the lack of understanding had become huge. There was gold, but the two had to organize a celebration for themselves.
So did Jared Tallent, a walker from Australia. He had finished second over 50 km at the 2012 Olympic Games in London, and four years later he learned of his great triumph: the Russian Sergei Kirdjapkin was stripped of the gold medal after a positive follow-up inspection. So in 2016, Tallent staged an awards ceremony in their own garden.
In the gold-yellow Australian training jacket, he climbed onto a small podium, had the medal worn around his neck and had the anthem “Advance Australia Fair” played. And the way he then bowed and waved to an imaginary audience suggested some practice. And indeed: just a short time before, he had also been awarded the gold medal at the 2011 World Championships, even then a doped Russian had deprived him of the real feelings of a world champion brought.
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