Ten or so years ago the Evening Standard ran the billboard headline “London Fashion Week Cocaine Shock”. Presumably the twist was that there was someone alive surprised to find it was going on, since the revelation seemed just about as startling as the fact they were playing baccarat in Rick’s place. Over Christmas, the International Weightlifting Federation dropped another bombshell when it announced that five Olympics weightlifters have just been provisionally suspended because some “adverse analytical findings” were discovered when the International Olympic Committee recently retested samples provided in 2012.

There were 260 weightlifters at London 2012. So far, 24 have failed tests.

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The IOC is keeping the London 2012 samples for 10 years, so it can take advantage of the new testing technology developed since. The retest results have been coming in an insistent drip, drip, drip, like a leaking tap no one has bothered to fix. It’s left quite a puddle of mess. A Kazakh hurdler, Natalia Ivoninskaya, failed a test in October, the Latvian long jumper Ineta Radevica failed a test in November, now these five weightlifters – Oleksiy Torokhtiy, from Ukraine, Ruslan Nurudinov, from Uzbekistan, Melanie Daluzyan, from Armenia, Mikalai Novikau, from Belarus, and Valentin Hristov, from Azerbaijan – failed tests last month.

Torokhtiy and Nurudinov are Olympic champions. Torokhtiy, who won the men’s 105kg title in 2012, is an interesting case. His win was such an upset even he seemed surprised (“In sport you can never be sure in anything,” he wrote, “except drug tests.”). He parlayed his success into a second career as a strength and fitness coach. He has a YouTube channel with 83,000 subscribers, an Instagram account that is three times as popular, and his own clothing line, Warm Blood, Cold Mind. He comes across as a likable guy, who has done a lot for the sport. On 23 December he addressed the failed test in an Instagram post.

“A few days ago I received an official letter from the International Testing Agency which notified me that after the retesting of my six and a half year old samples for the 2012 Olympic Games they found a banned substance. At this time I have more questions than answers. All test, before, during and after the Olympic Games didn’t show anything! More than that, I literally trained for almost a year with a torn meniscus and didn’t allow myself to take painkillers. I urge all athletes of all ranks, from beginner to professional to personally check the antidoping rules of IWF, the Wada list of banned substances, and EVERYTHING that is ingested by you, especially your supplements, the ingredients of which are the only factor which you can’t truly control.”

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Presumably that includes the supplements he is flogging on his website, too. But anyway, another week, another failed test. The record books are rewritten, asterisks added, results struck through, runners-up bumped up, and everyone who cares grows a little less certain about what they can really believe. Life goes on. A couple of days later, Torokhtiy was posting happy snaps of his family wishing his followers a merry Christmas, and pitching them a new idea for a weightlifting camp – “10 days together, first part of the day we’ll be training and then volleyball, swimming pool, BBQ and a lot of socialising! What do you think?”

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Radevica says she is not sure how she failed her test either. She was the European champion in 2010 and won silver at the world championships in Daegu in 2011 after the Russian athlete who finished ahead of her, Olga Kucherenko, was disqualified because she tested positive. Radevica received that silver only last year. Now she has lost it again. “Throughout my career, I have always been against the use of unauthorised substances and I am firmly opposed to illegal substances in sport at the moment,” Radevica said, “which is why I have been particularly unlucky.” She has just stepped down from her job as the head of the Latvian athletics federation.

Altogether, then, the London 2012 list of failed tests runs 116 long, which is an Olympic record, beating the mark of 86 set at Beijing. There are three years of testing left, so the final figure will be higher. London, which was supposed to be the cleanest Games in history, turned into the dirtiest. Of course, those are two different sides of the same coin. The IAAF president, Sebastian Coe, argues that the reason so many dopers have been exposed is because the authorities were so determined to catch them. If they had been so willing, and the technology so able, in the 1970s, 80s or 90s, the mark might be as far out of reach as one of those fossilised athletics records such as Flo Jo’s 10.49sec 100m.

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Perhaps. Though anyone who is paying attention must suspect Lord Coe is underestimating the size of the problem. One piece of research into the prevalence of doping in athletics, an academic paper called Doping in Two Elite Athletics Competitions Assessed by Randomised Response Surveys, which was conducted in 2011 and published in 2018, suggests the problem was likely a lot more widespread than that tally of failed tests suggests. In an anonymous survey of athletes at that Daegu world championships in 2011, a year out from London, 43.6% of the respondents admitted to taking performance-enhancing drugs in the previous year.