Jamaica's Usain Bolt, L, screams at teammate Asafa Powell after handing him the baton for the last leg of the men's 4x100-meter relay final during the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games on August 22, 2008. The team won the gold but the team was stripped of the medal Wednesday when Nesta Carter tested positive for a banned substance. File photo by Stephen Shaver/UPI |
License Photo
Jan. 25 (UPI) -- Sprinter Usain Bolt lost one of his nine Olympic gold medals Wednesday when the International Olympic Committee declared that a Jamaican teammate in the 2008 relay failed a doping test.
The governing body of the IOC in Lausanne, Switzerland, disqualified the team in the 4x100-meter relay in Beijing after re-analysis of samples from Nesta Carter resulted in a positive test of the prohibited substance methylhexaneamine, which has been used as an ingredient in dietary supplements.
The IOC retested 454 frozen samples stored from the 2008 Olympics and is in the process of additional tests from the 2012 Olympics in London.
The four members of the team -- Bolt, Carter, Michael Frater and Carter -- lose their medals. They had set a world record of 37.10 seconds. The Trinidad and Tobago's team of Richard Thompson, Emmanuel Callender, Keston Bledman and Marc Burns moved up to the gold, with Japan taking silver and Brazil bronze.
Bolt, 30, won nine golds over three Olympics, including awards in 2012 and last summer in Rio. He's the only man to win all three sprint events at three Games.
Bolt is the 100 and 200 world record holder.
Carter, 31, also won the gold as part of the 4x100 relay in Britain but did not compete in Brazil. He ran the first leg in the relays.
The Jamaican National Olympic Committee was told in May 2016 that Carter's B sample would be tested.
The Guardian reported last year that Bolt could lose a medal.
"Things happen in life, so when it's confirmed or whatever, if I need to give back my gold medal I'd have to give it back, it's not a problem for me," Bolt said last June to the Guardian.
Carter can appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Russian Tatyana Lebedeva, 40, who won silver medals in the women's triple jump and long jump in 2008, also was disqualified and stripped of her medals -- for a positive test of turinabol.
