Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson (center) was stripped of his 100 meter gold medal at the 1988 Seoul Olympics when he tested positive for stanozolol. He admitted having used steroids when he ran his 1987 world record, so that was rescinded too. His main rival, US athlete Carl Lewis (right), tested positive in1988, but successfully blamed the traces of banned stimulants on cold medication.

US track and field world champion and Olympic gold medalist Marion Jones forfeited all prizes dating back to 2000, admitting in 2007 that she’d been doping that far back. She confessed to lying about it to a grand jury investigating performance-enhancer creations by the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO), which supplied more than 20 top athletes, and was sentenced to six months in jail.

The German sprint star and world champion in 1991 for the 100 and 200 meter distance tested positive for clenbuterol in 1995. A comeback attempt failed.

Dieter Baumann, German 5000-meter Olympics champion of 1992, later tested positive for Nandrolone and was banned for two years in 1999, causing him to miss the 2000 Sydney Olympics. He argued that someone had contaminated his toothpaste. He came back in 2002, at the age of 37, to win silver over 10,000 meters at the European Championships in Munich.

Ekaterini Thanou and her training partner Konstantinos Kenteris failed to attend a drugs test on the eve of the Athens 2004 Summer Olympics. Later that day they were hospitalized, claiming they’d had a motorcycle accident. They withdrew from the Games, and investigators ruled the accident had been staged and they were criminally charged with making false statements to authorities.

The most high-profile case in professional cycling: The US Anti-Doping Agency in 2012 found Lance Armstrong guilty of using performance enhancing drugs, stripped the seven-time Tour de France winner of his titles and banned him for life. In January 2013, Armstrong told US television personality, Oprah Winfrey, how he lied without detection for years between 1998 and 2004.

Argentine football legend Diego Maradona tested positive for Ephedrine at the soccer World Cup in the US in 1994 and was excluded from the tournament. Three years earlier he had been found to have taken cocaine.

Claudia Pechstein is the most successful Olympic speed skater, ever. In 2009, she was accused of blood doping and banned from all competitions for two years. She claimed an inherited condition was the reason for irregular levels of reticulocytes but failed to win a long legal battle. She returned to competition in 2011, winning bronze in the 5000 meter event at that year’s World Championships.

Russia’s Svetlana Krivelyova won shot put gold at the 1992 Olympics and the World Championship in 2003. At the 2004 World Indoor Championships she was awarded gold after the winner was stripped of her title for failing a drugs test. In Athens, 2004, she won bronze only after the winner was disqualified for doping. A re-test then found drugs in Krivelyova’s, and the medal was rescinded.

South African long-distance runner Gert Thys entered World Championships and Olympic Games. He won the 2006 Seoul International Marathon but was disqualified after testing positive for the steroid Norandrosterone. Thys contested the ban, pointing to laboratory errors: the same technician had analyzed both his samples, a breach of testing rules. In 2012 he was exonerated.

Jamaican former 100-meter world record holder Asafa Powell, his teammate, three-time Olympic medalist Sherone Simpson, US American sprinters Tyson Gay and Veronica Campbell-Brown all failed doping tests this summer. Powell was one of the world’s most-tested athletes in the run-up to the London 2012 Summer Olympics. He is exploring legal options.

In the first known doping incident, coaches pumped a dangerous mix of strychnine and pure egg whites into Thomas Hicks before his marathon at the 1904 St. Louis Olympics. In the absence of guidelines at the time, he was declared the winner of the race - even after collapsing at the finishing line and hallucinating for hours. The boost may nearly have cost Hicks his life.

Argentine soccer ace Diego Maradona has battled with substance abuse on two separate fronts: During the 1980s, he developed a serious cocaine habit that would follow him throughout his life and lead to some serious health scares, but he also tested positively for ephedrine in 1994, provoking a FIFA ban and the end of his prolific career as a midfielder.

Born as Heidi, Krieger was a female shot putter for East Germany at the height of the Cold War. Communist officials fed Krieger with staggering amounts of steroids, altering her appearance. Krieger began to publicly identify as transgender and later opted to have gender reassignment surgery, becoming Andreas.

A successful Canadian sprinter with a stellar track record, Johnson's doping scandal overshadowed much of the 1988 Seoul Olympics. When blood samples tested positive for stanozolol, he was disqualified three days after winning the gold medal in the 100-meter sprint. Though Johnson admitted to doping, he maintained that he had never taken stanolozol - implying that he might have been set up.

Marion Jones was sentenced to six months in prison in 2008 after lying to US federal investigators about her part in the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO) doping scandal. Jones, the most prominent athlete linked to the scandal, had denied all allegations against her but later tested positive for tetrahydrogestrinone supplied by BALCO, leading to the end of her career.

Alex Rodriguez is one of the most successful baseball players of all time, producing numbers rarely seen since the days of fellow Yankees Joe DiMaggio in the 1940s and Babe Ruth in the '20s. Rodriguez was suspended for the 2014 season after admitting to steroid abuse. He has made a comeback and hopes to redeem himself by completing 700 home runs before he retires from the sport. He has 678.

Ullrich was German cycling's poster child. He won the 1997 Tour de France and two medals at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and continued to compete internationally for several years before doping allegations first arose in 2006. He managed to dodge these until 2012, when a Court of Arbitration for Sport ruling found that he had used steroids for many years.

A number of investigations between 2010 and 2012 led to Lance Armstrong's monumental downfall in January 2013. Although allegations had been levelled at him repeatedly, Armstrong managed to hide his steroid abuse for years. Having conquered testicular cancer, Armstrong was once a national hero who even hinted at a future career in politics in his native Texas. That's now history.