Well, well, well... No one saw this coming from the London Five-Ringed Circus...

Five years after London hosted the Olympic Games, word from the Sunday Mail that it could well have been the dirtiest track and field competition of all time!

• 656 athletes competed in the finals of the different disciplines.  Of that number, 87 of them have been dinged for doping violations, the Sunday Mail has investigated.  Almost one in seven, on average at least one person in every eight-person race final (understanding many of the distance races and field events have larger fields).
• Another 138 fall into one or more categories where they are or may be associated with doping:  Coach, doctor, agent, possible missed test, or even the Russians hacking in and getting information about them to blow them up.
• Russia had 29 of their 53 Olympic finalists dinged for doping violations, a clean one-third of the 87 investigated.  (In these, unless stated, this is part of the first 87, not the second 138!)
• Turkey had nine finalists in track and field at the Olympics:  Four have been nailed for drugs.
• Jamaica had 21 finalists, seven nailed for drugs, one additional for pot (it was separated out because it's not a PED, just to make the point...)
• Belarus, seven busted out of 14 finalists.
• The women's 1500 meter final may supplant the infamous Ben Johnson 100m men's final as the dirtiest race in history.  Five years of testing, etc., have felled five of the top nine finishers, including stripping the gold medalist.
• The women's 4x100 meter final may go similarly:  Four of the eight finalist teams have one or more runners on the banned list at one time or another, three having two.  A fifth (Brazil) has one with a case still in progress.  Mysteriously, the United States, who broke the world record in the event, is not one of them.  (Are you kidding me?)

I want to leave you with a frightening Tweet -- not only in the nature of the extent of drugs in Olympic sprinting, but in what might be an obvious conclusion...

Nick Harris of SportingIntelligence, whose Tweet, retweeted by Brian Tuohy, pointed out this article, says the following about the fastest 100-meter times in history:

Of the 30 fastest men's 100m sprint times ever, only nine have been run by an athlete NOT banned for drugs - all 9 by Usain Bolt. #IAmBolt

— Nick Harris (@sportingintel) July 31, 2017

I'll say it, and I said it in a response to Harris:  It makes it even less sensical that Bolt wasn't a product of some form of human engineering -- far scarier implications than drugs.