On Tuesday morning, Shannon Rowbury was sitting with her family in the lobby of a Quito, Ecuador hotel, the requisite layover on a trip to the Galápagos Islands. The greatest American middle-distance runner of her generation, Rowbury will turn 40 later this year, and the milestone called for a bucket list vacation with her husband and two young children.
By Adam Kilgore
Out of the blue, a moment Rowbury had stopped believing would happen popped up on her phone. Her agent had texted her a news release: Yet another competitor who finished ahead of her — who had cheated her — at the London Olympics had been disqualified. Rowbury started sobbing and shaking. An odyssey of suspicion and sorrow finally reached resolution. More than eight years after she ran her final Olympic race, she was in line to become an Olympic medalist for the first time.
“I had sort of given up that this day would ever come,” Rowbury said. “I feel like there’s still so many questions that I’m very much in shock and disbelief, but also thrilled. I’m very much at peace with this chapter of my life, the one that ate at me the most.”
Rowbury crossed the finish line sixth in the women’s 1,500 meters 12 years ago in London. She now stands in third place after the Court of Arbitration for Sport suspended the current silver medalist, Tatyana Tomashova of Russia, for 10 years and disqualified Tomashova’s results from a time frame that includes the 2012 Olympics.
A San Francisco native who once held the American records at 1,500 and 5,000 meters, Rowbury is not certain when or whether she will hold the bronze medal in her hands. Nothing can give her what she lost: an Olympic podium, financial and tangible benefits that compound over years, a competitive outlook free of torment. But she experienced Tuesday’s news with pure joy, nothing bitter about the sweetness.
“If my vacation is going to be interrupted, this is some of the best news I’ve had in many years,” Rowbury said in a phone interview Tuesday evening. “A lot of tears shed in the past leading up to it, but a lot of excitement. I thought justice would never get served. It feels like some good closure.”
Even before Tuesday’s ruling, the 2012 Olympic women’s 1,500 meters had been infamous. Five of the top nine finishers from the race have been retroactively disqualified, including both the original gold and silver medalists. A sixth runner was provisionally suspended for a failed drug test in 2016 before being reinstated. Tomashova had served a two-year doping ban that ended two years before London, one of several Russian athletes found to have manipulated drug-testing samples.
“The fact she was even on the starting line was crazy,” Rowbury said. “So much of that just ate away at me, the fact there could be so much corruption and cheating in our sport.”
Suspicion around the event was immediate. Fans booed Turkey’s Asli Cakir Alptekin and Gamze Bulut, the original gold and silver medalists, on their victory lap. (“The audience knew!” Rowbury said.) When Rowbury found her boyfriend (now husband) Pablo Solares on the Olympic Green, she collapsed into his arms, “just feeling like the race was unfair and there were people in it who shouldn’t be there,” Rowbury said.
Great Britain’s Lisa Dobriskey, who crossed in 10th place and now officially stands as the fifth-place finisher, said immediately after the race she had felt cheated. “I don’t believe I’m competing on a level playing field,” Dobriskey told reporters then. “People will be caught eventually, I think. Fingers crossed, anyway.”
Alptekin, the original gold medalist, was banned eight years for a doping violation in 2013. Bulut, the original silver medalist, would have been awarded gold had anti-doping agencies not found irregularities in her athlete passport in 2016. She received a four-year ban. Abeba Aregawi, the current silver medalist, was provisionally suspended for failing a drug test in 2016, only to be reinstated five months later owing to a lack of evidence.
In 2017, the IOC awarded third-place finisher Maryam Jusuf Jamal of Bahrain the gold medal, waiting to reallocate silver and bronze as other doping cases played out. A year later, it upgraded Tomashova to silver. In 2019, Rowbury said, she was notified the results were considered final.
By then, Rowbury had been stuck in a cycle of mourning and attempting to make peace. She was only 28 in London, and she channeled her energy into another Olympics. She finished fourth in Rio de Janeiro one month after Jama Aden, the coach of silver medalist Genzebe Dibaba, was arrested in Spain on doping charges.
“That was another knife in the heart,” Rowbury said. “My heart had been broken so many times by this same thing that I just couldn’t get up for a fight that felt rigged.”
Rowbury competed in one more world championship, but from 2017 through the final race of her career 2021, Rowbury failed to summon the same passion for track and field. She didn’t watch any of the Tokyo Olympics.
In recent months, multiple athletes had been restored medals after retroactive drug results. Rowbury’s friend Alysia Montano learned in May that another Russian runner, Ekaterina Guliyev, had been stripped of her 2012 silver medal in the 800 meters. She stood to be upgraded from fourth to bronze.
“Every time that happened, I was thrilled for that athlete,” Rowbury said. “But also, it would be another stab in the heart. It was just a reminder of this thing I felt powerless about.”
Tomashova’s samples from 2012 were retested in 2021, according to a statement CAS released Tuesday. There was no explanation why those results are surfacing only now. Those retests revealed the presence of anabolic steroids. CAS ruled she would be suspended 10 years while all her results from June 2012 through 2015 would be expunged, “with all resulting consequences, including the forfeiture of any titles, awards, points and prize and appearance money.”
Rowbury said she remained in the dark about how or even if she would be awarded the bronze CAS ordered to be stripped from Tomashova. Rowbury spoke Tuesday with Montano, but months after her news, Montano still had no clear idea.
“The reallocation of medals is not automatic,” the International Olympic Committee wrote in a statement emailed to The Post. The IOC follows its Olympic Medal Reallocation Principles, adopted in 2018. As a “general rule,” the IOC said, reallocation requests are submitted to the IOC Executive Board once athletes and nations sanctioned have exhausted any appeals and the international federation governing the sport — World Athletics, for track and field — has adjusted the results.
“There’s a lack of clarity about, will we get the upgraded medals?” Rowbury said. “If we do, when will it happen? How does this process unfold? All of us are a bit like, ‘Is this for real?’ ”
Rowbury is an optimist. She had made enough peace with her sport to attend the Paris Olympics as an NBC broadcaster. She marveled at the races, which she believed to be clean. It made her wonder how her life would have been different if she had competed a decade later.
Despite lingering questions and opacity on the part of governing bodies, Tuesday brought validation and joy. She said her 6-year-old daughter had planned an elaborate tea time while in Ecuador.
“I think maybe we’ll get a bottle of champagne at my daughter’s tea time,” Rowbury said, laughing. “I don’t even know. It still feels unreal.”
correction
A previous version of this article incorrectly said Genzebe Dibaba won the gold medal in the women's 1,500 meters at the Rio Olympics. Dibaba was the silver medalist; Faith Kipyegon won gold. The article has been corrected.
