What makes Rick DeMont’s ears glow are the stories of the college boys. For example, when Mark Spitz, the superstar on the US swimming team, brags about his womanizing. DeMont is 16 years old, the youngest in the team and yet, as the world record holder in the 1500 meter freestyle, is hoping for a medal at the Olympic Games in Munich. Beyond the pool, the curly-haired lanky from San Rafael, California likes to hang out in the Olympic Village record store. And he doesn’t think the bookstore is bad either, because there they have what a teenager from prudish America doesn’t know: booklets with photos of naked women.
“It was the summer of my life,” says DeMont five decades later in a transatlantic phone call. Carefree weeks that feel like an endless school trip, even if at some point DeMont’s mother arrives and insists on personally cutting her son’s hair in the village.
In retrospect, Rick DeMont recounts what happened next with remarkable composure: how he first won gold in the 400-meter freestyle race on September 1 – and then went down in Olympic history as the first athlete whose victory was denied because of doping.
In Munich, the IOC sets up a doping laboratory for the first time
At that time one could hardly speak of a fight against doping. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) isn’t particularly keen on investigating, although it’s an open secret that the death of Danish cyclist Knud Enemark Jensen in Rome in 1960 may have had something to do with the medication his coach gave him before the race. In Mexico City in 1968, there were only a few hundred banned performance-enhancing drug stops; one athlete, Swede Hans Gunnar Liljenwall, lost his bronze medal in modern pentathlon due to a positive result.
In Munich, the IOC is setting up a doping laboratory for the first time and has a good 2,000 urine and less than 100 blood samples examined. In the end, seven Olympians are disqualified, most for taking amphetamines or ephedrine. Among other things, it caught the Austrian weightlifter Walter Legel. Mongolian Bachaawaagiin Bujadaa loses his silver medal in judo. And then this is the most spectacular case: Rick DeMont.
The young swimmer is proven to have asthma, and the US swimming officials also know that. He takes pills for occasional shortness of breath, including the night before his 400-meter freestyle heat on September 1st. He easily reached the final. In the final in the evening, DeMont is only sixth after half the distance, but then he finishes first with a lead of a hundredth of a second (equivalent to 2.94 millimetres). The 10,000 spectators in the Olympic swimming pool celebrate the teenager. Then he has to go to the doping control.
“They just couldn’t imagine me hitting grown men”
Three days later, on the morning of September 4th, there is a knock on the door of Rick DeMont’s apartment. It’s the day he wants to win another gold medal in his flagship event, the 1500m freestyle. A US official asks him: “What medication did you take?” He points to his asthma pills, the official takes them with him. DeMont has ill feelings.
Shortly thereafter, he is summoned to a hearing before the IOC Medical Commission. She doesn’t believe the teenager has asthma. “They just couldn’t imagine that I could hit grown men,” DeMont recalls over the phone. However, the men from the IOC allow him to swim the 1500m final. He runs straight into the swimming pool. But when the hall announcer recites the names of the eight finalists, he is not there. “Rick,” his trainer tells him, “it’s a no-go.” He’s not allowed to start. “That’s when my world went black,” says DeMont today. Photos show him and his coach crying at the edge of the pool.
His supervisors put the boy on the next plane home – with the gold medal in their luggage, simply because nobody can take it away from him. For a while it sits on the TV in the DeMont family’s living room in San Rafael. When the IOC reclaimed them in November 1972, Rick DeMont’s father waited until his son was at school, put them in an envelope and mailed them to IOC headquarters in Lausanne.
Deep voices, strong muscles and huge leaps in performance arouse suspicion
Those responsible at the IOC make an example of DeMont. They turn a blind eye to the obvious abuse of muscle-building anabolic steroids in numerous other sports. Also because there were no reliable test procedures for it in 1972. However, athletes and coaches talk openly about the fact that the teams from the Eastern bloc cannot do things right. Athletes, for example, have deep voices, thick hair and suspicious muscle masses.
Suspicion also arouse leaps in performance in the shortest possible time. For example, with a Czech shot putter who suddenly shot a good three meters further in Munich than a year earlier. Decades later, systematic state doping in the Soviet Union and the GDR will come to light, but over time there will also be increasing evidence that heavy doping was also taking place in the West.
After Munich, it will be many years before world sport and the public identify the issue of doping as a threat to the ideals of sport. For a long time, fraud was considered a kind of trivial offense. April 10, 1987 turns into a black day in western sports when the all-around athlete Birgit Dressel, who is looked after in the doping mecca of Freiburg, dies at the age of 27 from a toxic-allergic shock. 102 drugs are detected in her blood, including an anabolic.
The most spectacular doping case in Olympic history: Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson is disqualified after his fabulous race at the 1988 Seoul Games.
(Photo: Horst Müller/imago images)
The big break came on September 27, 1988. On that day, Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson was convicted as a doper – three days after he won gold over 100 meters at the Olympic Games in Seoul and set a fabulous world record of 9.79 seconds . It’s an Olympic hero crashing off the pedestal. In the following years, many top athletes are exposed as sports fraudsters, such as the racing cyclist Jan Ullrich in Germany, the first German winner of the Tour de France.
The research methods still lag far behind the progress in the development of performance-enhancing substances. The IOC is also proving to be very hesitant when it comes to sports policy – especially when the comprehensive doping system in Russia, especially at the 2014 winter home games in Sochi, is unveiled. In 2018, the IOC excluded the Russian team from the Winter Games in Pyeongchang, but allowed supposedly unaffected athletes to start as “Olympic athletes from Russia”. The same in Tokyo 2021.
Comprehensive doping system: After the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, it was revealed how military hosts Russia cheated.
(Photo: Lee Jin-man/AP)
The topic is also difficult to deal with on a political and legal level. Only the World Anti-Doping Agency Wada, founded in 1999, gradually standardized a doping code including a list of prohibited substances. An international agreement against sports fraud, which national governments conclude with Unesco, only comes into force on February 1, 2007 – 35 years after the Munich Games.
And Rick DeMont? Continues to protest his innocence. “I was tattooed for life,” he says on the phone. In 1973 he became world champion again over 400 meters freestyle, as the first swimmer he needed less than four minutes for the distance. For some, this performance arouses suspicion. “I hoped this record would take the load off my shoulders. But it wasn’t. I was still the kid who lost his gold medal.”
DeMont, after his career a swimming coach at the University of Arizona, among other places, decides after years to fight for his rehabilitation. That, he says, also had something to do with his daughter: “She shouldn’t think her father was a fraud.” Unlike most other Olympic gold medalists who have lost gold since 1972, DeMont has numerous advocates.
In December 2001, 29 years after Munich, the US Olympic Committee confirmed a mistake by its officials: DeMont had correctly informed them about his asthma and the medication; however, the association representatives had not passed the information on to the Olympic organizers. The IOC has declined to review the case to this day.