1983 Seventeen athletes, including two from the United States, test positive for anabolic steroids at the Pan American Games in Caracas, Venezuela, and are disqualified. Eleven others leave the games in protest.
1987 EPO emerges as a doping agent, and over the next three years, 17 Dutch and Belgian professional cyclists die after injecting it.
1988 After winning the 100 meters at the Seoul Olympics, Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson is stripped of his gold medal after testing positive for the steroid Stanozolol.
1996 Irish swimmer Michelle Smith medals four times in Atlanta. Two years later, FINA, the governing body of international swimming, finds her guilty of manipulating a urine sample for an out-of-competition test. Smith is banned from competition for four years and misses the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
1998 Four days before the Tour de France, Willy Voet, a masseur for the Festina cycling team, is caught with 400 vials of performance-enhancing drugs. The team is asked to leave the Tour.
1998 In August, shortly before breaking Roger Maris's record of 61 home runs in a season, St. Louis Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire acknowledges that he has been using androstenedione, an androgenic steroid, for more than a year.
1998 U.S. runner Florence Griffith-Joyner, a three-time gold medalist, dies in her sleep from a heart seizure at 38. It is widely suspected that she used human growth hormone to increase her strength.
2003 Bernard Lagat of Kenya, a bronze medalist at the Sydney Summer Games, tests positive for EPO and is banned from the World Track and Field Championships in Paris. He had planned to run the 1,500 meters.
