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Alex Rodriguez was the cleanest name in baseball, the man to take back the home-run record with an apple-pie smile and no juice in his veins. But then the truth came out - A-Rod was as crooked as a Texan billionaire with an English cricketer's wife on his knee. Steve Deane and Winston Aldworth look at the hall of shame he has entered.
1: A-Rod becomes A-Fraud
Alex Rodriguez was going to be the man to lead America out of the era of steroids, corked bats and tainted records and into a bold new world of honesty, integrity and all-round goodness. He was going to do it on nothing more than apple pie and natural talent. And, as it turned out, three years of twice monthly steroid injections, followed by six years of bare-faced lying.
"I knew we weren't taking Tic Tacs," baseball's highest paid player and odds-on favourite to break Barry Bonds' already tainted home run mark finally admitted this week after being outed by Sports Illustrated. Although just one of 104 major league players to test positive for not taking Tic Tacs in 2003 at a time when doing so wasn't banned in baseball, the reputation of the best player of a generation is in tatters.
"If this is Humpty Dumpty, we've got to put him back together again, to get back up on the wall," Yankees' general manager Brian Cashman said of his US$275 million ($537.5 million) public relations disaster. Humpty Dumpty insisted he had never knowingly taken any illegal substances and would be consulting his lawyer about Cashman's comments linking him to the scandal.
>>Video: US President Barack Obama says A-Rod scandal is 'depressing'
2: Ben Johnson
The most-famous drug cheat in Olympic history was, in fact, little or no worse than the men who ran alongside him. Four of the top five finishers including Ben Johnson in the 1988 Olympic 100m race all tested positive for banned drugs at some point in their careers: Carl Lewis (who ultimately bagged the gold), Linford Christie (who landed the silver) and Dennis Mitchell all dabbled.
But it was Johnson who become the focal point for condemnation of drug cheats.
He set a new 100m world record of 9.79 seconds, but the glory lasted just three days before he tested positive for the anabolic steroid Stanozolol.
Johnson's coach, Charlie Francis, vehemently denies his runner had taken Stanozolol - he much preferred Furazabol.
>>Video: Ben Johnson breezes to Olympic gold in Seoul
3: Barry Bonds
In 10 days' time, Barry Bonds will be in court defending charges of obstruction of justice and perjury. The charges allege Bonds lied when he told a Grand Jury investigating steroid lab Balco that he had never used performance-enhancing substances.
Bonds' steroid use has never been proven and he maintains remarkable changes in his physique were down to taking, er, flax-seed oil. Not everyone believes him.
"If Barry Bonds has never taken steroids then I've never danced around naked with a lampshade on my head," one contributor to a Bonds hate website (yes, there are a few) opined.
In fairness to Bonds, he was unpopular enough to receive frequent death threats long before the drugs allegations that have haunted his every step since he beat Hank Aaron's mark of 733 to become baseball's all time dinger leader. "Barry Bonds' public persona is that of a self-centred, arrogant, race-obsessed egoist," said the bloke with the lampshade on his head.
4: Michelle Smith
Some things are just too good to be true. Such as the rise of Michelle Smith (later De Bruin) from an ageing, off-the-pace swimmer to a triple gold medallist - Ireland's first in the pool - in Atlanta in 1996.
Marrying Dutch field athlete Erik de Bruin, who was suspended in 1993 for returning unnaturally high testosterone levels, didn't do much for Smith's reputation.
Nor did the accusations of vanquished American rival Janet Evans at a press conference after her defeat.
Her repeated unavailability for random testing only heightened suspicions about her behaviour and two years after the Games Smith was finally banned after providing a urine sample that had been diluted with whisky. A Fina statement at the time said the sample contained "unequivocal signs of adulteration" - a bit like the record books, then, as Smith was never stripped of her medals.
5: Floyd Landis
The 2006 Tour de France winner hoped to usher in an era of drug-free cycling. Sadly he was stripped of the title after returning a drug test following the tough 17th stage that suggested he had roughly the same amount of testosterone coursing through his veins as the entire US Marine Corp.
His cycling team, Phonak, sacked him immediately, but the scandal was rolling. Soon Phonak was disbanded, a swag of other cyclists were busted and the sport's reputation hit its lowest ebb. Thanks Floyd.
6: Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery
Once upon a time Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery were the king and queen of the sprint world. They both held world records, fistfuls of medals and even produced a son, Tim Jr.
Then came BALCO, The Clear, a couple of white lies to some federal investigators, jail, a cheque fraud and money-laundering scheme, more jail, and, finally, for Montgomery, five years in the clink for dealing heroin. Oh, and they both had to give all of their medals back.
It wasn't all bad news for Jones though, who did manage to wrangle an appearance on Oprah where she informed the American people that she would have cleaned up in Sydney with or without the help of Tetrahydrogestrinone. Make yours a Tui, Marion? No worries.
>>Video: Marion Jones admits steroid use
7: Florence Griffith-Joyner
Florence Griffith-Joyner dropped dead in September 1998, just 10 years after she had blasted down the track at the Seoul Olympics, setting a 200m world record of 21.34sec that still stands.
Flo Jo never failed a drugs test - it was her own brilliance that damned her. Going into the 1988 season, her best 100m time was a respectable 10.96 seconds. In the space of a few months she knocked it down by a scarcely credible by 0.47 seconds, to set a record no one has approached since.
Her secret? Healthy living, she said. But Griffith-Joyner's decision to retire from track and field after her 1988 Olympic triumphs came with the knowledge that mandatory random drug testing was about to be implemented throughout the sport.
>>Video: Flo Jo's record-setting 200m Olympic final
8: Ekaterini Thanou
Up there with "the dog ate my homework", the old "we had a motorbike crash, so missed our drugs test" line buys little sympathy.
Greek sports fans were horrified when, on the eve of the 2004 Olympics, Ekaterini Thanou and her training partner Konstantinos Kenteris were hospitalised in a motorcycle crash.
Cynics quickly spotted a fraud.
The pair - miraculously unhurt in the "crash" - had failed to attend a drugs test earlier in the evening.
Ironically, Thanou stands to benefit from the hounding of drug cheat Marion Jones. The Greek finished second to Jones in Sydney 2000 and is in line to be awarded the American's gold medal should the powers that be deem the win to be tainted.
9: Marco Pantani
Perhaps the most popular drugs cheat of all time. Twenty thousand people attended the funeral of the man known as The Pirate after he died of a cocaine overdose in 2004.
Rated the greatest hill climber of all time, in 1998 the colourful Italian won the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de France. A year later he was disqualified when leading the Giro for returning an unnaturally high red blood cell count - an indicator of EPO use.
Pantani drifted out of cycling and into depression. The last entry in his diary was: "For four years I've been in every court, I just lost my desire to be like all the other sportsmen, but cycling has paid and many youngsters have lost their faith in justice. All my colleagues have been humiliated, with TV cameras hidden in their hotel rooms to try and ruin families. How could you not hurt yourself after that?"
10: Jose Canseco
In his first tell-all book, Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits & How Baseball Got Big, slugger Jose Canseco claimed former girlfriend Madonna was infatuated with him but that he was never really that into her. Oh, and that 85 per cent of Major League baseballers used steroids.
He also claimed to have personally injected single-season home run recordholder Mark McGwire, Jason Giambi, Rafael Palmeiro and Ivan Rodriguez.
At the time his claims were widely rubbished, discredited as the rantings of a bitter attention-seeker. Canseco has been working on a second book that includes accusations about A-Rod. It has a much shorter title than his first: Vindicated.
