United States at Negative-1 Gold Medals

Hot start for the U.S. Olympic contingent ... of 2000. The ↵IOC stripped the U.S. men’s 4x400 relay team from ↵the Sydney Olympics of its gold medal because one of ↵the runners, Antonio Pettigrew, recently admitted blood ↵doping during the Games.
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↵Bad news for America, sure. The real victims, though: ↵Pettigrew’s relaymates -- Michael Johnson, Alvin Harrison ↵and Calvin Harrison -- who also get stripped of their ↵medals, which is going to leave an awful empty space on the ↵teak mantle. Pettigrew wasn’t even the fastest of the four in the ↵final (that’d be C. Harrison).
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↵Nigeria took silver in the relay, so -- while no ↵announcement has been made -- it seems they’d get the ↵posthumous gold. The real impact comes for The Bahamas, who ↵with the bump from fourth to bronze would move into a tie ↵with Azerbaijan, Austria and Thailand (among others) for #50 in the 2000 ↵national medal rankings. Yeah! They’ll be parading in ↵the streets of Nassau tonight.
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↵Meanwhile, apparently they have spies in Russia! The BBC ↵reports Russian Olympians were repeatedly tipped off ahead of the arrival of IOC ↵testers. How did the IOC figure it out? Because the ↵dopers were always easily available for their random tests, ↵whereas the honest athletes who have no idea what’s coming ↵are off living life. The lesson, kids? Never be on time. ↵Punctuality is for druggies.↵