The London 2012 women’s 1500m was an Olympic moment that should never have happened. Six of the top nine finishers, including every medalist, were later linked to doping. Great Britain’s Lisa Dobriskey, who finished 10th, said it best, “I don’t believe I’m competing on a level playing field.” But the truth didn’t stay buried. Stripped medals, shattered reputations, and a rewritten podium followed. Shannon Rowbury, once sixth, is now the rightful bronze medalist, and in her recent conversation, she revealed just how chaotic and heartbreaking that entire aftermath truly was.

Taking to its X handle, USADA recently shared a striking montage featuring Rowbury, where she opened up about the moment she realized something was off at the championship. Speaking candidly, she said, “In the lead-up, there was all this kind of murmuring and an undercurrent of some fishy business going on.You know, athletes that kind of came out of the woodwork — many of whom had served bans before — and now they’re back running better than ever, which is always a suspicious thing. So you think about it: of the 12 women who were in my race, at some point in their careers, nine of them have had doping bans.”

She was right all along. After a rigorous investigation by the governing authorities, the wrongs of that infamous race have finally been corrected. Original gold medallist Aslı Çakır Alptekin was stripped of her title in 2015, and years later, in December 2021, Maryam Yusuf Jamal was officially elevated to gold. With the final reordering now complete, it’s confirmed: Shannon Rowbury will receive her long-overdue bronze medal at the LA 2028 Olympics.

The athlete was on a family vacation in Ecuador when she learned she had officially been declared an Olympic medallist. A journalist had texted the news to her agent, and she passed the phone to her husband, she later told San Francisco media. “He said, ‘Shannie! Oh my God, you’re going to get bronze!’ And I just started sobbing.” Months later, IOC President Kirsty Coventry confirmed in June that the long-awaited rectification was on its way, Abeba Aregawi of Ethiopia was upgraded to silver, and Rowbury to bronze.

Speaking to an NBC affiliate in the Bay Area back in September, Rowbury couldn’t hide her relief: “I feel really blessed that my Olympic story seems to be having a happy ending, which is something I had kind of given up on.”  With her newly awarded bronze, Rowbury now stands alongside Jenny Simpson as one of just two U.S. women in history to medal in the Olympic 1500m, a remarkable capstone to a career she wrapped up in 2020. Her story came to a spectacular end, but this was not the case back in 2012, as she was completely broken.

“Felt like the race wasn’t fair,” Shannon Rowbury said about the London 2012 race

While having a conversation with the Guardian, the former athlete was blunt, racing against doped athletes never feels fair. Expressing her thoughts, the newly minted 2012 Olympic bronze medalist stated, “When you’re competing against someone who’s cheated, their bodies don’t behave the way a normal, clean body would when everybody else is fading. They seem to have these other gears. They don’t seem to be impacted by lactic acid in the same way as everybody else, because they aren’t like everybody else. They’ve cheated.”

After the 2012 London Olympics, Rowbury didn’t try to hide how shattered she felt. As soon as the race ended, she found her then-boyfriend, now husband, Mexican middle-distance runner Pablo Solares, and broke down in tears. It’s not the medals that hurt her; it was the fact that she ran a race that was not fair. “The hardest thing wasn’t that I had missed the medal,” she says. “It was more that it felt like the race wasn’t fair, and that no matter what I could have done, I wasn’t on a level playing field. That injustice was hard for me to accept. “

Now that the wrongs have finally been righted, Rowbury is set to receive her medal years after hanging up her spikes. How will she feel in that moment, and what kind of energy will she carry on that day? Well, we’ll have to wait until the 2028 Olympics to find out.