Tatyana Firova
Tatyana Pavlovna Firova is a Russian sprint athlete. Firova won the silver medal in the 4 × 400 m relay at the 2004 and 2012 Summer Olympics. At the 2010 World Indoor Championships in Doha, she finished second behind American athlete Debbie Dunn in the 400 metres, obtaining her first individual world silver medal. She won the 400 m in the European Championships in Barcelona in the summer of 2010.
In 2016, it was announced that a reanalysis of samples from the 2008 Summer Olympics resulted in a doping violation by Firova. She was disqualified from the competition, and she and her teammates were stripped of their 4 × 400 m relay silver medals. She has explained that using banned substances was necessary for achieving good results: “A normal person can take banned substances if they want to. So why can't athletes take them as well? How else can we achieve high results?”
In February 2019, the Court of Arbitration for Sport handed her a four-year ban for doping, starting from 9 June 2016 and all of her results from 20 August 2008 to 31 December 2012 were disqualified.
