Legends who fell to earth: Bankruptcy, shoplifting, adultery and disgrace. Which Olympians stayed on track - and which didn't?

By David Thomas

The best athletes in the world come together to shine every four years at the Olympic Games, showing off their perfected sporting talent.
Some take gold medals and smash world records, and other wears the pain of defeat so openly on their faces that their disappointment - and our pity for them - is what we remember more than the glory and happiness of the winners.
But what happens to the stars after the closing ceremony, once they have taken home their medals and the limelight and applause has faded? 
A look back at sporting favourites over the past few decades discovers how some continued to thrive in the sporting world, while others faced public scandal.

Nadia Comaneci - Romanian gymnast

Perfect ten: Roman gymnast Nadia Comaneci, left, wowing the world in the 1976 Montreal games, aged 14. Five years later she was made a virtual prisoner in her own country. Above right: Comanici as she is today

The gymnast hasn't quite left the Olympics behind her yet, after she took part in the London 2012 torch relay this week. John Amaechi, left, joined Nadia Comaneci on the viewing platform of the North Greenwich Arena

Aged just 14, she produced the first perfect ten score in Olympic competition - followed by six more - at the 1976 Montreal games.
She won three gold medals, a silver and a bronze and went on to get a further two golds and two silvers in Moscow in 1980.
But, during a 1981 U.S. tour, her coach defected to the West. Romania’s communist regime responded by making her a virtual prisoner.
In 1989, she escaped and the man who smuggled her out took her to America, where he exploited her for commercial gain.

 

After negative press reports, he fled, taking all Nadia’s $150,000 earnings.
In 1991, she moved to Oklahoma to work in a gym run by former U.S. double gold medallist Bart Conner.
They married in 1996 and had a son. The couple now own a chain of sports shops and a TV production company.
She has become a sporting stateswoman, representing Romania as an Honorary Consul to the U.S. and serving on several charitable boards.
This week, a fit-looking and happy Comaneci, 50, held the Olympic torch aloft on the roof of the North Greenwich Arena.

Ben Johnson - Canadian sprinter

Pumped up, literally: Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson in his blocks before the men''s 100-metre final at the 1988 Seoul Olympics.His victory was instantly controversial

Documented fall from grace: Johnson's joy was short-lived in Seoul, as he was stripped of his medal and banned from competition. Since 1988, he has made several attempts to cash in on his notoriety

His name will go down in Olympic infamy as the most notorious of all drug cheats.
In 1988, he won the 100m in Seoul  in a world record time of 9.79 seconds.
But after testing positive for the banned steroid stanozodol he was stripped of his medal, the world record and banned from competing for two years.
After returning to athletics, he tested positive again in 1993 and was banned for life.
Johnson has since made increasingly desperate attempts to cash in on his notoriety.
He was appointed coach for a football team run by the son of Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi and was once mugged by gypsies in Rome who stole $5,000 from him.
He also worked as a fitness coach to Argentine footballer Diego Maradona, has tried to launch a clothing line, made a TV advert for a natural energy supplement and has written a self-published autobiography in which he claimed to have been an Egyptian pharaoh in a previous life.
Now 50, Johnson lives in Markham, a suburb of Toronto.

Zola Budd - South African runner

Barefoot competitor: South African Zola Budd, who ran for Great Britain in 1984, above left, returned to South Africa after her PR disaster at the LA Olympics. She is pictured above right competing in California last year

Demonised: Budd was in the lead during the 3,000m final when she and U.S. crowd favourite Mary Decker collided twice before Decker fell. The ever-sportsmanlike U.S. crowd booed for the remainder of the race

Zola Budd came to world attention in 1984 as a tiny, barefoot 17-year-old in the build-up to the LA Olympics.
Unable to compete for her native South Africa, as its apartheid regime led to the nation being banned from worldwide sports, Budd was given UK citizenship and moved to Britain.
But dreams of gold disappeared when a collision with America’s Mary Decker during the 3,000m final in LA made Budd a villain.
She continued competing, becoming World Cross Country Champion in 1985 and 1986, but her only subsequent Olympic appearance was under a South African flag in 1992.
By then she had married businessman Mike Pieterse and returned to Bloemfontein.
Despite repeated splits, the couple have a 21-year-old daughter and 14 year-old twins, and now live in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where Zola coaches at a university.
Now 46, she is still a keen marathon runner... but wears shoes these days.

Mary Decker - U.S. runner

Denied gold: Mary Decker, pictured left in the LA games in 1984, and right, running LA in 2009. She set numerous national and world records during her track career but never gained an Olympic medal

As world champion at both 1,500m and 3,000m, the LA Olympics was meant to be her crowning glory.
But disaster struck for Decker midway through the 3,000m final, when her stride was twice disrupted by a collision with British runner Budd.
On the second collision, she crashed to the ground - her face distorted in agony being one of the more memorable images of the games.
Decker blamed Budd her for fall, although Olympics judges didn't share her view - exonerating Budd of any foul play.
Decker appeared at the 1988 and 1996 Games, and broke more records, but she never won an Olympic medal.
In 1997, she was banned from the track after failing a drug test. After the breakdown of her marriage to fellow runner Ron Tabb, she wed British discus thrower Richard Slaney in 1985.
The couple have a daughter, who is a sports journalist.
They live on a 55-acre property in Oregon, where 53-year-old Mary looks after their three Weimeraner dogs, sews, gardens and does the DIY on their home improvements.
Her husband trades classic aircraft and helicopters.

Mark Spitz - U.S. swimmer

Golden boy: Mark Spitz was turned into a global sex symbol following the picture of him, left, showing off his seven medals from Munich in 1972. Now, pictured right earlier this year, he has lost his famous moustache

At Munich in 1972, he won seven golds - a record that stood unbeaten for 36 years until countryman Michael Phelps grabbed eight in Beijing.
Spitz’s trademark was his oh-so-Seventies moustache - grown to annoy a coach who insisted his swimmers remain clean-shaven.
A poster showing him bare-chested draped in medals turned him into a global sex-symbol.
He earned $7million (at least £40 million in today’s money) from ad campaigns and TV shows.
Spitz, a former dentistry student, was a prickly, driven character who wanted to be a Hollywood star.
But a film career never took off. A bid to compete in the 1992 Games also ended in failure.
Even so, he still earns large cheques from media appearances.
He’s had success in the property business, started a bottled-water company and is a keen yachtsman, competing in trans-Pacific races from California to Hawaii.
He lives in the swanky Bel Air district of LA with his ex-model wife of 39 years, with whom he has two adult sons.
The moustache however, has gone. Now 62, he shaved it off when it went grey.

Mary Rand - British track and field athlete

Apple of Mick Jagger's eye: Britain's first female gold medalist in a track event,  Mary Rand (at the 1964 Tokyo Games, above left, and this year on ITV's Lorraine show) was once the Rolling Stone's idea of a 'dream date'

A chimneysweep’s daughter from Wells, Somerset, who grew up in a council house, she won a sports scholarship to Millfield College.
After getting a job at Guinness (with a free pint every lunchtime) she was picked for the GB team at the Rome Olympics in 1960.
She performed poorly but four years later, in Tokyo, she won bronze in the 4x100m relay, silver in the pentathlon and gold in the long jump.
Rolling Stone Mick Jagger declared Mary his ‘dream date’ having seen her wearing a suede miniskirt to collect her MBE from the Queen.
But she was already a married woman, having wed fellow British Olympic oarsman Sid Rand.
They had a daughter but split when Mary fell for American decathlete Bill Toomey in 1967.
They married two years later and she had two more daughters.
This second marriage broke up in the mid-1990s and she wed businessman John Reese. The couple now live in California.
Rand, 72, has had both hips and one knee replaced and can no longer even bend down to garden.

Mary Peters - British pentathlete

Going for gold: Mary Peters, above left, delighted as she goes clear in the high jump at the 1972 Munich Games, and above right at the Team GB and Paralympics GB launch party at the Royal Albert Hall in May

Podium dream: Mary Peters celebrates her gold medal with West German silver medalist Heidemarie Rosendahl, left, and East German bronze medalist Burginde Pollack, right

After her mother died when she still at school, Mary Peters' father encouraged her obvious sporting talent. For her 15th birthday he gave her two tons of sand, which he used to make a long-jump pit in their back garden.
For many years, she was overshadowed by her contemporaries Mary Rand and sprinter Anne Packer.
At 33, she made one last bid for glory and won gold at Munich 1972. She smoked a whole packet of cigarettes during the competition to calm her nerves.
Afterwards, she was made a MBE and has since been made a dame (Dame Mary Peters, Lord Lieutenant of Belfast) in recognition for her years of work trying to make a better life for people during the Troubles in her adopted home of Northern Ireland.
Mary helped raise funds for the Belfast running track named in her honour and has been a keen supporter of the Outward Bound movement.
Now 73, she has never married and lives in a cottage in Lisburn.

Olga Korbut - Soviet gymnast

Munich success: Olga Korbut, at 4ft 11in, won three gold medals but suffered multiple concussions and fractures during a punishing 20-hour-a-day training regime

'Sparrow from Minsk': Gymnast Olga Korbut captured the nations hearts when she performed during the floor exercise competition at the 1972 Olympics. Right, she is pictured in the UK for a BBC programme in 2000

The elfin 17-year-old was the star of the 1972 Munich Olympics, nicknamed the 'Sparrow From Minsk'.
At just 4ft 11in tall and weighing six stone, her pigtails and smile captivated the watching millions as she won three golds.
But during her pre-Olympic training, she suffered multiple concussions and fractures from a brutal, 20-hours-a-day regime.
She was given only one meal a day and began smoking at the age of ten in order to keep her weight down.
She later claimed that her coach regularly hit her and even raped her - allegations he denied,
She retired after winning a further gold at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal and married a Russian folk singer.
They moved to America in 1990 and she set up a gymnastics academy but had to close it in 1995 after complaints about her coaching methods being too tough.
By now, Korbut had divorced her husbands and remarried, to a website designer.
In 2002 the couple quit their luxury home, leaving unpaid bills.
Bailiffs turned up and threw her Olympic mementos onto the lawn.
Soon afterwards, a haggard Korbut was caught shoplifting groceries from a local supermarket.
Ten years on, she appears to have made a recovery.
Now living in Arizona aged 57, she works as a private gymnastics tutor and motivational speaker.

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