Bolt loses relay Olympic gold after Jamaica's Carter tests positive

Usain Bolt made history as the first sprinter to sweep three gold medals at three Olympic Games. Now he's losing a piece of his historic hardware.

Bolt will forfeit an Olympic gold won at the 2008 Beijing Games because his Jamaican teammate was caught doping.

Nesta Carter was disqualified from the 4x100 relay that won gold in Beijing after a reanalysis of his sample found the banned substance methylhexaneamine, the IOC announced Wednesday.

The IOC has retested hundreds of samples stored from the 2008 and 2012 Olympics to possibly detect banned substances that were not originally identified at the time of the Games. Testing has improved since London to detect long-term metabolites.

Carter, 31, ran in the prelims and the final in Beijing.

The sanction against Carter wasn't surprising. The Guardian reported last year that Bolt could lose a medal. At the time he said it would be "heartbreaking" but that it's "just one of those things."

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"Things happen in life, so when it’s confirmed or whatever, if I need to give back my gold medal I’d have to give it back, it’s not a problem for me," Bolt said last June, according to a report in the Guardian.

Carter also won gold as part of the 4x100 relay in London.

In Beijing, Trinidad and Tobago took silver in the 4x100 followed by Japan and Brazil. The American men dropped the baton in the prelims. Bolt ran the third leg of the relay with Asafa Power the anchor as Jamaica set a world record.

The Jamaican National Olympic Committee was told in May of 2016 that Carter's B sample would be tested. In October, Carter's counsel sent a statement to the IOC that said the athlete had been using Cell Tech and Nitro Tech to help with recovery and to build up muscle mass during 2008. Carter said he had given several samples for doping control while he was taking the substances leading up to the 2008 Olympics and had never tested positive.

In its decision, the IOC disciplinary commission said that Carter's claim of "unknowing ingestion of a supplement would not and could not prevent the finding of the commission of an anti-doping rule violation."

The commission also said that Carter did not provide any real evidence that the supplements he declared on his Doping Control Form might have been the likely source.

"On the contrary, the fact that the Athlete used such supplements regularly and that this did not lead to other problems, supports the likelihood that the source of the prohibited substance was not the supplements mentioned by the Athlete," the decision read.

Carter, who did not compete in Rio last summer, can appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Russian Tatyana Lebedeva, an Olympic silver medalist in the women's triple jump and long jump in 2008, was also disqualified and stripped of her medals for doping. Her samples were also reanalyzed, the IOC said.