It’s surprisingly difficult to find a certain answer to this question! Maybe that’s because, if you could find sports which definitely have no doping scandals, that would be good news, and nobody is interested in reporting good news. Whatever the reason, it seems that you can’t find a definitive list of Olympic sports where nobody has tested positive for drugs, so the only way to find out would be to choose individual sports and type the name of the sport plus ‘doping scandal’ or a similar phrase in a search engine.

There were 42 Summer Olympic sports last year, and then there are 15 winter ones (you can see the full list here), so an individual check would be a very lengthy business. However, it does seem possible to say that there are certain sports where no illegal drug use has been detected yet; and these are the sports which are about skill and judgment more than speed and strength. For example, archery appears to be free from doping problems, and these stories are also rare in beach volleyball (though they do happen sometimes as you can see here). I can’t find a badminton doping scandal either, although a team was once disqualified for match fixing.

Another sport where this doesn’t seem to be a problem is golf – again, probably because drugs wouldn’t really improve performance in this case. Within the sport of swimming there have been plenty of stories about drug use, many of which have proved to be true, but one category – the new one of synchronised swimming – has apparently kept clean so far. Still, there has only been one Olympics where this was an official sport, so it may be early days. In general, though, team sports such as this one are less likely to attract cheating through use of banned substances than individual ones, partly perhaps because it would be much harder for a whole team to engage in such practices.

On the other hand the individual sport of trampolining also seems to have a clean record, or at least there have been no public scandals about it.

So there are some Olympic sports that don’t seem to be involved in anything illegal. And of course this isn’t a complete list – for example, you can certainly find examples of doping in wrestling as a general category, but within specific disciplines like martial arts you may find that some categories are ‘cleaner’ than others –  I can find no record of a scandal about tae-kwondo, for instance although, as said before, that doesn’t prove that nothing has ever happened.

There is no doubt that overall the use of banned substances has become more and more of  a problem in the Olympics and sport in general. The drugs are getting more sophisticated, so the techniques for detecting them have to get more sophisticated too – and this in turn can lead to further complications as medically approved substances get detected by mistake for banned ones. There have also been allegations in the past that some athletes have been secretly given drugs without their knowledge by rivals hoping to destroy their careers. Obviously, anything like this is very hard to prove.

While things may have got worse lately, doping of athletes certainly isn’t a new phenomenon. Even in ancient Greece a number of Olympic contenders tried to enhance their performance by eating lizards! And soon after the Games were revived in the late 19^th century, at least one athlete was caught taking a drug to try and increase his speed. So we can certainly expect more scandals in future – it will be interesting to see if the few sports that don’t have these problems now will still be problem-free in the future.