In 1955, an advertisement my mother saw in the Meditsinskaya Gazeta newspaper while she was working in a maternity hospital in East Kazakhstan changed her life. It was for a competition for places on the advanced residency training programme at the Moscow Regional Institute of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. She sent in her CV, and she was accepted. She left the provinces and joined the top ranks of Soviet medicine.
A similar thing happened to me. One day in the summer of 1985, I was watching an international soccer game on TV and reading Sovietsky Sport when I spotted an announcement at the bottom of the back page: the All-Union Scientific and Research Institute for Physical Culture (VNIIFK) was recruiting staff for its doping control laboratory. They wanted candidates who lived in Moscow, knew chemistry and instrumentation and had a background in physical, organic or analytical chemistry.
I was pretty well versed in those subjects, but had no idea how they might be mobilised to detect doping in a laboratory. I had read about doctors collecting athletes’ blood samples and pouring them into test tubes to check for stimulants or steroids, but I’d never heard of anyone getting caught or punished inside the USSR. Yet there was plenty of evidence of chemical abuse – for example, some female sprinters, runners and jumpers had deep voices, like men, and often displayed similar musculature. That seemed strange. It seemed odd that no one ever got caught and disqualified, and that was why doping control interested me.
I phoned the institute on Monday and found myself talking to Dr Victor Uralets, one of the most accomplished gas chromatographers in the world. Like me, he had graduated from MSU’s chemistry faculty, and he knew some of my colleagues in the chemical kinetics laboratory where I was employed.
He politely asked me what kind of work I was looking for, and I explained that I hoped to find a job that would lead to a PhD in analytical or physical chemistry. He invited me to visit the laboratory, where I was surprised to find no blood samples or medical doctors. There were small jars of urine kept in freezers, and some analytical chemists working there. Uralets seemed happy about the prospect of recruiting another MSU graduate for his laboratory. He disappeared into the office of the laboratory chief, Dr Vitaly Semenov, and then invited me in.
Dr Semenov was sitting behind a huge table piled with documents and files. He was in his late forties and balding, but had manipulated his remaining hairs into a comb-over to hide the fact. He sported a small moustache and had sharp dark eyes that seemed to pierce into your thoughts while he was talking to you. I later learned that the girls in the laboratory called him Gypsy because they viewed him as a secretive and shifty character. He told me that the laboratory was launching an important new research and development programme, and they needed staff.
He asked me a few perfunctory questions and hired me on the spot, as a junior researcher reporting to Uralets.
One day I was at university and the next I was a VNIIFK employee, essentially working for Goskomsport, the State Committee for Sports and the Soviet Olympic Committee. This was the kind of change I had been craving: VNIIFK had the latest, Western-made computers and up-to-date analytical instrumentation. The move lifted my spirits and re-kindled my desire to plunge into serious laboratory work.
Dr Uralets gave me copies of foreign journal articles on gas chromatography, mass spectrometry and steroid extraction and analysis to read. While I was perusing such articles on the subway, the police would sometimes ask me to show them what I was reading; Samizdat, copies of ‘anti-communist’ literature often circulated in xerox copies, and copying machines were closely monitored in the USSR. This was 1985 and the tail end of the ‘period of stagnation’, in a country completely devoid of personal freedoms. The old Soviet Union was literally dying: the sclerotic Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev had died in 1982, followed by his equally ancient successor, Yuri Andropov, two years later and then the asthmatic Konstantin Chernenko.
The comparatively young, 54-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev had just taken over as General Secretary of the Communist Party. Once the police saw the English text and the pictures of chromatograms and mass spectra, they would relax and wish me all the best.
Just checking.
I had no idea what to expect in terms of assignments and salary; I figured that I would, at the very least, have access to some sophisticated, American-made computers that I wouldn’t find elsewhere in Moscow. That proved to be true. But through some miracle, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had managed to evade President Ronald Reagan’s technology embargo on the ‘evil empire’ that had been imposed after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Just before the 1980 Moscow Olympics – pointedly boycotted by America and its allies – the Belgian Prince Alexandre de Merode, head of the IOC Medical Commission, convinced the Americans to let us import the latest Hewlett-Packard technology necessary for the accreditation of our laboratory. When it looked like we would be sending athletes to Los Angeles for the 1984 Olympics, de Merode secured even more equipment for the Moscow laboratory; no other laboratory in Russia had equipment and computers like ours, and they wouldn’t get any until the 1990s, after the ‘evil empire’ had collapsed.
I loved working in the laboratory at VNIIFK, although I started rattling some cages almost as soon as I arrived. I was amazed to learn that testosterone and the two anabolic steroids that I had been taking for three years, Turik and Stromba, were completely undetectable, even by the latest technology. It seemed totally bizarre that the widely used and abused anabolic steroids were uncontrolled. Moreover, the first Turik sample Semenov’s laboratory had ever seen came from my personal stock, collected on the other side of the barricades, as it were. It was the same for Sydnocarb, another staple in the athlete’s formulary.
Semenov was not happy to learn this, and told me to clam up. One of the problems with the laboratory, I quickly realised, was that it had no real-life feedback about what to look for. Our senior analysts were PhD scientists in lab coats who had not spent one second in a locker room or on a running track; as a result, they had very little idea which doping drugs athletes were taking, and when they did have a definite target, their expertise lagged behind the athletes’ abilities to outwit them. And they were unable to confirm the presence or absence of substances they had never encountered.
Dr Semenov was a unique personality of that time. He was a member of the IOC Medical Commission and had a warm relationship with its chairman, Prince Alexandre de Merode, and with the president of the IOC, Marquis Juan Antonio Samaranch. Semenov’s public face proclaimed: My laboratory detects everything. That was ridiculous, but all the other anti-doping laboratories were making the same exaggerated claims. The claim of a laboratory in Los Angeles in 1984 that it could detect stanozolol, a steroid widely used among top athletes in the USSR (that we could not detect ourselves), was partly responsible for the Soviet boycott of the LA Games.
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There have been two distinct eras in the history of doping control in sport. Between 1967 and 1999, the IOC Medical Commission was in charge. Then, in 1999, the IOC established the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), an independent agency created to handle the endless headaches associated with doping control, because the IOC had been losing the war against drugs in sport.
Doping control became inevitable after several cyclists died of apparent drug-related causes during the 1960s. In response, the IOC published a list of banned substances in 1967, but the system was imperfect from the start. At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, a Swedish pentathlete was disqualified for drinking a few beers before an event – alcohol was on the list of banned substances!
The IOC’s attitude was that doping is evil: drugs could enhance an athlete’s performance, but they damaged the player’s health. This was not actually true; the athletes’ exhausting training regimens harmed them far more than most performance boosters and prompted both athletes and coaches to dream about ‘magic pills’; athletes were looking for ways to protect themselves from the physical depredations of Olympic-level preparation. The real purpose of doping is not to build muscles, but rather to help the body recover from competition or survive the rigours of training.
In other words, it was a trade-off: athletes started doping when the potential harm of overtraining exceeded the potential harm of taking drugs. The members of an athlete’s entourage – doctors, masseurs and coaches – learned how to use pharmaceutical products and how to avoid problems with doping controls. To be on the safe side, the rules were simple: don’t overdose and don’t mix too many medications. There was a pharmaceutical revolution in the 1960s, and it presented new opportunities for cheats. The doping control laboratories couldn’t keep up.
I understood how this worked. Just a few years before, my summer training sessions had left me weak-kneed, dehydrated, exhausted and peeing blood. They debilitated me far more than the anabolic steroids I started taking to help me recover; ethics aside, I preferred taking the steroids to suffering the gruelling symptoms of overtraining.
To repeat, this wasn’t some uniquely ‘Soviet’ position. Western morality proved to be just as pliable, and American athletes competing in Europe scrupulously observed ‘proper preparation’ – a euphemism for doping – to enhance their performance. I remember reading Canadian judge Charles Dubin’s 657-page ‘Inquiry into the Use of Drugs and Banned Practices Intended to Increase Athletic Performance’, published after sprinter Ben Johnson tested positive for stanozolol at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, and being genuinely surprised to read this account in English. It was crazy – Canada operated pretty much like the USSR on the doping front. The inevitable conclusion was that there was no way to win without doping.
Doping has now become a synonym for cheating, which is why in the USSR we always referred to our athletes’ ‘pharmacology’. As we justified it to ourselves, we were forced to develop schemes and protocols to keep up with our rivals, the blue-tank-top-wearing athletes from East Germany and the United States. Of course they were doping – we had no doubt. Otherwise how could they compete with, or even beat, us Soviet athletes, who had an outstanding background in science, advanced sport medicine and pharmacology, not to mention superb training camps and rigid discipline?
Doping, or cheating, was what our competitors did. Soviet athletes were patriotic, clean and honest, defending the eternal glory of communism. The virtues of doublethink were at work in the world of sport.
In 1985 there were only a few doping control laboratories: Cologne in West Germany, Ghent in Belgium, Kreischa in East Germany, London, Los Angeles, Montreal, Madrid, Moscow, Paris, Prague and Rome. Manfred Donike in Cologne was the unofficial leader of the pack. In 1969 he had invented and synthesised MSTFA, a reagent that could detect small amounts of anabolic steroids, which is still used today. Donike also insisted on accrediting doping control laboratories and harmonising analytical procedures. He established quality control and insisted on airtight record-keeping and documentation, so laboratory analyses could withstand peer review and hold up in court. He lobbied for out-of-competition testing all his life; it finally became a reality at the 1989 World Anti-Doping Conference in Moscow.
In the 1980s, with the creation of WADA still some way off, there were no agreed rules governing the national laboratories, and no shared protocols listing analytical procedures and targeted substances. The Cold War prevented the socialist and capitalist countries from cooperating.
I would remember this lesson for the rest of my life: the doping control laboratories are always behind the dopers, and are mainly factories that churn out false negative results. It didn’t take me long to realise that the VNIIFK laboratory was a uniquely Soviet institution. Its primary function was not to catch athletes who were using banned drugs but to instruct the national teams how not to get caught, providing them with details of detection windows and wash-out periods for every anabolic steroid that doctors and coaches were prescribing. The USSR didn’t practise doping control per se, but it exerted control over the permitted use of doping substances.
Everybody’s ‘clean’! Except they aren’t.
At the national team level, the ultimate goal was to pass mandatory pre-departure doping control before competing abroad – only those athletes who were certified as ‘clean’ were allowed to travel outside the Soviet Union. The system was animated by a deep-seated fear of scandal; if a Soviet athlete got busted abroad, numerous Goskomsport apparatchiks would lose their job or their Communist Party membership and with it their foreign trips, the most alluring privilege of Soviet sport.
I knew that inside the Soviet Union, national level track and field athletes used all the steroids and stimulants they could get, without fear of disqualification. Since I had never heard about a Soviet athlete being disqualified inside the USSR, it was clear that doped athletes were safe at home.
Nevertheless, there were rules. Goskomsport apparatchiks chose which athletes would be enrolled in doping programmes; not all of them were allowed in. If you were not enrolled in the programme and got caught doping during a routine in-competition test, you were punished. Besides being barred from profitable trips abroad, you might be excluded from national team training camps or lose access to coveted sporting goods such as the latest Adidas running shoes, which you would never find in a Soviet store.
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In 1986, Goskomsport and Semenov organised a meeting of the anti-doping subcommittee of the IOC Medical Commission in Moscow. The meeting was held in the Sport Hotel on Leninsky Prospect. The legendary Professor Donike, founder and director of the Institute of Biochemistry of the German Sport University Cologne, chaired the proceedings. He knew and understood sport from the inside, having been a champion cyclist and competed in the Tour de France. He told me that the riders took amphetamines to maintain their competitive spirit and fight fatigue. Later, as director of the Cologne laboratory, he parked his red bike with ‘DONIKE’ written on the frame at the door to his office.
I remember waiting for Donike with Dr Semenov in the lobby of the hotel. I helped carry his luggage, which seemed to make him feel uncomfortable, and I remember that it was the first time I had seen a suitcase on wheels. Donike was dressed sharply, in a smart tie and a crisp suit. He navigated the world quickly and had a worried face and large, warm eyes.
I introduced myself to Donike, but he had no interest in small talk and promptly asked me what methodology we used for testosterone analysis and how many positives we showed. The question upset me, because we didn’t have a detection protocol for testosterone. Semenov was walking right behind us, and although he wasn’t fluent in English, he understood what we were talking about. His grimaces were a clear signal that I should change the subject, so we started talking about instrumentation issues. I proudly reported that we had received some fancy new equipment from Hewlett-Packard – an automated gas chromatograph coupled to a mass spectrometer, which would become the gold standard for anti-doping work in years to come.
The next morning, the IOC Medical Commission visited our laboratory, with great pomp and circumstance. All the visitors wore suits and ties, and we laboratory staff wore cleanly pressed lab coats. Our female assistants, who had dolled themselves up, served coffee and snacks. I can still remember the smells of perfume and cigarettes, the tell-tale odours of foreign visitors. Dr Uralets was translating for Dr Semenov, who latched onto Prince Alexandre de Merode like a lamprey, making sure everyone knew the prince was his personal guest.
I was positioned next to our newest Hewlett-Packard instrument and sang its praises like a sales rep. When the visitors left, Donike stayed behind to talk to me, bluntly asking how I detected stanozolol and how many positives we reported. I had anticipated that question, but didn’t have a ready answer. I tried to fill the air with technical jargon, to avoid admitting that we had tons of positives. As a junior assistant exchanging information with a top-level foreign investigator, I was in a very precarious position that bordered on insubordination. But Donike kept his hand firmly on the door handle: I was trapped.
‘So tell me,’ he asked, ‘what do you do if you see a positive result?’
‘We report it to Dr Semenov, of course.’
‘And only to him?’
‘Yes.’
‘And then what?’ Donike came closer, his large eyes making me even more nervous.
‘I don’t know,’ I answered.
What could I say? Donike stared straight at me, hoping that I might add some details to our exchange, but I couldn’t. I already felt like a rat. Then he relaxed, and I felt that we had come to some kind of unspoken understanding. He urged me to come to Cologne the following year, to attend his annual workshop in doping analysis.
‘Please consider this a personal invitation,’ he said. Then he finally left my office, and I was able to breathe again.
Dr Semenov had noticed my private conversation with Donike, and asked what we were talking about. I answered that Professor Donike had inquired about testosterone detection and advised us to purchase another Hewlett-Packard system for that type of analysis.
We did that, but it didn’t change much in our war against doping. The athletes quickly learned which anabolics had become detectable and about any increase in the detection windows. The system was perfectly efficient. The moment they or their coaches became aware of any changes in our laboratory practice, they would amend their doping regimens accordingly. We were like field marshals always condemned to fight the previous war.
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When I’d started working at VNIIFK in 1985, our testing methodologies might have politely been called ‘haphazard’. When our laboratory was overloaded by samples, Dr Semenov conducted a triage on what he called ‘the catch of the day’. We had to analyse every sample from track and field athletes and from the weightlifters, who were chronic steroid abusers, and testing swimmers and cyclists was also a high priority. But when it came to archers, fencers, gymnasts and figure skaters, Semenov would take the urine samples and pour them down the sink, before reporting that ‘after all analytical investigations were duly performed, no prohibited doping substances were found’.
Soccer and hockey enjoyed a special status in the Communist Party and had their own bespoke testing plans – everyone rooted for those teams, from the factory floor to the Politburo. Doping control in hockey was also pretty lax. Sometimes we would receive urine samples from the national hockey team on Friday evening and be expected to analyse them immediately. We’d report the results to Semenov, who handled communications with the higher-ups obediently and without complaint.
The following story is an example of what our IOC-accredited laboratory had to contend with. The hammer thrower Yuriy Sedykh was a two-time Olympic champion, and a huge steroid abuser. (For the record, Sedykh has denied using sports doping techniques.) He was just six feet, one inch tall but weighed an astonishing 243 pounds, almost all of it muscle. He ingested stanozolol in such huge doses that after we had injected his sample into our Hewlett-Packard machine, an alarm sounded and it became so contaminated with stanozolol metabolites that the next few samples spat out false positives, even when we knew there were no steroids present. In laboratory practice, this phenomenon is known as ‘memory effect’ or ‘sample crossover’, but we called it the ‘Sedykh effect’.
After Sedykh set his world record in Tallinn in 1986, throwing 86.66 metres during a meet between the USSR and East Germany, we received his urine sample in Moscow. It was anonymous, but because it was selected for testing as a world record sample, and because I’d been listening to radio and television reports of his achievement all day, it was easy to join the dots. Even though I diluted his sample with distilled water at a 10:1 ratio, it still overloaded my gas chromatograph mass spectrometer with gigantic peaks of stanozolol metabolites.
The ‘Sedykh effect’ notwithstanding, we didn’t report a positive finding.
Later that year, Sedykh set a world record (which still stands) during the European Athletics Championships in Stuttgart, yet Manfred Donike, who ran the best doping control laboratory in the world, reported nothing. Yuriy must have known what he was doing.
Another high achiever in this category was the talented shot-putter Natalya Lisovskaya, who set an unbelievable world record in Moscow in 1987. She threw the five-kilogram ball 22.60 metres and then beat that new world record in her next attempt, throwing 22.63 metres, another record that still stands.
As I explained to Donike, I reported the results to Semenov, and after that – who knows?
Here is how the story ends: Yuriy Sedykh and Natalya Lisovskaya later married. They moved to France, where they live with a daughter, and they often speak out against doping in sport. In 2013 they were inducted into the IAAF Hall of Fame, the only couple on the list. Programmed to win, they are shining examples of the close relationship between the state doping programme and the ideology of communism.