You know what they say: be careful what you wish for. At the age of 46, I had scaled the summit of my profession and was running the WADA-accredited laboratory in Moscow. Our equipment was obsolete and our staff was undisciplined and demoralised by low salaries. I needed to draft in new blood from the chemistry department of Moscow University, my alma mater, and I needed to buy some new equipment from the leading Western manufacturers.
Durmanov, now one rung above me in the pecking order, promised to talk to Fetisov, who committed to purchasing instrumentation that would double our sample throughput. I sent WADA a three-year plan of improvements, and in return received a copy of their International Standard for Laboratories. When WADA’s scientific director, Dr Olivier Rabin, told me to ‘obey the rules’, those were the rules that he was referring to.
Crouched as I was in the starting blocks at my new job, my situation looked secure, but everyone around me was quite jittery. Durmanov was focused on the upcoming Winter Olympics in Turin. Kulichenko was nervous about the forthcoming IAAF World Championships in Helsinki. The CSP director Nikolay Parkhomenko was perpetually anxious about weightlifters and chain-smoked Marlboros all day. He had plenty to worry about. Russian weightlifting led the way in doping bespredel – a situation ‘without limits’, which meant the rampant and risky abuse of performance-enhancing substances.
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Let me give you a brief overview of the anti-doping world in which I became a significant player in 2005. Vladimir Putin had been president of the Russian Federation for five years. An avid amateur judo enthusiast, he also loved sport more generally and had lured Fetisov from the New Jersey Devils’ front office in 2002 to be the czar of Russian sport. Putin’s dream was to host the Olympics, preferably in Moscow. In 2007, he partially achieved that dream, when the IOC awarded the 2014 Winter Games to Sochi, the Black Sea beach resort.
Russia’s mediocre medal hauls at the Winter Games in Salt Lake City in 2002 and in Athens in 2004 hung over Fetisov’s head. In Athens, around 400 Russian Olympians had passed pre-departure doping control in Moscow, but were caught during the Games. When I replaced Semenov, I promised Fetisov that no Russian athlete pre-tested by my laboratory would be found positive at an Olympic Games. That proved to be true, at five consecutive Games.
WADA was barely five years old, but it was getting its act together. In 2003, the first version of the World Anti-Doping Code was introduced, followed by a registry of international standards and technical documents. Then WADA launched the online Anti-Doping Administration and Management System (ADAMS), a web-based database for uploading athletes’ personal data and locations, the so-called ‘whereabouts report’ that supposedly helped testing authorities track down athletes any time and any place.
To be brutally honest, WADA staff at that time were naïve about where the doping analyses were coming from. They viewed the national and international sports federations, such as the corrupt International Weightlifting Federation, as the front line in sport doping enforcement, which was absurd. Most of the international federations hated doping control, didn’t want to pay for it and viewed the process as an unnecessary headache. Doping control meant scandals, which impacted on a sport’s popularity, sponsors, potential attendances and television revenues.
WADA had other vulnerabilities: for one thing, they thought the national doping control laboratories actually wanted to do away with doping. Another mistake was to treat all the accredited laboratories as equal, regardless of the host country’s score in the Corruption Perceptions Index, which was published each year by Transparency International. That worked in our favour because it meant that WADA believed that Russian DCOs employed by the Parkhomenko-led CSP worked in the same way that the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) did, while they couldn’t have been more different. The CSP, and by extension RUSADA, had lists of ‘untouchable’ athletes, and bribery and urine substitution were not uncommon. WADA assumed that the American laboratory in Salt Lake City and my Moscow Anti-Doping Centre both immediately reported positive results, but in fact the two institutions operated quite differently.
They also assumed that all accredited laboratories were similarly competent, which was not the case. Some WADA-accredited laboratories were just sloppy, and would reach out to other countries’ laboratories when they had to process quality control samples to gain re-accreditation.
I have held some unorthodox views about doping that are now considered pure evil, but remember my experience as an elite runner. It is assumed that sport doping is harmful, but the science doesn’t bear that out. You might read that a weightlifter died young and was ‘a heavy steroid user for years’, but if he was overdosing on steroids, he was probably also engaging in an abusive diet and training regimen. A lot of things can kill you, other than sports drugs in lethal doses.
I understand that in some countries there is a stigma associated with using steroids, but that was never the case in Russia. Synthetic steroids have advanced like any other technology – they have become less harmful and more efficient as we have learned which ones to use, how to administer them and what they can accomplish safely.
Training at the Olympic level puts significant strain on the body. Steroids reduce fatigue and trauma, and can also help muscles recover more quickly. I am not aware of any studies concluding that these substances are harmful in moderate dosages, and I know plenty of athletes who used them for years and have lived long and healthy lives.
Let me advance another controversial argument cited by proponents of doping: it brings equality. Some athletes are genetically gifted and can get to the top of their sport with natural training techniques; meanwhile, an athlete who seems unpromising can, after a modest doping regimen, show huge progress in developing skills and stamina, progressing to the point where he or she can challenge visibly stronger rivals. An average athlete might have more room for development and be more dedicated than the ‘natural’ competitor. I’ve often seen late bloomers benefit from doping. If sport was ‘clean’ that would be a reverse handicap, favouring naturally gifted athletes over their less advantaged rivals. Without doping, there is no way to overcome the ability gap.
I disdain the notion of athletes being ‘clean’. WADA loves that word, but their mission should really be to protect honest athletes. Generally speaking, Soviet and Russian athletes were almost always clean when they had to be, meaning we managed to wash out the evidence of their doping schemes before sending them into competition. They were clean in the same way that a laundered shirt is clean – you wash dirty things to make them clean. When a new methodology was used to reanalyse the urine samples of ‘clean’ Olympic athletes several years after the Beijing and London Games, hundreds of them were revealed to be dirty.
Laundry and sports have a lot in common.
This isn’t a popular line of thinking, but for someone who has spent his life in sports, it is a realistic one.
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The tenth IAAF World Championships in Helsinki were approaching, and the doping situation, especially the abuse of anabolic steroids and prohormones, was out of control. This was bespredel in action: total chaos and lawlessness.
In theory, Russian DCOs conducted surprise out-of-competition testing, but sample collection schedules were known weeks beforehand, so athletes could either make themselves scarce from training camp, or bribe a corrupt DCO and substitute a urine sample. It sounds crazy, but in some training camps, finding clean urine was a problem because so many athletes were dirty! The coaches were drinking gallons of water and emptying their bladders into their athletes’ sample bottles. In every batch of 20 samples from a training camp, four usually had the exact same steroid profile, meaning that they came from the same person – generally a coach. My friends who were coaches complained that they didn’t have enough urine inside them when DCOs showed up at training camp. Doping control was one of the largest budget line items for the CSP, but it was simply money flushed down the toilet.
The IAAF had its own supposedly sophisticated system for targeting elite Russian athletes, known as the International Registered Testing Pool (IRTP). Athletes in the pool had to enter their travel and training schedules on the ADAMS database three months in advance, to facilitate ‘surprise’ (called ‘no advance notice’) testing. A Swedish company, International Doping Test and Management (IDTM), employed the DCOs who collect the samples, but the Russian employees who worked for them were totally corrupt and athletes and coaches generally had two months’ notice of ‘surprise’ testing.
After several months in my new job, I warned Nikolay Durmanov that things were getting out of hand; when he briefed Fetisov, the former hockey star exploded in anger and summoned Kulichenko, telling him that if any Russian athletes tested positive at the IAAF World Championships in Helsinki, he would lose his job. The following day, a florid-faced Kulichenko summoned me to the House on the Embankment and asked me what to do. I said we had to collect genuine urine samples from the worst offenders, and make sure that they voided immediately after a training session.
Kulya started collecting real dopers’ urine and delivered it to us in plastic soda bottles. The samples usually contained oxandrolone, Oral Turinabol, methenolone and, less often, traces of stanozolol. The male athletes were much more disciplined than the women; some of the girls showed several different anabolics in their samples. We called them the ‘cocktail girls.’ (It was crazy to see Turik [Oral Turinabol], my old friend from my running years, back in fashion after more than a decade.) This soda bottle pre-testing worked – the incorrigibles got the message and cleaned up their act. Russian athletes won seven gold medals in Helsinki, with no positive result after doping control analysis.
The less good news was that Helsinki was the first championships where the IAAF decided to retain urine samples for eight years, for possible reanalysis. In 2005, doping control was comparatively weak, but eight years later it was more precise. Our research discovered long-term metabolites of anabolic steroids, which was revolutionary: the detection window jumped from seven days to 70 days, and more. Re-testing of the Russian athletes who had competed at Helsinki revealed a total of 20 positives: scientific progress had showed that clean urine was actually dirty.
This re-testing triggered a crazy game of time-delayed musical chairs with the Helsinki results. The first wave of reanalyses in 2013 stripped Russia of two medals – Olympic champion Olga Kuzenkova’s gold medal in the hammer throwing and Tatyana Kotova’s silver in the long jump – but Russia gained a gold when the Belarusian shot-put star Nadezhda Ostapchuk was disqualified and the silver medallist Olga Ryabinkina was promoted.
However, in 2015, a second wave of re-testing exposed 18 more positive results among Russian athletes, including Olga Ryabinkina. Those results got thrown out after an appeal to the Court for Arbitration for Sport (CAS) by Tatyana Andrianova, the bronze medallist in the 800 metres who had tested positive for stanozolol. She argued that the athletes had complied with the WADA rules in 2005 and that the eight-year statute of limitations on the reanalysis of samples had expired. The court agreed with her, and Russia retained most of its medals.
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In 2007, we ran into some serious trouble, when our two best female hammer throwers, Tatyana Lysenko and Ekaterina Khoroshikh, tested positive after an IAAF event in Doha, Qatar. It took a while for the laboratory in Lausanne to identify metabolites of a new anabolic steroid, with the odd name prohormone (it was Formadrol, 6α-methylandrostenedione), in their urine. Remarkably, while the laboratory was puzzling over her samples, Tatyana was setting another world record.
Valery Kulichenko was disturbed and summoned me to his apartment, with both women also present and the fateful bottle of Formadrol capsules in the centre of the table. It was the well-known Methyl 1-P brand, produced by Legal Gear in the USA. Together we read a sternly worded letter from Dr Gabriel Dollé, director of the IAAF Medical and Anti-doping Department, reprimanding our athletes. There wasn’t going to be any way out of this one.
The women left, and I could tell that Kulichenko knew he had a real scandal on his hands. Lysenko told reporters that she had never taken banned substances and that Kulichenko had sold her the bottle of Formadrol capsules. Valentin Balakhnichev, president of the All-Russian Athletics Federation (ARAF), fired Kulichenko. Then Lysenko’s ‘coach’-cum-boyfriend-and-car repairman, Nikolay Beloborodov, tried to shake down Kulichenko for $500,000, a sum that he said represented two years of ‘lost profits’ that would result from her suspension.
In the end, Kulya settled with them and they spent their suspension at the plushest training camps, living like royalty and drawing their full stipends, as if nothing had happened. The only rules of bespredel were that there were no rules. Athletes believed they were protected, and they were.