Secret Russian Doping Plan From 1983 Revealed As Rio Games Continue

In late 1983, months before sports officials announced a boycott of the Los Angeles Olympics, sports officials of the Soviet Union sent detailed instructions to the head of the country’s track and field team.

Secret Russian Doping Plan From 1983 Revealed As Rio Games Continue

Oral steroid tablets were not sufficient, they said, to ensure dominance at the Games. They said the team should also inject its top athletes with three other types of anabolic steroids.

Giving precise measurements and timetables for the doping regimens, the officials stated they had a sufficient supply of the banned substances on hand at the Research Institute of Physical Culture and Sports in Moscow, a division of the government’s sports committee.

The document containing instructions– obtained by The New York Times from a former chief medical doctor for Soviet track and field– was signed by Dr. Sergei Portugalov, a Soviet sports doctor who took advantage of a growing interest in new methods of doping.

The document, marked confidential, referenced a Nov. 24, 1983 meeting of the Soviet Union sports committee, at which “individual profiles of special pharmacological preparation” had been approved for track and field athletes of all disciplines.

Now, 33 years later, Dr. Portugalov is a key figure in Russia’s current doping scandal. Last fall, the World Anti-Doping Agency named him as a crucial broker of performance-enhancing drugs in Russia, someone who in recent years injected athletes personally and covered up drug violations in exchange for money.

Discoveries of the recent schemes, which anti-doping authorities claimed dated back at least 10 years, prompted the international governing body for track and field athletes to in June ban Russia’s team from the Rio Games, the most strict doping punishment in Olympic history.

At the track and field events in Rio this week, only one athlete– who successfully petitioned to compete–will be representing Russia.

The 1983 document and the account of Dr. Grigory Vorobiev, the former chief medical doctor, who spent more than three decades with the Soviet track team, demonstrate new evidence of exactly how far back Russia’s government-sponsored doping stretches.

There was only one reason not to inject athletes with anabolic steroids, the officials wrote: the lack of definite information regarding how long they could be detected in drug tests.

The 86-year-old Dr. Vorobiev is quite an impressive man. Before finishing medical school in St. Petersburg, then known as Leningrad, he played for the Soviet Development Basketball Team in the 1950s, opting not to pursue a professional sports career because he considered it unstable. He was coached, he proudly stated, by the man who late led the Soviet Union to an upset victory over the United States at the 1972 Olympics.

His career in Russian sports medicine lasted through the 1990s. As his health began to deteriorate, Vorobiev left Moscow five years ago for Chicago, where his son and grandchildren reside.

During two days of interviews there, in an assisted-living complex, Dr. Vorobiev wore a blue Soviet tracksuit with “CCCP” on the back as he discussed his career. His son, who encouraged him to speak out, had accompanied him to the hospital in recent weeks and said he wanted his father’s life to be documented given the recent doping revelations.

Dr. Vorobiev, speaking Russian that was translated by his son, recalled some details more vividly than others, relying on journals, documents and black-and-white photographs of athletes in motion to recount memories dating back to 1959, when he was hired as one of the Soviet Union’s first full-time sports doctors. He specialized in improving coordination, strength and flexibility among elite athletes, with expertise in foot injuries.

He described a system in which winning at any cost without being caught was crucial. Dr. Vorobiev revealed an interesting paradox, however: as a member of the medical commission of track and field’s governing body, he surveilled doping at international competitions while aware that many of Russia’s top athletes were using banned substances.

Russia’s sports ministry and sports science institute did not respond to telephone and email requests for comment.

Dr. Vorobiev stated he was unsure whether nor not the doping scheme detailed in the 1983 document was actually carried out.

The Soviet sports officials outlined a plan for administering the steroid injections to candidates for Olympic medals who had performed well in the past while consuming low doses of oral steroids.

They suggested administering the injections during the first two weeks of March and last week of February 1984, ending the regimen 145 to 157 days before competition began and ensuring that athletes were engaged in “maximum or sub-maximum” training.

When athletes sought advice in individual consultations for performance-enhancing drugs, Vorobiev said, he instructed them to take “as low a dose as possible,” cautioning them to stay alert for cramps or changes in voice as signs they had overdone it. Above all, he emphasized that drugs were not a substitute for rigorous training.

Not everyone chose to use illicit substances, he said, defending Soviet sports as not uniformly tainted. He was incapable of estimating how many athletes had consumed drugs, adding that some who had displayed drastic physical changes had denied doping during private consultations with him.

Nevertheless, low doses of oral steroids were common among top track athletes, Dr. Vorobiev stated, claiming he would have been blamed and eventually fired had he dissuaded them from taking drugs.

East Germany, later found to have run a strong doping program, became a particular motivator after the Montreal 1976 Olympics, in which the nation won nearly as many golds as the Soviet Union.

The World Anti-Doping Agency, the regulator of drugs in sport, was not created until more than 20 years later.

Still, sports officials remained adamant about fighting drugs at major competitions. Anabolic steroids had been banned by the International Olympic Committee, and testing for them debuted at the 1976 Games, making the regimen that Soviet officials proposed for Los Angeles unambiguously prohibited.

Dr. Vorobiev said he had consistently opposed steroid injections — typically administered with a shot in the thigh or buttocks. He considered that method too concentrated and too dangerous, he said.

The three additional drugs were Retabolil, Stromba and Stromba-jet, forms of the steroids nandrolone decanoate and stanozolol. The officials had enough Retabolil in their possession, they said.

“A range of data,” the letter said, “proves that the main opponents of Soviet athletes will use the aforementioned injection form of anabolic steroids at the upcoming Olympic Games.”

In May 1984, about five months after the document outlining a doping plan was circulated, the Soviet Union withdrew from the Los Angeles Games, citing the “anti-Olympian actions of the U.S. authorities and organizers of the Games” in a statement. “Chauvinistic sentiments and an anti-Soviet hysteria are being whipped up in the country,” it said.

LONDON, ENGLAND – AUGUST 06: Yuliya Zaripova of Russia celebrates after winning the gold medal in the Women’s 3000m Steeplechase final on Day 10 of the London 2012 Olympic Games at the Olympic Stadium on August 6, 2012 in London, England. (Photo by Michael Regan/Getty Images)