Late in 1983, months before they announced a boycott of the Los Angeles Olympic Games, sports officials of the former Soviet Union sent detailed instructions to the head of the nation’s track and field team.
Oral steroid tablets were not enough to ensure dominance at the 1984 Summer Olympics; the team should also inject its top athletes with three other kinds of anabolic steroids, they said.
Providing precise measurements and timetables for the doping regimens, the officials said they had a sufficient supply of the banned substances on hand at Moscow’s Research Institute of Physical Culture and Sports, a division of the government’s sports committee.
Illustration: Mountain People
The potent drugs were critical to keeping up with the competition, they wrote in the instructions.
The document — obtained by the New York Times from a former chief medical doctor for Soviet track and field — was signed by Sergei Portugalov, a Soviet sports doctor who went on to capitalize on a growing interest in new methods of doping.
Now, more than 30 years later, Portugalov is a central figure in Russia’s current doping scandal.
In fall last year, the World Anti-Doping Agency named him as a key broker of performance-enhancing drugs in Russia, someone who in recent years injected athletes personally and made a business of covering up drug violations in exchange for money.
Revelations of the recent schemes, which anti-doping authorities said dated back at least a decade, compelled the international governing body for track and field to bar Russia’s team from the Rio Games — the most severe doping penalty in Olympic history.
At the track and field events in Rio this week, no one will represent Russia, a nation that is usually a fixture on the medals podium.
The 1983 document and the account of Grigory Vorobiev, the former chief medical doctor, who spent more than three decades with the Soviet track team, provides new evidence of how far back Russia’s state-sponsored doping stretches.
WINNING ABOVE ALL
At 86 years old, Vorobiev still stands more than 1.82m tall. Before finishing medical school in St Petersburg, then known as Leningrad, he played for the Soviet Development Basketball Team in the 1950s, choosing not to pursue a professional athletic career because he thought it unstable.
He was coached, he said proudly, by the man who later led the Soviet Union to an upset victory over the US at the 1972 Olympics.
His career in Russian sports medicine lasted through the 1990s. In deteriorating health, Vorobiev left Moscow five years ago for Chicago, where his son and grandchildren live.
Over two days of interviews there, in an assisted-living complex with Russian-language newspapers lying around the lobby, Vorobiev wore a blue Soviet tracksuit with “CCCP” — a Russian acronym for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — on the back as he recounted his career.
He spoke at the encouragement of his son, who had accompanied him to the hospital in recent weeks and said he wanted his father’s life documented in light of the recent doping revelations.
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 trigger memories dating 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.
With little emotion, he described a system in which winning at any cost without getting caught was paramount.
He projected loyalty to his country while plainly wrestling with contradictions: As a member of the medical commission of track and field’s global governing body, he policed doping at international competitions while knowing that many of Russia’s top athletes were using banned substances.
Russia’s Ministry of Sport and sports science institute did not respond to telephone and e-mail requests for comment.
Vorobiev said he was not sure whether the doping scheme detailed in the 1983 document was carried out. Regardless, the communication captures the results-oriented mentality of the nation’s sports committee, which he said intensified over time as athletes became preoccupied with drugs.
By the 1970s, he said, most of the several hundred athletes with whom he worked were asking about performance-enhancing drugs, particularly after traveling to international competitions.
When athletes sought advice in individual consultations, he said he told them to take “as low a dose as possible,” cautioning them to watch for cramps or changes in voice as signs that they had overdone it.
Most of all, he stressed that drugs were not a substitute for rigorous training, he said.
Not everyone chose to use illicit substances, he said, defending Soviet sports as not uniformly tainted.
He was unable to estimate how many athletes had used drugs, adding that some who had shown drastic physical changes had denied doping during private consultations with him.
However, low doses of oral steroids were common among top track athletes, Vorobiev said, asserting that if he had dissuaded them from taking drugs, he would have been blamed for poor results and summarily fired.
East Germany, later found to have run an aggressive doping program, was a particular motivator after the 1976 Olympics, in which the country won nearly as many gold medals as the Soviet Union.
The anti-doping movement was in its infancy at that time; the World Anti-Doping Agency, the regulator of drugs in sport, was not created until more than 20 years later.
Still, sports officials were conscious of the need to combat 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.
Vorobiev said he had consistently opposed steroid injections — typically administered with a shot in the thigh or buttocks, adding that he considered that method too concentrated and too dangerous.
The 1983 letter — addressed to Vorobiev’s boss, the head of Soviet track and field — cited competition as a main motivation for adding injections to the “special pharmacological profiles” developed for national athletes after a meeting of the country’s sports committee on Nov. 24, 1983. (The letter was translated independently from the original Russian by the New York Times.)
The three additional drugs were Retabolil, Stromba and Stromba-jet, forms of the steroids nandrolone decanoate and stanozolol respectively.
The officials had enough Retabolil in their possession, they said.
“A range of data proves that the main opponents of Soviet athletes will use the aforementioned injection form of anabolic steroids at the upcoming Olympic Games,” the letter said.
The letter — signed and archived by Portugalov, and bearing the signature of a colleague at the Institute for Physical Culture, Roshen D. Seyfulla — said top athletes with chances of winning medals were prime candidates for injections.
It suggested paying particular attention to those who had performed well while taking oral steroids.
Three to five vials of 50mg each should be injected into those athletes, the officials instructed, with the final doses administered 145 to 157 days before the Olympics.
Drawn into the plot, according to the document, was the Soviet anti-doping lab, which the officials — mindful of Olympic drug-testing — had recruited to determine how long the steroids in question would linger in the system.
“There is only one basic reason to reject the injection form — the lack of definite data about how much time it takes to clear the body,” the letter said.
“We will have the official recommendation and conclusion no later than Dec. 15, 1983,” it continued, suggesting that national sports officials and anti-doping authorities were colluding to cover up doping.
Such collusion happened in Russia as recently as last year, anti-doping investigators said in a report last month, detailing how the national drug-testing lab helped formulate special drug cocktails for Russian athletes and covered up drug violations on orders from the country’s sports ministry.
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 US 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.
However, the fixation on beating the competition by using banned substances did not end, Vorobiev said.
He described an atmosphere in which winning was supremely important, in which drugs displaced training as the primary method of preparation, and in which Portugalov’s profile continued to rise.
For decades, Portugalov was a little-known figure outside Russia. However, inside the country he was a “fairly authoritative and very knowledgeable” figure who was not shy about advertising access to the best performance-enhancing substances, according to Vorobiev.
Vorobiev said that his own philosophy on developing elite athletes was not aligned with that of Portugalov’s and that he preserved the document over several decades because he considered it proof of how Portugalov was masterminding the Soviet sports-science program.
Portugalov came to global prominence in 2014 when two Russian whistle-blowers identified him as a linchpin distributor in Russia’s state-run doping scheme.
Yuliya Stepanova and Vitaly Stepanov, a married couple — she a runner and he a former employee of Russia’s anti-doping agency — told German public broadcaster ARD that Portugalov had provided Stepanova with performance-enhancing drugs and outlined a tiered payment system whereby he received a sliding-scale percentage of winnings, depending on whether an athlete won gold, silver or bronze medals.
“He bragged to Yuliya that over the past few decades, he had made so many Olympic champions,” Stepanov said in an interview this summer, describing Portugalov as “arrogant” and more interested in turning a profit than seeing athletes succeed.
An investigation commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency confirmed Stepanova’s account and concluded that Portugalov’s enterprise stretched much wider.
In the wake of a damning report published by the anti-doping agency in fall last year, Portugalov was suspended from Russian track and field and from his post at Russia’s sports research institute.
Portugalov could not be reached directly by the New York Times. Neither the track organization nor the government institute responded to e-mailed requests for information about his employment status or ways to reach him. His name is no longer listed on the Web site of either organization.
A spokesman for the World Anti-Doping Agency said the Russian Ministry of Sport had told the agency that Portugalov no longer worked for the government.
Meanwhile, investigations into his work are continuing; last month, the global governing body for swimming appointed a lawyer to look into claims that Portugalov provided drugs to Russian swimmers.
Former World Anti-Doping Agency president Richard Pound, who led last year’s investigation into doping in track and field, called the 1983 document an unsurprising indication of the long history of Russia’s doping program.
“It shows the foundation on which a lot of this has been built,” he said. “The system we encountered is not new. It’s a continuation of the Soviet days.”
Russia has responded to the charges of systematic, state-run doping with a mix of defiance and contrition.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has criticized scrutiny of the country as being politically motivated, but he has also suspended implicated officials and announced broad efforts to change Russian attitudes toward doping in sport.
“It’s a problem of culture and education,” Russian Minister of Sport Vitaly Mutko said in an interview this summer, adding that he had told Putin in 2009 that doping was a “black spot” on the country.
“Our aim is to have a healthy nation,” Mutko said. “We’re moving away from the old Soviet legacy.”
STILL ROOTING FOR RUSSIA
Vorobiev’s career with the national team ended after he was blamed for an athlete’s drug violation in the mid-1990s.
He said the violation in question involved the drug Phenotropil, which was used by Russian astronauts and military members to combat fatigue.
He is characteristically pragmatic about the terms on which his 37-year tenure ended.
“That’s life,” he said, expressing a steady loyalty to the ministry while criticizing people such as Portugalov who, he said, corrupted sports and shifted focus away from skillful coaching.
“Am I happy now that the problems have surfaced 20 years later?” he said, referring to his 1996 departure. “It was inevitable.”
Well into his retirement, Vorobiev remains interested in discussing physical preparations for competition, asking a reporter for her exercise routine.
“Do you agree that training is more important than steroids?” he said after four hours of discussing doping, during which he often pounded his fist and foot for emphasis.
Vorobiev is blind in one eye and has weak vision in the other. He rarely turns on the television, which sits atop a small piece of furniture that holds balled-up athletic socks.
However, he did plan to watch the track and field events in Rio, and he neither condemned nor condoned the recent doping scandals that had precipitated the ban on Russia’s team.
He expressed a statesmanlike support of “the Olympic movement” and of decisions about who could compete.
“Obviously, it would be better with Russia,” he said, shrugging matter-of-factly in his Soviet team uniform. “I hope this will be a lesson to train harder, and maybe there will be less steroids as a result.”
Additional reporting by Ivan Nechepurenko
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