The doping of athletes to enhance their performance, particularly with anabolic steroids, has been a recurrent scandal in the international sports world. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) banned this practice in 1967 and began testing for steroids in 1976. In 1999, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) was created. Yet athletes continue to use performance-enhancing drugs.
The most recent incident in Russia was reported in the August 13 issue of The New York Times (Rebecca R. Ruiz, “The Soviet Doping Plan: Document Reveals Illicit Approach to ’84 Olympics”). In 2014 Yuliya Stepanova, a middle distance runner, and her husband, Vitalii Stepanov, a former member of the Russian anti-doping agency, exposed doping practices in their country. The scandal has apparently caused the dismissal of a prominent sports physician who allegedly profited from the doping of Soviet and Russian athletes. WADA is investigating the matter. Revelations resulted in the exclusion of Russian track and field competitors from the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. The International Paralympics Committee has banned Russia from the Summer Paralympics because of doping practices. The ban has been extended to the Winter Paralympics.
Doping in Russia goes back to Soviet times, when it affected other republics of the USSR as well, and was also heavily practiced in East Germany. According to The New York Times report, a confidential document from late 1983 shows that in anticipation of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Soviet sports physicians had advised the head of Soviet track and field that anabolic steroid pills were not enough and that injections should be used. Many Soviet athletes had in fact been using steroids since the 1970s.
This is not news for diaspora Ukrainians who remember the 1984 Olympics. Early that year, Osyp Zinkewych, the energetic, hard-working founder and president of Smoloskyp Publishers, visited California in order to organize an information campaign at the upcoming games. Through underground channels, he had received an appeal from Soviet Ukrainian athletes alleging that they were being forced to use performance-enhancing drugs, which apparently resulted in a range of health disorders and, in some cases, premature death. Citing the early deaths of 59 Soviet Ukrainian athletes (at an average age of 41), with a dramatic upsurge between 1976 and 1982, they called on the IOC to investigate Soviet practices. They also requested that Soviet republics like the Ukrainian SSR – which, after all, had a separate representation at the United Nations – be permitted to field their own Olympic teams.
In 1980, the U.S. had boycotted the Moscow Olympics because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But Smoloskyp emphatically did not support the movement to keep Soviet athletes out of the Olympics. It believed that USSR participation in international sports was not a matter of one team too many, but of 14 teams too few: each Soviet republic should compete individually. Smoloskyp compiled a book titled “Ukrainian Olympic Champions,” in which it calculated how many medals Ukraine would have won if it had been allowed to participate independently. In response to its arguments, IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch wrote: “Your comments have been duly noted.”
In May 1984 the USSR, citing “anti-Soviet hysteria” and related reasons, decided not to attend the Los Angeles Olympics. Nevertheless, Mr. Zinkewych did not abandon his plan of publicizing the Ukrainian athletes’ appeal. Accordingly, in mid-July the Ukrainian Olympic Information Service opened its doors. The Ukrainian American community of southern California provided moral, professional and logistical support. Through the generosity of Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary Ukrainian Catholic Church and its pastor, Msgr. Peter Leskiw, a two-story house was made available at 5146 ½ De Longpre St. in Hollywood (where many Ukrainians had settled when this was the center of the film industry), while the Ukrainian Orthodox Church also helped out. A typewriter, a photocopier and that new gadget – a personal computer – were set up. A team of volunteers – some local, some from as far away as Washington, D.C., fluctuating in number from a handful to around 20 – worked day and night in the stifling heat, preparing and disseminating informative materials and communicating with the media and foreign delegations, under the direction of your columnist.
The UOIS arranged a press conference on August 2 at the Los Angeles Press Club, where the list of 59 prematurely deceased Ukrainian athletes was made public. Mona Snylyk of Santa Monica ably led the proceedings, while yours truly discussed national discrimination in Soviet sports and the issue of Ukrainian Olympic participation. Andrij Karkoc deftly parried hostile questions from Soviet and Hungarian journalists on irrelevant and inflammatory topics like alleged Ukrainian fascist participation in the Holocaust, riposting with facts about the millions of Ukrainian victims of the Soviet regime.
The media responded. California’s Santa Ana Register and Daily News, as well as the Baltimore Sun, published favorable articles. The Los Angeles Times was skeptical, as was Sports Illustrated’s Jerry Kirshenbaum. On his late-night call-in radio show on KABC, Ray Briem conducted a friendly interview with a UOIS representative.
Did the Ukrainian Olympic action bear fruit? Coming on the heels of the Great Famine commemorations of 1982-1983, and preceding by only a few years the observances of the Millennium of the Baptism of Ukraine-Rus’, it was part of a sustained effort on the part of our diaspora in the 1970s and 1980s to raise world consciousness about Ukraine. In the Orwellian year of 1984, it was largely ignored by the international sports establishment. “But the days to come,” sang Pindar in his first Olympian ode, “are the wisest witnesses.” In the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer and the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Ukraine participated as an independent country. Its athletes are no longer subject to the compulsory doping practices that survived into the post-Soviet period in Russia. It is a belated victory for those who suffered illness and early death. For those who first raised the issue and still live, it is a bittersweet vindication.
Andrew Sorokowski can be reached at [email protected].