Russian state doping — A Nation’s Samples, Swapped Through a Hole in the Wall

Between roughly 2011 and 2015, the Russian state operated a doping program without precedent in sport: not the cheating of individual athletes, but an institutional system run by the Ministry of Sport, the security services, and an accredited national laboratory, designed to make positive drug tests disappear. It reached its most audacious form at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, on Russian soil, where dirty urine samples were physically swapped for clean ones overnight. The verdict, handed down by sporting authority and upheld on appeal, was: banned. Russia was barred from competing under its own flag, name, and anthem at the Olympics and major world championships.

The mechanism was uncovered chiefly through Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the former director of Russia’s anti-doping laboratory, who had helped build the system and then turned whistleblower. The World Anti-Doping Agency commissioned an independent investigation led by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren, whose two-part report in 2016 concluded, beyond reasonable doubt, that Russia operated a state-directed scheme it called the “disappearing positive methodology.” More than 1,000 athletes across more than 30 sports were found to have benefited.

The Sochi method was the report’s most striking finding. The supposedly tamper-proof sample bottles could be opened with a tool; late at night, after foreign observers had left, tainted samples were passed through a concealed hole in the laboratory wall to a room controlled by the security service, swapped for clean samples banked months earlier, and resealed. A control system built to be inviolable was defeated by a hole in a wall.

The reckoning was protracted and, by design, partial. WADA declared the Russian anti-doping agency, RUSADA, non-compliant; in December 2019 it imposed a four-year package of sanctions, which the Court of Arbitration for Sport in December 2020 upheld in principle but reduced to two years, running to the end of 2022. Russian athletes who could demonstrate they were clean were permitted to compete as neutrals, without flag or anthem — a compromise that punished a state while sparing individuals, and that satisfied almost no one, least of all the clean athletes of other nations who had lost medals, finals, and moments they could never recover.

East German state doping — A State That Doped Its Own Athletes, Many of Them Children, and Was Convicted of Bodily Harm

Between the early 1970s and German reunification in 1990, the German Democratic Republic ran the most comprehensive state-organized doping program in the history of sport. It was not the work of rogue coaches or individual cheats. It was government policy, codified in 1974 as a state research plan and administered through the country’s sports and medical hierarchy. On July 18, 2000, a Berlin court convicted the former head of the GDR sports federation, Manfred Ewald, and the program’s chief medical overseer, Dr. Manfred Höppner, as accessories to the intentional bodily harm of athletes, including minors. Ewald received a 22-month suspended sentence; Höppner received an 18-month suspended sentence. Those convictions are the verdict on record.

The program’s principal drug was Oral-Turinabol, an anabolic steroid manufactured by the state-owned pharmaceutical firm Jenapharm. It was given to athletes across many sports, frequently to teenage girls, and frequently without their knowledge or informed consent. Many were told they were taking vitamins. The doses were calibrated by sport and tracked centrally, and the medical apparatus that administered the steroids was the same apparatus that worked to keep athletes from testing positive in international competition. Estimates of the number of athletes affected run to roughly 10,000 over the program’s lifetime.

The harm was real and, for many, permanent. Female athletes experienced virilization; athletes of both sexes have suffered cardiovascular disease, liver and reproductive damage, and serious psychological consequences. The most widely known case is that of Heidi Krieger, the 1986 European shot put champion, who was doped from her teens and who has said the steroids contributed to a gender identity she was never given the chance to discover for herself; she underwent gender-reassignment surgery in 1997 and lives as Andreas Krieger. The damage done to the people the state was meant to represent is the center of this case.

The trials that followed reunification could not undo any of that. They established, as a matter of law, that officials at the top of the system had knowingly caused bodily harm to athletes in their care, and that some of those athletes were children who could not have consented even if they had been asked.