Pregnancy doping - Olga Karasyova. Kommersant's account of 10th December 1998

Olga Kharlova (left) in 1966, with the USSR World Championships team.  This is before her marriage to gymnast Valeri Karasyov. Lauren Cammenga found the original Kommersant story about the bogus pregnancy doping story.  The date of the article is 10th December 1998, and not as reported in my original article on RRG of 29th November. Do you agree that The Observer should now print a correction to its story of 15th November?

SPID-Info is up the Creek 35,000 Rubles

Author: Maxim Stepenin

Translator: Lauren Cammenga

Olga Karasyova, a USSR, European, world, and 1968 Olympic champion in artistic gymnastics, has been awarded 35,000 rubles in damages from the newspaper SPID-Info. The Ismailovsky District Court awarded this, a record-breaking amount for suits of this kind, in emotional damages for a 1997 interview supposedly conducted with Karasyova. In reality, the interview supposedly given by Karasyova was given by an impostor from Germany.

It was the German journalists who were the first victims of the fraud. What’s more, they fell victim a long time ago. On November 21, 1994, the TV channel RTL, which plays in Germany but is operated in Luxembourg, aired a live interview with a certain Olga Kovalenko. She was represented to the viewers as a merited Master of Sport, 1968 Olympic champion, 1971 world champion, and multiple European and USSR medal-winner in the sport of artistic gymnastics. She gave a sensational exposé of the supposed methods used by the State Committee for Sport and coaches to obtain such stellar results. “They forced us to get pregnant by our coaches, and after 9-10 weeks, just before important competitions, we had to get abortions. The thing is, during that time hormone levels in a woman’s body increase sharply. This stimulates physical development and can boost results. That’s how we won.”

A number of European publications ran the story, and all of them were duped. It turned out that the real owner of all the titles listed above never gave an interview to RTL. The day the live interview aired she was on a Mediterranean cruise with a bunch of Olympic champions from various eras.

There was also a discrepancy over the athlete’s surname. The champion was known by the name “Karasyova,” not “Kovalenko.” She only took her husband’s name, Kovalenko, after she left the sport, although by the time the interview aired she was “Karasyova” once more.

Karasyova, in Moscow, began to be exhausted by reporters from foreign publications, though when they heard the whole story, the reporters became disappointed. She was planning to sue RTL, but that turned out to be too difficult and expensive. Everything would have blown over, except that three years later Spid-INFO, a monthly publication, unearthed the bogus scandal.

In April of 1997, Spid-INFO published an article by Irina Ovanesyan called “In Bed with Coach.” Ovanesyan used excerpts from that sensational “interview” and added doctors’ commentary. She also said that she “spoke with Olga Kovalenko, who lives and works abroad, over the telephone.”

The real Kovalenko-Karasyova, who has always lived in Moscow, remembers the shock she felt. “After all, everything had already been sorted out! I had even had to give the Russian Olympic Committee an official explanation! And here it was again!” The former gymnast ended up in the hospital with a nervous breakdown. When she was released, she began trying to get Spid-INFO to write a retraction, but wasn’t able to solve the problem amicably. It was then that Karasyova pursued a libel lawsuit. In addition to a retraction, she requested 250,000 rubles in emotional damages.

In court, Spid-INFO insisted that Ovanesyan spoke with a woman named Kovalenko in Germany, and even gave a phone number where she could be reached. Karasyova’s lawyer could not reach anyone at the number, and everything became clear. A few days later the court ruled that Spid-INFO would have to publish a retraction. The amount of damages was lowered substantially, but 35,000 rubles is still a rare amount for this type of case. Only the Vertinskaya sisters (Anastasia and Marianna, famous Soviet actresses) won more, in their case 142,000,000 old rubles (the ruble was redenominated on 1 January, 1998, shortly before the 1998 Russian financial crisis) from the newspaper Megapolis-Express. Now Karasyova says she has decided to go forward with the lawsuit with RTL.

Karasyova told a reporter for Kommersant that she’s never heard of the kind of scandalous method of gymnastics achievement that is now attributed to her. “It’s all rubbish,” she said.

With many thanks to Lauren for her translation!  

Link to the Kommersant article - http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/210330

Link to the RRG article which gives the background - http://rewritingrussiangymnastics.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/fact-or-fiction-press-gymnastics-and.html