'The Olympic Champion Exposes the Doppelganger' - full translation of interview with Olga Karasyova (2001) - by Marina Vulis

As promised, here is a word for word translation of Olga Karasyova's interview with Vladimir Golubev.

March 7^th, 2001

The Olympic Champion Exposes the  Doppelganger

Olga Karasyova, one the most beautiful and charming gymnasts of our incomparable Olympic team which triumphantly won the 1968 Mexico Olympics, finally achieved fairness. The Moscow Ismail Court sided with her and ordered a famous newspaper to pay 35,000 Roubles for false information.

Olga Dimitrievna [Karasyova] invited me to her cozy two-room apartment above the “Aeroport” metro.  Going through the family gymnastics albums, remembering her younger years,  and quietly spoken,  the still  coquettish  and smiling  “girl of our dream” (1944 German movie name).

- What a  voluminous document folder!  Can you imagine how much time and effort had to be spent to get the case to court.   Correspondence, lawyer’s request, decisions, regulations, summons.

- I must say,  the story was dragging on.  One day, the German TV Broadcasting Corporations  RTL had an interview - with my doppelganger!  A certain young woman announced that she was the Olympic Gymnastics Champion Olga Kovalenko (I indeed, took my second husband’s name, then got divorced, and went back to Karasyova). She gave a sensational interview alleging that at the time she was performing with  the USSR National Team, the coaches forced the girls to become pregnant, and after 9 or 10 weeks to have an abortion. The medical professionals know that during this time, women have an elevated level of male hormones in the body,  so girls become physically strong, with new vital functions, and they experience elation.  A sort of doping.   To put it in the words of the imaginary Kovalenko,  “That’s how we won”.

- Deftly conceived.  By the way, one can believe this.  When you learn the truth of what the DDR [East German] coaches were doing, you get scared.  You can imagine the ballyhoo outside the USSR.

- Naturally, this interview was duplicated by many information agencies, newspapers, and magazines. Juan Jimenez de Parta, the accredited correspondent of “ABC”, the Spanish newspaper published in Moscow, somehow found my telephone number, and asked for a meeting.  You can imagine his disappointment when I easily proved it was a pure fake. While my “double” broadcast live about  the “abortions”, I was on a cruise, as one could see in my foreign passport (in the USSR, one had an internal and a foreign passport).

Then even the “Paris Match”  reporter (Michel Peyrard) who  in person saw  the “stunning”  interview in RTL,  flew in.  He was pleasantly surprised by my fluent French, and at the same time annoyed as he found  no similarity between me and the “German Olga”.

To summarize, I was besieged by the journalists who all tried to convince me to bring a criminal case against RTL. That was a difficult season for me – hospitalization, surgery, long treatment. In addition, my mother was also hospitalized. All this time, my lawyer was not sitting idly, and was preparing paperwork against  RTL.  However, the project turned out to be very expensive, and we sort of “buried it”.

Then all of a sudden, one Russian newspaper resurrected an article “smelling of mothballs” and published it - “In Bed with the Coach”. It started like this, “There was no other sports scandal caused such horror in the public eye as the story which was told by the former gymnast Olga Kovalenko on the RTL TV Channel", wrote a famous “Sports Illustrated” journalist.  But in fact in Russia, this story had no resonance.

Later  followed  the  most incredible stories. The correspondent of a Russian paper got in touch by phone with this Olga Kovalenko, who presently lives and works abroad.  She repeated, “My case is not extraordinary. I was one of numerous athletes who were prescribed obligatory sex. The girls who refused were dismissed from the team. Those who did not have regular boyfriends, were forced to “cohabit” with the coaches”.

You can imagine how I felt. I was in shock! Cheap, so cheap! Obviously, the “Fake Olga” disappeared without a trace;  she evaporated, after probably getting a large fee for her first RTL interview. But here -  “she was  reached by phone”. And I filed a suit against the newspaper.

You see, I do not like to complain about life.  Whatever happened,  happened. I suffered  a lot. As a young girl, I became friends with Valery Karasyov during the 1966 Worlds where our idols  Larisa Latynina, Polina Astakhova, Boris Shakhlin, Yuri Titov performed for the last time. Valera courted me with such attentiveness and persistence,  that I really thought, “maybe it is a fate?”. We got married and together went to both the  1968  Olympic Games in Mexico and the 1970 Worlds.

We lived together for ten years. I wanted a child so much! But my husband kept saying we needed more money, needed to settle down. He was eager to work abroad, but the contracts somehow did not work out. In the meantime, I liked working for the International Department of the USSR State Sports Committee. I wanted this - did not in vain get a Degree from the Foreign Languages Department of a Pedagogical Institute.  As before, I was connected to gymnastics - was   FIG President Titov’s  interpreter,  travelled abroad, and was preparing to run for the FIG Technical Committee. Perhaps, my happy eyes caused my husband’s jealous spells. Ugly scenes would happen more and more often.  I already realized that the more he yelled  and  spied on me,  the more he wanted to “veil” his own sins. Was I blind, and did I not guess about his going “astray”?

- Olga, I was the friend of your family, and this all happened in front of my eyes, I could not convince Valery that he was overdoing it, and losing it without a reason.

- In that last year of my marriage, when the relationship became some kind of antipathy, I fell  for Yuri Kovalenko, who was working in the International Department as an interpreter and travelled with delegations to the tournaments. A typical situation – a constantly insulting husband,  a new friend who looks like Yacheslav Malezhik  [a Soviet and Russian singer, poet and composer]  and  who presents flowers,  sings songs accompanied by a guitar in English, and pays compliments. Where would a woman’ s heart lie?

- Everything  is relative in this world. Yura was overburdened  by  his role as an interpreter and  wanted more. Yes, we had a new apartment  in a prestigious building,  a car, modern furniture – in those times. Finally, he found a good position  in one American firm. He had trouble getting  it, and used all my connections to get him accepted. But when I got seriously sick, when he had to support me and give up something, he “broke up”, could not take it. He actually betrayed me; the rays of my previous glory faded, and he cooled towards me. He found a new flame, a daughter of the firm’s  president, a very rich man,  and as the result  left for the USA

My current husband, Michael Lifirenko, fell for me when I was not doing well.

- Sorry, let us go back to the scandal. Your Olympic Team included Lyuda Turishcheva,  Lyuba  Burda,  Larisa Petrik, Natasha Kuchinskaya, Zina Voronina, Olya Karasyova  – simply all beauties. Did the they really force  you to have sex?

- This is, I repeat, is a monstrous canard [hoax]. I was seeking only one thing – for the newspaper to refute the story.

And I am very satisfied that the court stood up to defend my honour and dignity. I would love to find the German impostor and tell her something in person. However, though I am angry,  I might just heartily  laugh !

On July 2000, Olga turned 51.  No one believes it – she is still a real beauty.

Vladimir Golubev

EDITOR'S NOTE : The Sports Illustrated article mentioned here was published in Sports Illustrated in 1994, Vol 81 Issue 23, and was written by Alexander Wolff and Richard O'Brien.  The full text in English is as follows :

Since the fall of communism, horror story after horror story has come to light about the excesses, pharmacological and otherwise, of the various Eastern-bloc sports machines. But no tale has been quite as chilling as the account aired on Nov. 21 by RTL, a TV station based in Luxembourg and Germany. According to Olga Kovalenko, who as Olga Karasyova won a team gymnastics gold medal for the U.S.S.R. at the 1968 Olympics, Soviet sports officials ordered her at the age of 18 to become pregnant by her boyfriend and then decreed that the fetus be aborted at 10 weeks. Kovalenko, who indicated that she was one of many female athletes directed to have sex, said doctors told her that pregnancy would cause her body to produce more male hormones, which in turn would give her greater strength and stamina. She said that girls who balked at the order were threatened with dismissal from the team, and some of those without boyfriends had sex with their coaches until they became pregnant.

Vadim Moyesseyev, who was identified as an official with the Soviet Olympic team in the late 1960s, confirmed Kovalenko's story. And one unnamed former coach told RTL, ``There was a lot of coercion and manipulation to make the girls get pregnant. In any other country it would have been called rape.''