Almost ten years ago RRG covered a story about a story of doping of Soviet gymnasts in 1968.
For some reason, that story is receiving a lot of hits on my site at present, and I don’t know why. So a word of caution.
The RRG story is a story within a story - a story of how stories can become distorted in the telling. It centres on an article that had appeared in The Observer in November 2015. The article had been talking about sports doping in general, and used pregnancy doping as an example, presenting allegations as truth.
Pregnancy doping would be a vile abuse of a woman’s trust, more abuse than doping, and subject to the same rules of reporting as apply to abuse everywhere. You don’t name victims of abuse unless they have spoken out themselves, and you shouldn’t pursue or doorstep an alleged victim of abuse for journalistic purposes.
The whole social context is difficult - contraception was poor quality in 1960s Soviet Union, and attitudes to women’s health were less than progressive and caring. Abortion was widely used as a form of birth control, and was in many cases the only birth control available.
There are a lot of unanswered questions. The article in the Observer had been based on an out of date internet source that has long been removed from the web. The author had stretched and generalised an allegation about one gymnast, and tried to say it was about her whole team.
It would have been true to say that there had been allegations about one coach and his gymnast (who also happened to be the coach’s wife), not that doping had unquestionably taken place, and that the whole team had been affected. But that wouldn’t have given The Observer a headline.
The nature of the allegations are such that only word of mouth evidence could ever tell the story reliably. I doubt that any medical records exist, and they would be subject to rules of privacy. If pregnancy doping did take place, our only way of knowing could be if the women alleged to be affected - the entire 1968 USSR Olympic team of women gymnasts - came out and said so, in public.
It would be wrong to speculate about this. To cover a story based on allegations of abuse against named women who hadn’t spoken out themselves would be unkind to the women and would be going against all kinds of professional ethical compliance frameworks. To my eye, there is no ethical way of investigating and writing about these particular allegations.
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