“In gymnastics, doping can’t help you. That’s precisely why I don’t understand why anti-doping controls are carried out so often.”
When Romanian coach Nicolae Forminte made that claim to Pro Sport in August 2008, he was articulating a belief long embedded in the sport’s self-image: gymnastics and doping are incongruous. The implication was clear. If performance-enhancing drugs offer no advantage, then the problem scarcely exists.
And yet, it did.
Doping was not foreign to the Romanian gymnastics program; it was part of its history. In Degrees of Difficulty, historian Georgia Cervin has argued that doping in Romania was more systematic “at least until the year 2000, when Răducan was stripped of her gold medal in the all-around after the team doctor gave her, and allegedly the entire team, pseudoephedrine.” The episode, she writes, reveals that “over the last four decades, at least, coaches, officials, and even medical staff have conspired to break the rules in order to win medals, thereby jeopardizing gymnasts’ careers and health.”
Pseudoephedrine was not the only substance circulating within the system. In her autobiography, Prețul aurului. Sinceritate incomodă (The Price of Gold. Uncomfortable Honesty), Maria Olaru describes the pressures placed on gymnasts to maintain competition weight. The options, she suggests, were stark: develop bulimia, or be “forced” to take furosemide—a banned diuretic that can also be used to mask other drugs, including anabolic steroids.
Here’s the full quote from Olaru’s book:
“There, at the training camp, I also learned the surest method of getting rid of the excess food I had swallowed, so that it wouldn’t lead to weight gain: inducing vomiting.
However unpleasant it may have been (including to recount), almost all the girls did it, waiting for a moment when they wouldn’t be seen, slipping into the restroom and sticking their heads into the toilet. That wasn’t simple at all, since Mrs. Eta — the same one — was all eyes and ears… as were the coaches.
Given how the bathroom was situated, you had to sneak in at just the right moment so as not to be noticed (you could choose the shower for that, but we were well-brought-up girls — it wouldn’t have been proper to wash ourselves where — pardon — we had just thrown up).
In any case, those of us who managed to rid ourselves of the excess of our gluttony in this way were no longer ‘forced’ to contaminate ourselves with Furosemide, facing the cursed scale with defiant courage.”
If doping “couldn’t help” in gymnastics, it is all the more striking that it became embedded in the program’s culture.
Appendix: The Forminte Article
Forminte Revolts
It’s well known that the Olympic Games host dozens of competitions in parallel. In fact, there are really just two major ones. One lasts two and a half weeks, in which China is trying to outpace the United States in the medal haul, while Romania wants to prove that it, too, can be a developed nation in at least one field. The other competition stretches across all four years of an Olympic cycle and is tending to become more important than the first. It is the fight between anti-doping laboratories and the laboratories that produce “black-market” champions. Obviously, with no reference whatsoever to race.
“I’m against abuses.”
The most important Romanian coach present in Beijing, Nicolae Forminte, is rebelling against the Olympic “Inquisition,” which he says has spun out of control. Forminte does not understand why a veritable avalanche of tests has been unleashed on his gymnasts. Moreover, he fears that the new phase of testing — blood sampling — could lead to the gymnasts being infected with HIV or another virus, without anyone assuming responsibility for such an accident.
“What’s happening with anti-doping control already goes beyond many barriers related to human rights, the presumption of innocence, and the way this process is carried out. It is very important that these tests exist; their benefits are seen over time — sport has become cleaner. But I believe it’s slipped out of any kind of control. It has become a sort of state within a state; no one knows who runs it. In the name of clean sport, anti-doping control has turned into a kind of ‘Wild West’ sheriff who is allowed to do anything, anytime, in any way,” says Forminte.
The national gymnastics coach does not understand why these anti-doping controls had to begin right before the competition: “We probably have our share of blame, too. I read in the press that there were some suspicions involving those who were going to come to the Olympics, and perhaps we’re bearing the consequences now. In gymnastics, doping can’t help you. That’s precisely why I don’t understand why anti-doping controls are carried out so often.”
Team doctor rules out HIV infection
Conclusions after Nicolae Forminte’s tirade? The gymnastics team doctor rules out the possibility of infection during blood collection. He says the level at which these tests are conducted is far too high for anything like that to happen.
The absurdity of anti-doping controls in gymnastics — especially those done “in blood” — has been known since the time of the Andreea Răducan case, when she lost her gold medal because of a cold pill, a medication with no relevance whatsoever to her performance.
One piece of bad news, however, for fans of conspiracy theories: all gymnastics teams are subject to this excess.
Mihai Mironică (BEIJING)
Pro Sport, August 6, 2008
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Nicolae Forminte is not the only coach to voice frustration over the disruptive nature of anti-doping controls. Aimee Boorman has expressed a similar sentiment (without the concerns over HIV):
I believe in the anti-doping system and appreciate the job the USADA officials perform, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t terribly disruptive. They would show up at her house, they would show up in the gym, and they once showed up two days in a row. The first test hadn’t even reached the lab in Switzerland, yet they wanted another sample. I understand that people think Simone is superhuman, but I assure you, she is not. She was tested All. The. Time. It was shocking when she wasn’t on their testing list. I remember one time at camp, the official walked in, and I started to tell Simone to come off the floor because the USADA had arrived. I was surprised when the official stopped me to say they weren’t there for Simone that day. I exclaimed, “Hallelujah!”
In Rio, Simone was tested after every single competition.
The Balance: My Years Coaching Simone Biles
Notes
Note #1: Furosemide is the most common doping violation in women’s artistic gymnastics. The public cases include Nadzeya Vysotskaya (2006), Đỗ Thị Ngân Thương (2008), Daiane dos Santos (2009), Kristina Goryunova (2009), Luisa Galiulina (2012), and Angelina Simakova (2022).
But there is a long history that lives in the shadows. The Soviets, for example, took it. The Bulgarian team had a furosemide scandal in 1992, as did the South Korean team in 1998.
Note #2: Previous generations of Romanian gymnasts have been candid about their abuse of diuretics. In a November 7, 2008 interview with Cotidianul, Emelia Eberle (Trudi Kollar) confessed:
From time to time, the girls managed to fool the coaches’ vigilance and secretly eat chocolate brought by their boyfriends from outside: “Once, [Béla Károlyi] found chocolates taped with Scotch tape under the toilet seat and beat us so we wouldn’t crave sweets anymore. But there were also times when we managed to eat without being caught. Those were our small joys. Because we were weighed every day, we resorted to diuretics to get rid of the chocolate we had eaten in secret; I remember that once I took ten pills at once.”
Când și când fetele reușeau să păcălească vigilența antrenorilor și să mănânce pe ascuns ciocolate aduse de prietenii lor din afară: „Odată ne-a găsit ciocolate lipite cu scotch sub colacul de la WC și ne-a bătut să nu ne mai dorim dulciuri. Au fost însă și ocazii când reușeam să mâncăm fără să ne prindă. Acestea erau micile noastre bucurii. Pentru că ne cântăreau zilnic, apelam la diureticepentru a elimina ciocolata mâncată pe ascuns, îmi amintesc că odată am luat 10 pastile deodată“.
Note #3: I have spent months trying to obtain a copy of Olaru’s book, without success. Should I obtain one in the future, I will update this page. The quotation here is drawn from excerpts published online.
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