In 1994, the International Gymnastics Federation passed what some critics had demanded for years: a minimum age of sixteen for international competition, set to take effect in 1997. The rule promised to protect children from the extreme physical demands of elite gymnastics. But when French journalist Richard Montaignac sat down with Michel Léglise, chairman of FIG’s Medical Commission, he discovered something unsettling. The official charged with safeguarding athletes’ health admitted he didn’t actually care whether national federations falsified their gymnasts’ ages. “I don’t care at all,” Léglise declared. “It makes absolutely no difference to me.”
Léglise’s views didn’t necessarily reflect every FIG official’s position. Surely, some genuinely supported meaningful enforcement. That said, the organization oftenresponded with institutional shrugs when confronted with evidence of age falsification.
Here’s a translation of Léglise’s remarks as they appeared in Sovetsky Sport.
After the 1981 World Championships, the IOC was forced to confront an uncomfortable reality in women’s gymnastics: many elite competitors looked far younger than their official ages suggested. Olga Bicherova, who looked particularly young, had won the all-around, provoking widespread alarm across the sporting world and pushing concerns about women’s gymnastics all the way to the IOC’s highest levels.
To much of the Western gymnastics community, the explanation was straightforward. Birthdates were being falsified to satisfy age-eligibility rules. The International Olympic Committee (IOC), however, did not initially see the matter as an administrative deception. Its medical commission framed the issue as a health concern, questioning whether “dieting control” or pharmaceutical manipulation were being used to delay puberty and keep gymnasts artificially small. They wanted the FIG to establish a medical commission to conduct further investigation.
In this sense, the IOC was operating in the same conceptual space Western officials had occupied just a few years earlier. In 1978, accusations of doping in Eastern Bloc women’s gymnastics were widespread. By 1981, that narrative had begun to shift. Although state-run doping programs did exist in parts of the Eastern Bloc (and the gymnastics community still suspected it), many Western observers focused their efforts on underscoring the manipulation of birth records, not biology. It was a more provable allegation; they could point to paper records and show that the dates did not match.
The documents that follow illustrate this moment of interpretive overlap. The first is a brief report on an IOC Executive Committee meeting held in late 1981; the second is a lengthy interview with Prince Alexander de Mérode, then head of the IOC Medical Commission. Together, they show how age, doping, and women’s health were discussed not as separate issues, but as facets of the same unresolved problem.
Olga Bicherova at the 1981 World Championships
To be clear, Bicherova did not do anything wrong; she did not ask for her passport to be altered. This photo simply illustrates what everyone was seeing and questioning in 1981.
In November 1978, Western gymnastics officials charged that Eastern Bloc programs were using drugs to delay puberty in young female gymnasts, deliberately keeping athletes small to secure a competitive advantage.
The accusations emerged during the World Championships in Strasbourg, France, where officials remarked on the striking physical disparities between Eastern and Western competitors. Dr. Robert Klein, the meet’s chief medical examiner, reported having seen photographs of a Soviet gymnast showing what he described as a “steady regression of breast development” over a four-year period. Danish federation president Niels Peter Nielsen voiced broader suspicions, warning, “We see small girls, who I suspect are being controlled by drugs… they are being stopped from becoming women.” Even Nadia Comăneci, the sport’s reigning star, expressed astonishment at the child-like proportions of some competitors, remarking that she could not believe the 17-year-old Maria Filatova was actually older than herself.
There were many explanations for what Westerners were seeing. The onset of puberty varies from individual to individual. The sport itself favored smaller bodies, particularly in an era when the uneven bars were set closer together. Chronic overtraining and disordered eating almost certainly affected physical maturation, as well. More consequentially, age falsification distorted Western observers’ assumptions about normal pubertal timelines: gymnasts listed as fourteen or fifteen were sometimes several years younger in reality, and their bodies appeared pre-pubescent because they were, in fact, still pre-pubescent.
The historical irony of this moment is especially sharp. We now know that East Germany did, in fact, operate a systematic doping program for young athletes, and that one explicit aim of that program was premature growth-plate fusion—precisely the outcome Western officials feared in 1978, though they lacked proof at the time. The accusations were therefore simultaneously unsubstantiated, given the evidence available to the accusers, and eerily prescient, given what was occurring behind closed doors in at least one Eastern Bloc sports system.
The two articles that follow capture this moment of accusation and denial. The first, an Associated Press report, presents the Western claims with striking specificity, detailing suspected mechanisms and targets. The second, drawn from the FIG’s official bulletin, is a categorical rejection that combines legitimate scientific argumentation with institutional defensiveness and, in hindsight, a troubling underestimation of what state-run sports programs were capable of concealing.
Oral-Turinabol, the steroid that formed the basis of the East German doping program.
For gymnasts whose ages have been falsified, a single birthdate is never enough. Their careers must be read against two calendars: the date on which they were actually born, and the date under which they were permitted to compete. Only by holding those two timelines together can we understand not just that an age was altered, but why.
Take Eugenia Golea. She was born in 1971, yet her first senior World Championship medals came in 1985. To be fifteen at those championships, she would have needed a 1970 birth year. But that was not the date under which she competed. Instead, Golea was officially registered as having been born in 1969, making her eligible for the Los Angeles Games. However, for Golea, things never quite came together in 1984.
Most age-falsification cases involve making gymnasts older so they can enter senior competition earlier. But what if the goal were the opposite—to make a gymnast younger, allowing her to compete in both junior and senior events?
That appears to be what happened with Bulgarian gymnast Hrabrina Hrabrova, who competed at both the 1988 Olympic Games and the 1988 Junior European Championships under a falsified age.
In December 1990, as Romania struggled to redefine itself after the fall of communism, Celestina Popa said something that should have forced a reckoning in international gymnastics. Speaking to Dutch journalist Hans van Wissen for De Volkskrant, she acknowledged openly that the Romanian federation had falsified her age.
“Sometimes people on the street asked me how old I was,” Popa said. “I didn’t know what to tell them: my real age or the age the federation gave me. Officially, I was one year too young to compete at the 1985 World Championships.”
It was not a vague admission or a rumor repeated secondhand. Popa, herself, was correcting the historical record. Her confession came on the heels of Ecaterina Szabó’s own admission and Aurelia Dobre’s divulgence of Daniela Silivaș’s age falsification, as well.
Together, their statements represented a breach in the Eastern Bloc’s code of silence: athletes speaking openly, shortly after their careers were over, about a system built on falsification and obedience.
When Béla Károlyi defected to the United States in 1981, he carried with him not only his reputation as Nadia Comăneci’s coach but also Romania’s secrets. Speaking to the New York Times in December 1981, after an age scandal erupted at the World Championships in Moscow, Károlyi made a stunning allegation: three members of the Romanian women’s team competed in Moscow despite failing to meet the 15-and-over age requirement. They were Lavinia Agache, who he said was 13 years old; Christina Elena Grigoraș, also 13; and Mihaela Stănuleț, 14.
It would have been easy to dismiss these claims as the bitter accusations of a defector. But Károlyi was telling the truth. Subsequent research has confirmed that Mihaela Stănuleț was born in 1967, making her 14 at the 1981 World Championships. Lavinia Agache was born in 1968 and was indeed 13 years old. And, as we’ll see in the archival record below, Cristina Elena Grigoraș, the young star who had dazzled audiences with her European Championship performance earlier that year, was also born in 1968—not 1966, as her official documents claimed.
That means she was only twelve years old when she competed at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, well below the minimum age requirement of fourteen. Romania’s silver-medal team performance thus relied, in part, on the participation of an underage athlete competing under an incorrect birthdate.
Not every Soviet gymnast whose age was falsified went on to become a World or Olympic medalist. Valentina Shkoda was one of them.
In Shkoda’s case, the evidence of age falsification was not hidden in sealed files or whispered recollections. It appeared plainly in the public record.
Olga Mostepanova’s name may not have been as familiar to American gymnastics fans as that of some of her Soviet contemporaries, such as Natalia Yurchenko, but her story ranks among the most poignant of the Cold War era. A world champion on balance beam in 1983 at just fourteen years old, Mostepanova appeared destined for Olympic glory—until the Soviet boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Games intervened. An even more devastating blow followed at the 1985 World Championships in Montreal, where her elite career effectively ended at its peak: despite qualifying, she was withdrawn from the all-around final.
By 2008, she had returned to the sport that once broke her heart, working as a preschool coach at Dynamo Moscow, the gym where she once trained under the legendary “Aksyonov Brigade.”
In this interview, Mostepanova made a striking admission—one she insisted she had never made before: that Dynamo Moscow had added a year to her age to make her eligible for senior competition. Her categorical statement—”I can respond to anyone who says that my age was changed. It was. But I never discussed that in any interview, official or unofficial”—called into question the authenticity of previous reports, including a 1998 interview in Sovetsky Sport, where such admissions appeared. Mostepanova also reflected on the political forces that shaped Soviet gymnastics, her coaching philosophy, and her hopes for the future of Russian gymnastics.
Enjoy this interview with the only elite gymnast to score a perfect 40 in the all-around.
On August 27, 1984, in the Winter Stadium in Olomouc, Czechoslovakia, Olga Mostepanova achieved what no elite gymnast had ever done before or has done since: four perfect scores of 10.0 in a single all-around competition. Vault: 10.0. Uneven bars: 10.0. Balance beam: 10.0. Floor exercise: 10.0. Sovetsky Sport called it “a record—an absolute one.” Thousands of spectators rose in thunderous applause for, as a subsequent profile described her, “the fifteen-year-old winner.”
Except according to official Soviet records, Olga Mostepanova was sixteen years old in August 1984.
Or was she?
1983: Olga Mostepanova does her routine on the balance beam. Mandatory Credit: Tony Duffy /Allsport
