Category: Doping

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1981 Doping East Germany MAG World Championships

1981: The Vault Champion Who Vanished after a Positive Doping Test

In November 1981, Ralf-Peter Hemmann stood in a packed Moscow arena, preparing for his second vault in the apparatus finals of the World Championships. His first had been flawless—a handspring front with a half twist that stuck to the mat as if pulled by a magnet. The judges awarded him a perfect 10. Now came his Tsukahara. He landed it cleanly. Score: 9.95. The twenty-two-year-old auto mechanic from Leipzig was the world champion.

“After the 10, I still wasn’t sure,” he told reporters afterward, beaming. “But then when the second vault went so well…” He didn’t finish the sentence. He was being called to the podium, where thousands of East German tourists in the sold-out hall cheered for their new champion. It was the kind of victory that makes careers, the kind that gets remembered in record books. The days before had been the hardest, Hemmann said—sleepless with nerves. But in the competition itself, he’d been completely calm.

Then, without warning, he disappeared.

Not literally—Hemmann was still alive. But his gymnastics career ended abruptly in the spring of 1982, with no explanation, no farewell interview, no public acknowledgment of what had happened. One day, he was preparing for a competition in the Netherlands. The next, a club official told him his competitive career was over, effective immediately. The press never called again.

For years, people whispered theories while the official story was buried in Stasi files that wouldn’t surface until after reunification: Hemmann had tested positive for anabolic steroids at that same Moscow World Championship where he’d won gold. The Soviets had caught him, covered it up, and allegedly used the secret as leverage against East German sports officials. Rather than face an international scandal, those officials made Hemmann himself disappear—forced into retirement with his title mysteriously intact.

Thirty years later, Hemmann still didn’t have answers. His case raises troubling questions about how Cold War sports politics may have enabled cover-ups at the highest levels. Rumors of the positive test circulated among judges even during the competition itself. Yet the positive test result was never published, and the International Gymnastics Federation never stripped him of his medal. We may never know for certain why.

Here’s a translation of Sandra Schmidt’s article on Hemmann’s case.

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Doping East Germany MAG WAG

“You Don’t Treat Children Like That”: The Pharmaceutical Manipulation of East German Gymnasts

The roar in Seoul’s Olympic Gymnastics Hall is deafening as Dagmar Kersten dismounts from the uneven bars. It’s September 1988, and the seventeen-year-old has just executed an exquisite routine. Despite a small hop on the landing, a 10.0 flashes on the scoreboard. But perfection isn’t enough. Romanian Daniela Silivaș, who built an insurmountable lead after compulsories and optionals, takes gold with a perfect total of 20 points. Kersten’s silver is still East Germany’s highest finish in women’s gymnastics at these Games, confirming that the legacy of Karin Janz and Maxi Gnauck is still alive and well.

What Kersten doesn’t know—what she won’t discover until years later, after the Wall falls and the archives open—is that she’s been part of an experiment. The pills her coaches gave her weren’t just vitamins. She was a test subject in one of the most sophisticated pharmaceutical programs ever applied to athletes, a system that treated her body as a laboratory and her performance as scientific data.

“I would never have thought that something like that existed among us—it was outrageous,” Kersten would later say. “That’s why the whole process of confronting it was so shocking, as well. That’s when you realized that you had been used for such things. I had always seen the people we trusted as people who saw us as human beings. You don’t treat children like that; it’s the very last thing anyone in a position of trust should exploit. It’s also outrageous that some of this is still being covered up today. It’s a slap in the face to those who are now reading their files from back then. To deny that such things were possible at the time is an insult. There’s more than enough evidence. People always say, ‘We’d rather not talk about that.’ It’s such a shame that this topic can’t simply be discussed openly. No one wants to face it. No one wants to engage with the gymnasts of that time. We were given psychotropic drugs and OT [Oral-Turinabol]. Some of these substances were even tested by the NVA [National People’s Army]. They were supposed to help gymnasts who fell react more quickly. Anabolic steroids weren’t the only things they could give.”[1]

For decades, the gymnastics world believed its sport stood apart from the chemical manipulations reshaping track and field, swimming, and weightlifting. Doping, the conventional wisdom went, was incompatible with a discipline requiring grace, balance, and split-second coordination. Steroids built bulk; gymnastics required mobility. The logic seemed airtight.

But the archives of the Ministry for State Security tell a different story.

Dagmar Kersten, 1988 Olympics. Kersten has been the most vocal East German gymnast on the subject of doping.

Note: This article is not intended as medical advice, nor does it endorse the use of steroids. It is a historical account based on a collection of Stasi files.
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1990 Doping Interviews & Profiles USSR

1990: A Conversation with Olga Karaseva – “Imagine Yourself a Creator”

Olga Karaseva won Olympic gold in 1968, became world champion in 1970, and won medals on every event at the 1969 European Championships—taking silver in the all-around and gold on floor. Her career blazed briefly but brilliantly, embodying the elegance that made Soviet gymnastics compulsory viewing in those years. But by twenty-three, she was finished competing and felt, as she puts it, that “no one needed me anymore.”

In this 1990 conversation with sports writer Gennady Semar, Karaseva examines what the Soviet system did to athletes: how it created champions and then abandoned them, how it corroded the moral foundations that once made sport meaningful. She speaks with unusual candor about the collapse of purpose after competition ends, the loss of expertise as former athletes drift into bureaucratic roles, and the absence of any social safety net once the applause stops. Yet she’s not bitter. She counts herself fortunate—her coaches were “people of high human qualities,” and she escaped both the coercive “stick” of brutal training and what she calls the “chemicalization” of sport, a process she describes as “the destruction of the soul” that ruins both health and integrity.

For Karaseva, the crisis isn’t only institutional or pharmacological—it’s spiritual. Athletes, she insists, must be understood not as expendable performers but as whole people whose cultural development, imagination, and artistry are inseparable from their physical achievements. To save sport, she argues, means recognizing athletes as creators, not gladiators.

Note: Olga Karaseva passed away at the end of October at the age of 77.

Olga Karaseva, 1968
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