In 1970, the Women’s Technical Committee set the competitive age limit at 14, arguing that elite gymnastics was endangering children through uncontrolled, overly intensive training that treated them as “competitive animals” rather than developing athletes. Raising the minimum age was meant to ensure a slower, pedagogically sound progression that protected gymnasts’ physical and psychological development.
A decade later, the FIG voted again, this time raising the age limit to 15. Once more, the decision aimed to protect young girls. Here’s what the FIG Bulletin recorded at the time.
While gymnasts from North Korea and China have been penalized for age falsification, Romania never was. The logic was paradoxical: a consistent lie looked like the truth on paper.
“How should I put it… an uncaught thief is…”
Nicolae Vieru trailed off. It was early April of 2002, and the president of the Romanian Gymnastics Federation had just been confronted with a troubling contradiction: Gina Gogean’s birth certificate said 1978; her international competition records said 1977. Vieru, agitated, insisted he had never seen such a thing. When the ProSport journalist pressed—wasn’t this irregular?—Vieru laughed. “What sanctions could they take? I’m a vice president of the FIG, responsible for regulations and the statutes. There’s nothing in the rules about this.”
Weeks later, speaking on TVRM television, Vieru told a different story: “Altering ages was a worldwide practice. Just as others copied us, we copied others.”
Between those two statements, the evidence had piled up too rapidly to contain. Journalists located birth certificates in village archives. Former gymnasts confirmed that the documents submitted in their names did not match their actual birthdates. The denial collapsed within a month.
But what did that collapse mean? If passports submitted to international competitions had been accepted years earlier, did a confession in the press matter now? If the documents had been internally consistent when the FIG reviewed them, was there any mechanism to revisit what had already been approved?
Daniela Silivaș’s age falsification is the case every gymnastics fan can name, but few know that it took more than a decade for her real age to appear. It’s a story built on a false confirmation, an overlooked sidebar, and the quiet mystery of why no one bothered to look sooner.
In 1990, after years of rumors about age falsification, the world thought it had finally learned Daniela Silivaș’s real birth year: 1971. But that certainty turned out to be misplaced. The question of her actual age would remain unsettled for another twelve years. Only in 2002, when ProSport began collecting documents and retracing old accounts, did Romanian reporters finally dial Silivaș’s number to ask.
By then, the pattern had already revealed itself twice over. First came Gina Gogean, whose birth certificate told a story that contradicted a decade of official records—a contradiction she declined to acknowledge. Then Alexandra Marinescu, who did what Gogean would not: she confirmed that her passport had been altered and pointed to her damaged body as proof of what that alteration had cost.
And then came Silivaș. ProSport’s headline put it bluntly: “The Nightmare Continues: Silivaș’s Age Was Falsified, Too!”
Three gymnasts. Three falsified ages. And for Silivaș—the most decorated of them all, with six Olympic medals from a single Games—the truth was finally being spoken in her own voice.
Here is the story that took more than a decade to come into focus.
The federation manipulated Alexandra Marinescu’s age on paper; the training regimen carved lasting injuries into her spine. Together, they shaped a career that ended far too soon.
The week after revealing Gina Gogean’s age falsification, ProSport published a second case. But where Gogean’s career had been “fulfilled” and “decorated with medals,” Alexandra Marinescu’s story ended in spinal surgeries and permanent pain. Between April 15 and April 17, 2002, the newspaper documented how the Romanian Gymnastics Federation falsified Marinescu’s birth date, who made the decision, and what it cost her. What follows is a synthesis of that three-day investigation.
Gina Gogean’s birth certificate said 1978. The passport said 1977. And no one could explain where the truth went.
In April 2002, Romanian sports fans woke each morning wondering what ProSport would publish next. For the first set of articles, the sports daily had sent reporters to a small commune in the Eastern Carpathians, to village clinics and town halls, searching for birth certificates. What they found—tucked into green folders bound with string, recorded in yellowing registries—contradicted a decade of official documents for Gina Gogean.
The newspaper published its findings as the story developed, revelation by revelation. What follows is a distillation of the newspaper’s day-by-day reporting, the details of which did not circulate widely outside Romania. Revisiting them now offers a clearer sense of what the episode revealed and what it ultimately obscured.
Gina Gogean, 1996
Note: This is the first installment in a series on Romanian age falsification. Future pieces will examine other gymnasts’ cases, the relevant Romanian laws, and the FIG’s statutes and regulations.
When the German Democratic Republic collapsed in 1990, thousands of coaches, doctors, trainers, and officials from its elite sports system entered a unified Germany that was still trying to understand what, exactly, the GDR had been. Their reputations now depended on how their pasts were interpreted—by newspapers, by athletic federations, by former teammates and rivals, and sometimes by courts. Some sought to defend themselves through interviews. Others tried to fight damaging statements in court. Still others discovered that defending themselves was complicated by missing documents, conflicting testimony, or shifting expectations in a country still learning to read its own history.
Three figures from GDR gymnastics—Ellen Berger, Klaus Köste, and Gudrun Fröhner—each confronted the same problem: how to assert their own account of the past in a new Germany where the rules, the evidence, and even the moral categories were changing under their feet. Their cases did not follow the same path, nor did they end in the same place. But all three illustrate how difficult—and sometimes impossible—it was to clear one’s name in the 1990s and beyond.
Across two decades, in the same city, two East German girls lived out almost identical stories.
In the 1960s, Christiane Fröhlich was a sturdy child with quick reflexes and the kind of discipline coaches called turnerisch veranlagt—born for gymnastics. By seven, she was training five days a week; by sixteen, she was broken. Her coaches pried her knees backward to force flexibility, held a lighter under her calves when she could no longer lift her legs, and starved her until her vision went black. When she finally retired, her body was permanently damaged—spine fused with metal, nerves shot, walking possible only with crutches.
Two decades later, Antje Wilkenloh, the last East German champion, followed the same path through the same city. She, too, was chosen young, molded by repetition, and told to ignore pain. By thirteen, she was training up to six hours a day, her childhood disappearing into drills and conditioning. Fear of the coaches kept her silent as injuries accumulated: swollen fingers, a broken nose from the uneven bars, operations on her elbow, toe, ankle, and knee. Like many girls around her, she took painkillers before practice because she knew what training would demand.
Despite the difference in years, their experiences map onto each other with striking precision: early talent, escalating injuries, pressure to perform, and an adult world that treated their pain as routine. Both entered the system healthy and hopeful; both left it with bodies that would shape the rest of their lives.
Their stories, told here through two contemporaneous Der Spiegel profiles—one published in 1994, the other in 1995—show what remained after the routines ended and the state itself was gone.
Rotterdam, October 1987. Dörte Thümmler stood before the uneven bars in Amsterdam’s Ahoy Hall, knowing what she had to do. Her teammate Gabriele Fähnrich, the reigning world champion, had only just returned to competition after a long injury layoff and had fallen during compulsories. Now the fifteen-year-old Berliner—just 1.47 meters tall and 36 kilograms—was suddenly East Germany’s best hope for gold. She executed her routine flawlessly: the Tkatchev, the Deltchev, the toe-on front with a half turn, landed with just a small shuffle backward. When the score appeared—a perfect 10—she had won the world championship title on uneven bars, sharing the gold with Romania’s Daniela Silivaș. Dutch journalists were stunned. “Thümmler?” one said. “In a poll of favorites, her name would not have appeared on a single ballot.” In claiming this title, she continued a long tradition that included Maxi Gnauck and Fähnrich herself.
Thirty years later, Dörte Thümmler spoke publicly for the first time about what that victory had cost. At a press conference held by the Doping Victims Assistance Association in April of 2018, she stood alongside other former gymnasts, all of them bearing similar damage. For eight years by that point, she had been unable to work, living on a full disability pension. Medical specialists at Berlin’s Charité hospital had diagnosed her with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. She had only thirty percent of the strength typical for people her age. She was forty-six years old.
What Thümmler and the others revealed that day was something far worse than simple overtraining. Across East Germany’s gymnastics program, young girls had been fed into a system that treated them as experimental subjects rather than children. They trained seven hours a day, six days a week. They lived in boarding schools separated from their families. They were told the pills were vitamins. And when their bodies inevitably broke down—often before they even reached adulthood—they were left to live with permanent disabilities.
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.
Larisa Latynina has never been content to rest on her legend. The nine-time Olympic champion—whose name still defines an era of Soviet gymnastics—has lived many lives: prodigy, national icon, iron-willed head coach, and, later, the quiet architect behind Moscow’s next generation of stars. When Nadia Comăneci enchanted the world in 1976, it was Latynina who paid the price at home—forced to step down as head coach despite the fact that the Soviet women’s team had never lost a single Olympic or World Championship title under her leadership. In this interview from 1990, she reflects on the complexities of leadership, the stubbornness of talent, and the moral weight of guiding the sport she once ruled. Latynina speaks candidly about the fierce personalities she nurtured—Korbut, Tourischeva, Kim—and about one of her later instincts that proved prophetic: championing a young Svetlana Boginskaya when few others saw what she did. Her story is one of brilliance tempered by conviction—and of a woman who, even after the spotlight dimmed, never stopped shaping the stage.
