I’m always interested in learning more about the history of steroids in sports — giving synthetic masculinity to people and then putting the results on global television is a remarkable science experiment. Of course, they don’t tell you what the treatments were: you have to guess from clues (e.g., the name “John Smith” is a clue).

(Here’s my 1997 National Review article “Track and Battlefield” that revolutionized our understanding of the history and future of the gender gap in sports.)

So here is a new expose from the New York Times on old Soviet practices. It turns out, when read closely, to be less scandalous than you might have assumed without a deep knowledge of track and field historical results:

The Soviet Doping Plan: Document Reveals Illicit Approach to ’84 Olympics By REBECCA R. RUIZ AUG. 13, 2016 RIO DE JANEIRO — Late in 1983, months before they announced a boycott of the Los Angeles Olympics, sports officials of the Soviet Union sent detailed instructions to the head of the nation’s track and field team. Oral steroid tablets were not enough, they said, to ensure dominance at the Games. The team should also inject its top athletes with three other kinds of anabolic steroids.

In other words, the Soviet sports bureaucracy’s policy up through 1983 had been to not inject its athletes with steroids, relying only upon oral steroids. But the 1984 Olympic year, it was decided, would require extreme measures for Soviets to stay competitive with more ambitious rival dopers.

… The potent drugs were critical to keeping up with the competition, they wrote in the instructions.

Who was the competition in late 1983? For example, from Wikipedia:

Jarmila Kratochvílová … is a Czech former track and field athlete.[2] She won the 400 metres and 800 metres at the 1983 World Championships, setting a world record in the 400 m.[3] In 1983, she also set the world record for the 800 metres, which still stands and which is currently the longest-standing individual world record in athletics. Kratochvílová’s 1983 400-metre world record of 47.99 seconds stood for only 2 years until it was broken by Marita Koch in 1985. Koch’s 400 metre world record of 47.60 seconds still stands as of 2015.[6] Koch and Kratochvílová are the only women who have broken the 48 second barrier in a 400-metre laned race.[6] Kratochvílová’s remarkably fast times and her atypical physique[7] spawned rumors of illegal drug use.[8]

The countries that were really pushing the envelope in the mid-1980s were not the Soviets, but some of the Soviets’ Warsaw Bloc allies.

Over time during the 1980s, Western athletes went hog wild by the 1988 Olympics.

For example, I saw a then-skinny Florence Griffith-Joyner win the silver medal in the 200m at the L.A. Coliseum in 1984, losing to the suspiciously muscular wife of an NFL player. In track, you really need gold to cash in, so it was back to work at the nail salon for Flo-Jo. Her next big opportunity was the 1987 World Championships, where, still skinny, she finished second again, this time to a doped East German. Frustrated, Flo-Jo then called up Ben Johnson for training advice, and showed up in the spring of 1988 looking like Wonder Woman.

The NYT’s expose on the Soviets goes on:

The document — obtained by The New York Times from a former chief medical doctor for Soviet track and field — was signed by Dr. Sergei Portugalov, a Soviet sports doctor who went on to capitalize on a growing interest in new methods of doping. The document, marked confidential, referenced a Nov. 24, 1983, meeting of the Soviet Union sports committee, at which “individual profiles of special pharmacological preparation” had been approved for track and field athletes of all disciplines. But without “injection forms of anabolic steroids,” the officials wrote, a dramatic improvement in Soviet athlete performance at the Summer Olympics was not guaranteed. Now, more than 30 years later, Dr. Portugalov is a central figure in Russia’s current doping scandal. Last fall, the World Anti-Doping Agency named him as a key broker of performance-enhancing drugs in Russia, someone who in recent years injected athletes personally and made a business of covering up drug violations in exchange for money. Revelations of the recent schemes, which antidoping authorities said dated back at least a decade, compelled the international governing body for track and field to bar Russia’s team from the Rio Games, the most severe doping penalty in Olympic history. At the track and field events here this week, no one will represent Russia, a nation that is usually a fixture on the medals podium. The 1983 document and the account of Dr. Grigory Vorobiev, the former chief medical doctor, who spent more than three decades with the Soviet track team, provide new evidence of how far back Russia’s state-sponsored doping stretches. There was only one reason not to inject athletes with anabolic steroids, the officials wrote: the lack of definite information about how long they could be detected in drug tests. … Dr. Vorobiev said he was not sure whether the doping scheme detailed in the 1983 document was carried out. Regardless, the communication captures the results-oriented mentality of the nation’s sports committee, which he said intensified over time as athletes became preoccupied with drugs. The officials outlined a plan for administering the steroid injections to candidates for Olympic medals who had performed well in the past while taking low doses of oral steroids. They suggested administering the injections during the first two weeks of March and last week of February 1984, ending the regimen 145 to 157 days before competition began and ensuring that athletes were engaged in “maximum or sub-maximum” training.

In contrast to the Soviet’s planned five month lag, before breaking the world record in the 100m in 1988, Canadian Ben Johnson is said to have shot up right in the stadium.

… By the 1970s, he said, most of the several hundred athletes with whom he worked were asking about performance-enhancing drugs, particularly after traveling to international competitions. When athletes sought advice in individual consultations, he said, he told them to take “as low a dose as possible,” cautioning them to watch for cramps or changes in voice as signs that they had overdone it. Most of all, he stressed that drugs were not a substitute for rigorous training. Not everyone chose to use illicit substances, he said, defending Soviet sports as not uniformly tainted. … But low doses of oral steroids were common among top track athletes, Dr. Vorobiev said, asserting that if he had dissuaded them from taking drugs, he would have been blamed for poor results and summarily fired. East Germany, later found to have run an aggressive doping program, was a particular motivator after the 1976 Olympics, in which the country won nearly as many gold medals as the Soviet Union. … Anabolic steroids had been banned by the International Olympic Committee, and testing for them debuted at the 1976 Games, making the regimen that Soviet officials proposed for Los Angeles unambiguously prohibited. Dr. Vorobiev said he had consistently opposed steroid injections — typically administered with a shot in the thigh or buttocks. He considered that method too concentrated and too dangerous, he said. … “A range of data,” the letter said, “proves that the main opponents of Soviet athletes will use the aforementioned injection form of anabolic steroids at the upcoming Olympic Games.”

This article about Soviets using oral steroids but not planning to inject steroids until 1984 confirms my impression from studying track times of the 1970s-1980s: Soviet doping was systematic but rather moderate in dosage.

The really crazy times tended to come out of countries like East Germany and Czechoslovakia, and then out of Canada (e.g., Ben Johnson) and America (Flo-Jo), followed by a weird run in the 1990s by one Chinese regional women’s track team.

In general, the Soviets appear to have been more cautious with their athletes’ health and reputation than some of their rivals.