On November 23, 1994, the midday news on France 2 aired the confession of former Soviet gymnast Olga Kovalenko. She claimed that before the 1968 Mexico Olympics, doctors in her country had forced her to get pregnant to take advantage of pregnancy hormones and that after winning the team gold, she was made to have an abortion. Her teammates had gone through the same, and perhaps other compatriots from different disciplines had also suffered. A heartbreaking story. The confession was an excerpt from a report broadcast the day before by German television RTL and by that time had already been reproduced by many other media outlets worldwide, such as Le Monde, The Sunday Times, or Sports Illustrated.
Over three decades later, a team of students from the Centre de Formation des Journalistes (CFJ) in Paris refutes the dark legend. The story was entirely false. A deception. The investigation, published by L'Équipe last week, proves that the woman in the report was not really Olga Kovalenko and also denies the existence of evidence of a Soviet doping program based on pregnancy.
Kovalenko herself, who passed away in October 2025, had always denied these statements, and other sources had cast doubt on the abuse, but until now, her case continued to be repeated as true in documentaries, books, and various articles. The confession was so shocking that it survived for decades despite being false.
And the falsehood had started as a rumor. Its first appearance in archives was in 1973 through a book called 'The Femininity Game,' written by an American clergyman who wanted to praise the benefits of pregnancy, and it was only considered a proven fact after the RTL documentary in 1994.
In it, a woman labeled as Kovalenko appeared, who after 26 years of silence had "decided to speak," as the France 2 presenters announced. "The doctors told us that a pregnant woman's body produces more male hormones and can become stronger. If I had refused, I wouldn't have been able to participate in the Olympics," confessed the fake Kovalenko. "Olga was lucky. The others had to sleep with their coaches," added Vadim Mojessejev, presented as a former Soviet official, a testimony also doubtful. From then on, the myth circulated and even recently was used in the United States by anti-abortion organizations to support their arguments.
Until the CFJ team decided to investigate. "When we found this story in an old book about doping, we were struck by the fact that a false account had been picked up by television and reputable media worldwide without any verification," explains Hannah Wandji Nkuimy to EL MUNDO, the author of the report along with Clara Ruffing, Nisreen El Yagoubi, Antonin Audion, Leonardo de Carlo, and Emile Pawli. "And when we started discussing it with people in our circle, we discovered that the myth was still alive in the collective imagination, even though Kovalenko herself had denied it."
The researchers contacted numerous acquaintances of Kovalenko, including Larisa Petrik and Ludmilla Tourischeva, two of her teammates in Mexico 1968, and all confirmed that the woman in the report was not her: neither the hair nor the face, nothing matched. "She had separated teeth and dimples that did not match those of the gymnast," explains Wandi. The question was who the woman in the documentary was, and facial recognition and reverse image search led them to a Russian dance school. There they found Elena K., a teacher who eventually admitted her participation. Or not. "Yes, it may be me. I don't remember, it was a long time ago," she responded when they located her, although her testimony did not close the investigation.
It remained to be explained why the lie persisted for so long. After the RTL documentary, Kovalenko and the other gymnasts considered suing, but they did not because an international lawsuit was expensive, and they believed the story would have little impact. Trained as a dog trainer, in her later years, the former gymnast, born Olga Karasyova, distanced herself from sports and wanted nothing to do with public life. Only in 1998, when a Russian tabloid insisted on the story and added some new fabricated quotes, Kovalenko took the case to court and won, although the case's repercussions did not extend beyond Russia.
Interestingly, the so-called doping through pregnancy has no scientific basis. Pregnancy does not increase testosterone or muscle mass, so it does not provide any direct performance benefits. There is, however, a case that may have fueled the rumor. Larissa Latynina, a nine-time Olympic champion, won the 1958 World Championships while several months pregnant and ten years later was precisely the coach of the Mexico 1968 champions. Her presence could have sparked the rumor, and from there, the rest of the story unfolded.
In reality, the story most likely succeeded because it appeared at the right time in a conducive context. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 exposed state-sponsored doping in the Soviet bloc and created an atmosphere where any absurdity seemed plausible. In fact, it is documented that doctors and officials in the GDR administered substances to athletes and pressured them to abort if they became pregnant, but that does not prove that those pregnancies were intentional. The CFJ investigation found no evidence of this.