A few months ago, one of their articles got on my radar and stayed there. Written by Brian Oliver, it was a piece about the German team of reporters who released the documentary film Lord of the Lifters last year, which is a scathing indictment of the doping corruption in our sport and, more specifically, how IWF President Tamas Ajan has been the driving force behind it. This thing shook up the weightlifting world and basically led to Ajan getting the boot. It was a nuclear warhead.

The article on insidethegames was a follow-up piece from the guys who made the film. In an interview, they expressed doubt about the doping cleanup possibilities in Olympic weightlifting because, as they stated, “the sport is not able to control itself.” In other words, they believe outside intervention from some kind of independent governing body is the only way weightlifting’s drug corruption can ever be cleaned up. If you leave it up to us to fix our own sport, it’ll never happen because doping is too embedded in weightlifting’s DNA.

When you think about statements like this, questions come to mind. One of them is simply WHY? Aside from the basic ego desire to lift bigger weights and get stronger muscles, WHY can’t our sport fix itself? For crying out loud, several countries around the world have institutionalized national doping programs. If you want to lift on their national team, drugs are a requirement. It’s been going on for decades, and it’s still going on even though our sport is facing expulsion from the Olympics if we don’t clean up. It’s a lot like the situation you see with heroin addicts who have come close to death multiple times. They know they’re going to die if they keep pushing it, but they can’t stop. They just keep shooting up.

We know why. The physical addiction of heroin has consumed them, and they literally can’t quit, even if they want to. In Olympic weightlifting, we’ve got a different scenario with some of the same qualities. Everybody knows the IOC is one breath away from kicking weightlifting out of the Olympics if we don’t clean up the doping problem. It’s public knowledge. And yet our weightlifters continue to take drugs. It’s a widescale sports version of self-destructive behavior.

Why should you care about this? Because you’re heavily invested in Olympic weightlifting. Even if you’re a thousand miles away from Olympic level, you’re either a weightlifter who understands the temptation to take drugs, or a coach who works with weightlifters who are tempted to take drugs. It’s 100% impossible not to be connected to the doping issue in weightlifting, regardless of your role or level. So you need to have a complete understanding of it.

Some of you might be aware that I wrote a book called Drugs in Olympic Weightlifting. It’s a complete exploration of the whole issue. In this article, I’m going to share some of the words and ideas from my book, hoping to help you understand that WHY question just a little more. I’m going to give you some excerpts from the book, along with some new stuff, and try to help you understand why the sport of Olympic weightlifting seems to have such a deep commitment to self-destructive behavior.

As with everything, it’s often about money

In the United States, Olympic weightlifting is not a mainstream media sport that generates major revenue. Football, baseball, and basketball are the big pillars in that department. Most weightlifters in the US make no money from their lifting. At the top of the national rankings, our elite 1% makes enough money to live on through stipends and some minor sponsorship, but even that is sparse and it can be easily lost through sub-par performances. Overall, the sport is not an avenue to move from poverty to wealth in America.

However, the situation is different in other parts of the world. To fully understand the big picture, we need to return to the old Communist Era of the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries. Back in this time (1950s-1980s), communist governments used sports success to demonstrate the strength of their nations and the superiority of their way of life. Athletics were a primary public relations tool. Because of this, these governments pumped vast amounts of money and resources into their sports programs. Alexander Kurlovich was one of the premiere Soviet weightlifters of the 1980s. Kurlovich trained in a program called the Sports Clubs of the Soviet Ministry of Defense (SKA), which was basically a sports wing of the Soviet army. Here, athletes could train full-time and receive the same benefits of the country’s armed forces. Food, housing, and military-level pay were some of the perks. Many of the greatest Soviet athletes of the Cold War Era were members of this program. Similar systems were established in the other Communist countries of Eastern Europe.

This was during a time period when the standard of living for the average citizen in Europe was impoverished and limited. By the time communism collapsed in 1990, the Per Capita GDP in the United States was over $23,000, compared to average figures around $6,000 in most Eastern Bloc countries. Average people lived in squalor, while sports champions were well taken care of. In other words, becoming a successful weightlifter could be the ticket out of a life of labor, starvation, and economic bleakness.

So, for several decades, a system was established where there was tremendous financial opportunity for weightlifters in these countries. In addition to the upper-level programs like the SKA, sport development academies were built and funded by the government, giving athletes the chance to start training at young ages and pursue the opportunity to become world champions. Children were recommended or specially selected for these schools, and once they were enrolled, their sport became their government job. If they continued to improve, they worked their way up in the national sport system with continued financial support.

This sport academy system survived the collapse of communism, and it still exists in various countries across Europe and, now, Asia. China has built its own sports school network based on the blueprints of the old Soviet program. There are currently thousands of sports schools in China that crank out Olympic medalists and World Champions in a wide range of disciplines, making it a global powerhouse that has surpassed Russia in several international competitions.

In short, you can make a good living as an Olympic weightlifter in these countries. Once you get placed in their system, you’re a professional athlete, but you have to produce results that will be competitive enough to stay in the program and continue receiving the system’s support.

And this is where the drugs get involved. Former sports doctors and officials from China and Russia have come forward in recent years, claiming that doping starts with school-age athletes as young as 11 years old in these systems. Drug use isn’t frowned upon or viewed as a corruption in these cultures. It is simply seen as a required tool for professionals. So we have a system where there is tremendous financial motivation to use drugs, combined with a societal acceptance of it.

And it’s also just basic athlete obedience

Visualize being a candidate for one of these sports academy systems: you’re a young athlete with an opportunity to become a champion and make a good living, and your coaches tell you to take “medications” that will help you accomplish these things. Nobody around you acts like there’s anything wrong with these medications, your teammates are all taking them, and you understand that you can easily be dismissed from the academy and replaced if you refuse to comply with what your coaches and team officials are telling you to do. All of this leads in a very obvious direction. The athletes are going to do what they’re told and take the drugs.

I have a personal experience that reflects just how easily this process can take place. When I was 17 years old (1990), I was invited to the Olympic Training Center in Colorado for a one-month training camp with the US Junior National team. During this camp, the medical staff at the OTC was conducting a research study about the effects of amino acid supplementation on athlete recovery. When we first arrived, we were told about this study very briefly, but there were no details shared. We were young athletes excited to be in a national training center, and none of us were too concerned about it. Every morning, one of the medical staff members would come to our dorm rooms at 7:00am, wake us up, and tell us to “take our pills.” He would have a small paper cup for each of us with three or four tablets in it, and we would swallow them down. None of us asked any questions. Basically, we just got up every morning and took what they gave us without thinking twice about it.

That’s how things work in national training programs like this. When athletes are told to take something, they take it. Most of them don’t know (or even care) what they’re taking, especially when they’re young. A quick explanation is enough because they trust the people in charge. When I look back, I realize they could have been giving us anything, including performance enhancing drugs. Those pills could have been Dianabol and we wouldn’t have known any different. In fact, if you really think about it, they WERE giving us performance enhancing drugs. It just happened that the drugs were amino acids, which aren’t banned substances. (Yes, I did investigate the study years later and yes, they really were amino acids).

The point we’re making should be obvious. It’s extremely easy to understand how doping happens so effortlessly in the countries where it’s being practiced widescale. Their cultures don’t view it as unethical; it’s simply something that must be done with precision and caution to keep the athletes from failing drug tests. Amino acids were totally acceptable to everyone involved in the study I was a part of, so there were no ethical dilemmas or conversations about right or wrong. Moral questions simply don’t enter the conversation.

And let’s not forget those financial opportunities we talked about. Here’s another example that sheds light. Back in 1987, a documentary film called School of Champions was made. It was a year-in-the-life movie about the Bulgarian weightlifting program, which was at the height of its powers at the time, coached by the legendarily notorious Ivan Abadjiev. During the film, there’s a scene where the team is meeting for a pep talk with coach Abadjiev before a training session. He gives his lifters a lengthy lecture about how important maximum effort is during their workouts, and he concludes the talk by telling them, “Your stipends will depend on the results of these training sessions.”

You read that correctly. Athlete payments were based on the results they produced in the training hall on a daily basis. Knowing that this was the program’s policy, along with the historically proven fact that Bulgaria was one of the primary doping countries of that era, do we honestly think any of their lifters would have any qualms about taking whatever drugs they were given? The average standard of living in communist Bulgaria was abysmal. If these athletes would have refused the drugs they were told to take, they would have been flushed from the system and sent home, where they would have most likely worked a labor job for subsistence living.

It would be difficult for anyone to say they would have made a different choice if they were in the same position at these athletes. Top US weightlifting coach Danny Camargo of Florida, who was also an elite US lifter in his athlete years, shared some thoughts with me in an interview on this subject once. His words were, “I suppose those living in China and Russia have different set of circumstances than we do within our American system. I can imagine my view on PEDs [performance-enhancing drugs] would be different if scenarios were different, allowing for PED use, or if faced with incentives to do so. But since our system is the exact opposite, prohibiting PEDs whether for domestic competition or abroad, and there aren't many incentives at all at even high levels (historically), I remain set on being clean from PEDs.”

We’re left with the understanding that PED use is often directly proportional to how much the athlete has to lose or gain. When paychecks (or an entire life opportunity) are hanging in the balance, many athletes will simply do whatever is required for success. And as Camargo said, the system determines the behavior. As athletes who were raised in the US national system, both he and I were drug-free lifters. That was the standard around us, and the expectation of our coaches and administrators. However, if we would have been born in a different part of the world and a chance at a better life would have been on the line, it’s fair to assume we would have simply taken our pills.

That’s what we’re up against

This is going to be a tough nut to crack. Once you start talking about the opportunity for a better life, especially when you’re talking to young people from an impoverished country, moral conversations about right vs. wrong become tricky.

And as I’ve already said, you’re not in that same position. You’re not a poor kid from a developing country who needs weightlifting to put food on the table. But at the same time, weightlifting is your sport. You’re invested in the direction it goes.

I once spoke with a Special Forces guy who told me how the military teaches problem-solving. He said the first step in solving a problem is understanding the whole problem. I like this idea because it’s completely the opposite of our current social method. Nowadays, people read one headline sentence or listen to one sound bite, and then they form their opinions based on that ONE thing they learned. (Then they get on the internet and blast their opinions to the universe, but I digress…)

If you’re reading this magazine, you probably want to increase your expertise in this sport. You can’t be an expert in something until you’ve examined every nook and cranny of it. That’s all this article was supposed to be. You have to understand the problem, and that can’t happen unless you understand the people involved with the problem. Maybe you’ll be in a situation with some similar elements in the future, maybe not. Either way, just put this analysis in your toolbox and keep it in mind as you continue your journey in weightlifting.