Moscow, November 1981. A young gymnast takes her starting position at Luzhniki Sports Palace. When the opening notes of Rossini’s La Cenerentola (Cinderella) sound through the arena, fifteen-year-old Natalia Ilienko—so says her official biography—begins what Soviet journalists will soon call a “sparkling” performance, an “étude set to Rossini, in a minuet-gavotte style.”
The routine, choreographed by Natalia Alexandrovna Marakova, is “elegant, polished down to the smallest detail—to every movement of the flexible hands, to each glance—now languid, now playful.” When Ilienko completes her final tumbling pass, the crowd erupts. Moments later, she will stand on the podium as the floor world champion, one of her country’s newest gymnastics sensations.
But there was a problem with this triumph: Natalia Ilienko should never have competed at those World Championships.
In the summer of 1983, Soviet sports journalist Vladimir Golubev watched Irina Baraksanova compete at the Spartakiad and reached for the kind of language writers reserve for truly special talents. She was, he wrote, “a pure diamond” — a girl of “exceptional talent and natural gifts” whose sixth-place finish at the national championships was quite “an achievement” for a seventh-grader. After the Friendship-84 tournament the following autumn, another article celebrated her as embodying “the freshness of young shoots,” declaring that she and her fellow newcomers had brought gymnastics “new shades and freshness.”
The Soviet sports press had found a narrative they loved: the late bloomer from Tashkent who had started gymnastics only in second grade, yet possessed such refined technique that “there seems to be no element in modern gymnastics beyond her reach.” Her “exceptional spring and flight” produced vaults that were “both the highest and the longest.” Her floor routines were “daring and free,” her movements “harmonious and lyrical.” Month after month, Sovetsky Sport charted her ascent — gold in the all-around at the 1984 European Junior Championships, bronze in the all-around at the 1984 USSR Championships in Donetsk, gold on floor exercise at the 1984 USSR Championships in Individual Events in Moscow.
Eventually, Montréal happened.
At the 1985 World Championships, Baraksanova finished fourth in the team final, ahead of both Oksana Omelianchik and Elena Shushunova. Yet when the individual all-around final arrived, it was Omelianchik and Shushunova who competed, while Baraksanova and Mostepanova watched from the sidelines. The official explanation was injuries, but neither Irina nor Olga was injured.
The moment crystallized something about Baraksanova’s career: extraordinary talent never quite converted into championship results, promise never fully realized, potential always just out of reach. Twenty-five years later, the gymnast once hailed as a “pure diamond” reflected on what she achieved, what she lost, and the peace she had made with her gymnastics destiny.
How did people in the USSR feel about Olga Bicherova’s age falsification at the time?Did everyone simply accept that it was for the greater good of the Soviet Union?
In a 1987 essay published in Ogonyok under the provocative title “Don’t Lose the Person,” Tokarev returned to this episode not to litigate eligibility rules, but to imagine the human cost of the lie. He opened the article with the age-falsification case, identifying the gymnast only as “B” to spare her further harm. At the tournament’s final press conference, officials calmly insisted that the champion’s age complied with the rules. When a reporter produced not one but two start lists showing that she had not yet turned fourteen, officials dismissed them as “mistakes.” Only later did a federation insider admit to Tokarev that the documents had been deliberately swapped.
What haunted Tokarev was the position in which this placed the girl herself. Friends, relatives, classmates—everyone knew the truth. She was told that lying was necessary, that falsifying her age served “higher interests,” the honor and glory of the state. The burden of the deception, Tokarev suggested, fell not on officials or coaches, but on a child expected to live inside a public fiction.
(Tokarev would return to this case in 1989, writing again in Ogonyok and naming the gymnast explicitly as Olga Bicherova.)
The heart of Tokarev’s outrage, however, centers on the 1985 World Championships in Montreal. There, coach Vladimir Aksenov watched his protégé Olga Mostepanova—sitting in second place after two days of competition—be abruptly removed from the individual finals along with Irina Baraksanova. In their places, head coach Andrei Rodionenko inserted Oksana Omelianchik and Elena Shushunova, who would go on to share the gold medal. When Tokarev recounts this episode, he anticipates the response he knew so well: the medals were still Soviet medals, so what difference did it make whose names were attached to them?
Aksenov explained the reasoning to Tokarev in stark terms. Rodionenko, he said, was taking revenge. After Sovetskaya Rossiya (Soviet Russia) reported that people’s control inspectors at the Lake Krugloye training base had caught Rodionenko hoarding scarce food supplies meant for athletes, coaches were pressured to sign a letter denying the incident. Aksenov was the only one who refused. His punishment was swift: he was barred from accompanying his own athlete to Montreal, and Mostepanova was sacrificed in the finals as retribution. “Olga and Yurchenko hugged each other and burst into tears,” Aksenov recalled. “You could say that all the way back to Moscow, Olga’s eyes never dried.”
Tokarev recognizes that these individual injustices—the falsified documents, the stolen food, the vindictive substitutions—are symptoms of a deeper corruption. He challenges the notion that such deceptions serve “higher interests” or the “honor and glory of the state.” Through pointed examples, from the pentathlete Boris Onishchenko’s rigged épée at the 1976 Olympics to weightlifters caught trafficking anabolic steroids abroad, Tokarev argues that secrecy and complicity had rotted Soviet sport from within. The system demanded that witnesses sign false statements, that coaches look the other way, that everyone prioritize medals over human dignity. His closing plea is both moral and practical: sport cannot be reformed unless it embraces the same transparency and accountability reshaping Soviet society. “No medals,” he writes, “can replace for us what is most valuable—the person.”
What follows is a translation of Tokarev’s seminal essay.
On a November evening in 1981, in Moscow’s Olympic Stadium, a tiny gymnast with freckles and a turned-up nose stood atop the podium as the newly crowned world champion. Olga Bicherova had just pulled off a stunning upset, defeating the reigning Olympic champion with a perfect 10 on vault. She was, officials said, fifteen years old—barely. Her birthday had been October 26, just weeks earlier.
The American gymnasts watching from the stands didn’t believe it for a second. They had reason to be skeptical.
The year before, Bicherova had been left off the Soviet Olympic team because she was too young—not yet fourteen, the minimum age required at the time. Now, just over a year later, she had supposedly turned fifteen—just old enough to meet the new age requirements. The timeline was impossible unless someone had changed her birth year.
In late January 1981, a Romanian gymnast, who was competing at the International Gymnastics Classic in Los Angeles, was greeted with something unusual: birthday cake. During a dinner with the delegations, someone mentioned the petite Romanian had a birthday, and the Americans—ever genial hosts—sang “Happy Birthday, Ecaterina.” She smiled. She stood. She accepted the applause.
There was only one problem. The gymnast wasn’t Ecaterina Szabó. It was Lavinia Agache.
What happened in California that weekend became known as the “Szabó Substitution”—a scandal that would expose gaps in international athletic oversight, raise questions about Cold War-era sports diplomacy, and leave a young gymnast’s achievements erased from the record. The story unfolds differently depending on whose version you follow, but the timeline itself reveals how information traveled, how institutions reacted, and what remained unresolved.
Ecaterina Szabó on the left, Lavinia Agache on the right USGF News, no. 2, 1981
Among the brightest stars of Romanian gymnastics in the early 1980s, Lavinia Agache carved out a remarkable career despite controversies and heartbreak. Born February 11, 1968, in Onești—the same hospital that welcomed Nadia Comăneci into the world—Agache emerged as one of the era’s most decorated gymnasts, accumulating ten medals at major international competitions. Yet her path to prominence was shadowed from the start: Romanian officials altered her age, listing her birth year as 1966 instead of 1968. This deception allowed the thirteen-year-old Agache to compete illegally at the 1981 World Championships in Moscow, where she placed seventh all-around—two years before she would have been eligible under FIG’s minimum age of fifteen.
By 1983, Agache had established herself as a force in the sport, winning four medals at the European Championships in Gothenburg (including gold on balance beam and silver in the all-around) and three more at the World Championships in Budapest. She entered the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics as a legitimate contender for all-around gold, having finished third at the 1982 World Cup and consistently challenging teammate Ecaterina Szabó throughout their years training together at the Romanian national center in Deva.
Lavinia Agache’s gold-medal routine in 1983
First after compulsories, Agache’s Olympic dream disintegrated when a team doctor gave her a pill to combat jetlag. The next day, disoriented and lethargic, she fell four times during the optional round. The medication was legal, but its effects were devastating: Agache failed to qualify for the all-around final, watching from the sidelines as Szabó battled Mary Lou Retton for gold. What happened to Agache in Los Angeles—and the painful parallel she would later draw to Andreea Răducan’s 2000 Olympic ordeal, when a team doctor’s prescription cost the Romanian gymnast her all-around gold medal—forms a cautionary tale about the precarious intersection of medicine and athletic performance in elite gymnastics.
Here’s International Gymnast‘s piece on Agache from 2001, published before the age falsification scandal erupted in Romania in 2002.
In November 2003, Ziarul de Sibiu (The Sibiu Newspaper) published this profile of Mihaela Stănuleț, who won team silver at the 1983 World Championships and won Olympic gold with Romania’s team in Los Angeles in 1984. The article captures the harsh realities facing retired gymnasts in post-communist Romania. Even Olympic champions struggled to find work, were asked to return their competition tracksuits, and trained new generations in unheated gyms with decades-old equipment.
Like many of her contemporaries, Stănuleț had competed underage: born in 1967, she was only 14 when she placed fourth with Romania’s team at the 1981 World Championships in Moscow, a year before she would have been eligible under the age-15 minimum. By the time she reached the Olympics three years later, the system that had rushed her into elite competition as a child offered little in return for her gold medal—just 16,000 lei instead of the promised 100,000 and no car despite assurances. (Ecaterina Szabó made similar remarks about unfulfilled promises.) The article reveals how completely Romania’s gymnasts were discarded once their competitive value expired.
Oh, and there’s a story about Béla Károlyi’s dogs.
This lengthy profile of Ecaterina Szabó, published in Képes Sport (Sport in Pictures) in May 1990, offers a detailed firsthand account of life in Romanian gymnastics during the late 1970s and 1980s. The article, based on interviews conducted by Levente Deák for Romániai Magyar Szó (The Hungarian Voice of Romania), traces Szabo’s journey from a small village in Transylvania to Olympic glory at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, where she won four gold medals.
Notably, the article confirms Szabo’s actual birth date as January 22, 1968—making her 16 years old at the time of her Olympic triumph, not the older age sometimes claimed in contemporary sources. The narrative provides extensive detail about the grueling training regime at the Karolyi gymnastics school: wake-up calls at 6 AM, training sessions lasting until 10 PM as punishment, mandatory afternoon naps, and a schedule that prioritized gymnastics over traditional schooling.
As you’ll see, compared to today’s top gymnasts, Szabó competed non-stop, traveling to a total of 70 countries. It’s no wonder that, by the time the World Championships in 1985 rolled around, she “was simply exhausted.”
As was often the case at that time, gymnasts’ biographies were woven together with Béla Károlyi’s story. Throughout the piece, the writer includes several parenthetical statements that paint Béla Károlyi in a remarkably positive light, characterizing him as a dedicated coach who made tactical decisions in the best interests of his gymnasts.
However, this generous portrayal omits crucial context that we know today: before the Károlyis were transferred to General School No. 7 in Deva, the Romanian government’s patience with the Károlyis was wearing dangerously thin. In March 1977, Teodora Ungureanu fled during training in Cluj, boarding a train to Onești. The Securitate intercepted her at the Târgu Mureș train station and escorted her to Bucharest. According to the Securitate report: “The gymnast gave as the reason for leaving the fact that she could no longer stand working with coach Béla Károlyi,” who “persecutes her baselessly.”
The situation continued to deteriorate during a tour of Spain in 1977. Securitate officer Ioan Popescu reported that Béla Károlyi “showed inappropriate conduct towards Nadia Comaneci and Teodora Ungureanu, consisting of swearwords, insults, even beating them, because their weight was unsuitable for the competition.” Ilie Istrate, a National Council for Physical Education and Sport (NCPES) instructor and Securitate informant, reported that “the girls were found weeping in their rooms because of hunger.” (See Olaru’s Nadia Comăneci and the Secret Police for more.)
Read against this historical background, Szabó’s account becomes all the more poignant—a testament to both her remarkable athletic achievements and the complex, often contradictory relationships that defined elite Romanian gymnastics in this era.
In many ways, this set of articles becomes Szabó’s way of reclaiming her story—from her erased Hungarian heritage to her falsified age, from the name she was given to the one she was born with (Katalin), and from the rewards she earned to those she never received.
In the spring of 1990, just months after the Romanian Revolution, Ecaterina Szabó became one of the first Romanian gymnasts to publicly confirm what insiders had whispered about for years: the systematic age falsification of competitors by the Romanian Gymnastics Federation. Speaking to journalist Thomas Schreyer in Deva, Szabó revealed that she was born in 1968, not 1967 as her official gymnastics documents claimed—making her one year younger than the world had been told.
Despite the courage it took to come forward in a still-uncertain post-revolutionary Romania, Szabó’s confession was largely overlooked by the gymnastics community. Perhaps this was because the revelation didn’t retroactively change any of her competitive results. Even with her true birth year of 1968, Szabó would have been age-eligible for the 1983 World Championships in Budapest, where her international senior career began—she would have turned 15 that January, meeting the FIG’s minimum age requirement.
Ironically, this article would become a touchstone in gymnastics history not because of Szabó’s admission, but because of a single sentence about her close friend Daniela Silivaș. The article claimed Silivaș was “one year younger than previously stated,” and that news ricocheted around the globe. But the truth would prove even more dramatic: Silivaș was actually two years younger than her competitive age, making her age falsification far more consequential for the record books.
In this remarkable interview, Szabó discusses life after the Revolution, the mechanics of age falsification, and what it meant to be a gymnast in Ceaușescu’s Romania.
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.
