Strength of His Convictions Empowers Soviet Sports Critic

Yuri Vlasov apologized for the clutter in the living room, which was filled with boxes from his recent move to a new apartment. Nothing appeared in its proper place except for the pictures of Ernest Hemingway on the walls and the barbells in the corner.

Asked to describe himself today, Vlasov would say that he is, first, an author who has had seven books published and, second, a politician. But before he was either, he was a great weightlifter, the man who, by winning the super-heavyweight division at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, replaced Paul Anderson as the world’s strongest man.

Today, at 54, he still looks the part. He is 6 feet 6 and has the large hands, arms and legs of a lumberjack. With his beard, long-sleeved wool shirt, khaki pants and sandals, he would seem more at home in the forest, swinging an ax, than in the grimy, industrialized Lyublinsky district of Moscow.

But most of the power he wields today comes from his deep, rich voice, which he used last May as one of 2,250 elected representatives in the Soviet Union’s Congress of People’s Deputies.

Vlasov spoke eloquently against the omnipotence of the Communist Party, the power of President Mikhail Gorbachev and the tyranny of the Soviet secret police, the KGB. Such a speech seven to 10 years ago, another deputy said at the time, would have landed Vlasov in prison.

Even in the age of perestroika , when freedom of expression is--if not encouraged--at least tolerated, his comments have made him unpopular with party leaders.

“I am deeply hostile to Leninism,” he said in an interview last week. “They can smell this coming from me.”

The foremost critic of the Soviet sports system, he was equally candid when he accused the state-controlled sports committee, Goskomsport, of using athletic successes to promote communist ideology, spending massive amounts of money to win Olympic medals while ignoring recreation for the masses, misleading the world for almost 40 years about its use of professionals in amateur sports and turning a blind eye to the use of performance-enhancing drugs by athletes.

While not responding directly to Vlasov’s charges, Goskomsport officials acknowledged that their predecessors were guilty of overemphasizing elite sports and that abuses occurred. They said they have made reforms in some areas, particularly drug-testing, and, while they intend to maintain the Soviet Union’s Olympic superiority, they also are formulating plans to provide sports for all.

But Vlasov said that the officials are paying lip service to critics from within the government, media and public in an attempt to buy time before they are forced into cost-cutting measures that could eliminate many of their jobs and privileges.

“This is the response from the apparatus because, generally speaking, the people’s dissatisfaction with this kind of arrangement is tremendous,” said Vlasov, formerly chairman of the weightlifting and bodybuilding federations. “If there are true reforms, hundreds of thousands of sports bureaucrats throughout the country will be unemployed.

“But the battlefield in this country is elsewhere. Therefore, sports remains the only national preserve absolutely untouched by any change under perestroika . The system today operates the same as it did 30 years ago, the only difference being that not all money earned by athletes abroad is taken away by the state.”

“I was once very close to the leadership of big sports, and I observed the bribery and corruption. . . . It is a totally rotten system.”

He was introduced to the system as an 18-year-old, first-year student at the nation’s air force academy, which was appropriate because his primary discipline there, weightlifting, became part of the Cold War effort. That was in 1954, two years after the Soviet Union joined the Olympic movement.

“I was told, ‘You have been been taken from a vast army of ordinary citizens, we are waging ideological warfare against the West, and you are the shock force,”’ he said.

He was a willing conscript. The son of a Soviet secret agent, he said he was conditioned throughout most his life to hate the West, particularly the United States. But there also were incentives for closet capitalists.

Goskomsport officials announced in 1988 that they, for the first time, would give cash bonuses in both Soviet rubles and Western currency to athletes for their Olympic performances. But Vlasov said the practice actually began in 1949 and was authorized by the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

“They laid down specific rewards for any kind of record,” he said. “The amount of the reward depended on whose record was improved upon. If I defeated an American record, I received maximum pay. When I beat Anderson’s record in 1960, I received a bonus of 2,500 rubles. At that time, that was colossal. Today, that would be between 15,000 and 20,000 rubles ($24,750-$33,000).”

But he also said that officials of each sport were allowed to withhold bonuses if they were not satisfied with an athlete’s behavior.

“That turned athletes into obedient sheep,” Vlasov said.

Among the orders given to athletes by officials between the mid-’60s and mid-’70s, he said, was to take performance-enhancing drugs, including anabolic steroids, as Soviet sports researchers studied their effects. He said the practice was stopped before the drugs were declared illegal by the International Olympic Committee in 1975, but he added that many athletes in several sports, with the encouragement of their coaches, have continued to take them.

With the revelation last week that 52 Soviet athletes tested positive last year in Moscow’s laboratory, Goskomsport officials said they are combatting the problem.

“That is a lie from beginning to end,” Vlasov said. “If we really discontinued doping in this country, all of our athletes would start losing after a while. The sports officials would be made scapegoats. That’s not going to happen.”

Vlasov became disillusioned with the win-at-all-costs mentality in 1964. After winning the gold medal in 1960, he retired to concentrate on his passion, writing. But he had difficulty selling his work and, needing money, returned to weightlifting in time for the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

It appeared as if he had defended his championship when his principle opponent, Soviet teammate Leonid Zhabotinsky, conceded defeat. Deceived into a false sense of security, Vlasov was hurt and angry when Zhabotinsky returned a half-hour later and won the competition on his final lift.

“I was choked with tears,” he later wrote. “I flung the silver medal through the window. . . . I had always revered the purity, the impartiality of contests of strength. That night, I understood that there is a kind of strength that has nothing to do with justice.”

Not until several years later, he said, did he realize that Zhabotinsky’s deception was a product of the system, as were the sharp increase in the the use of drugs and in injuries as athletes tried to compete even when they were not healthy.

“The medal is the ultimate goal,” he said.

He said he once expressed his concerns to a Central Committee member. “I told him that this approach to sports was creating a lot of maimed and sick people,” he said. “He said that this is a war, and that we get people killed in wars.”

Vlasov decided then to lead the counter-insurgency. He said that he is not opposed to elite sports. On the contrary, he said they are important as a means for attracting the masses to sports. But he said that purpose has been defeated in a country that can provide swimming pools for only 10% of its populations and indoor sports facilities for only 30%.

“Big sports in this country are parasites, leeching off the people,” he said.

His solution is not altogether different from the one proposed by Goskomsport officials. He said the government should finance mass sports, while most elite sports should be forced to finance themselves, primarily through sponsorship agreements with Western companies. The point where he and sports officials part is that, in his system, there would be no Goskomsport. Each sport would govern itself.

With or without Goskomsport, all parties agree that the government is about to retire from the Olympic medal business.

“The entire country sits on a volcano,” Vlasov said.

“It’s quite possible all government financing will be withdrawn from sports within the next two or three years. The economic situation in this country is more serious than ever before.”