When Glory Comes Late

How did it feel to finally receive the gold?

Initially, it was bittersweet. The moment has passed, but you appreciate getting recognition for the hard work you put in and for the right result. Afterward, when you start thinking about the opportunities you lost, it's a really different experience than I think most people would associate with winning a gold medal. I've come to terms with the financial losses, but losing the memory will probably always bother me.

How did placing second in 2004 shape your career?

I decided to train one more year for the 2005 World Championships, and I didn't have a sponsor. I trained very angrily. But sometime during that year, my anger was replaced by a different kind of passion that reminded me why I did this in the first place. I didn't go into shot put to make money, but between the 2000 and 2004 Olympic Games, it became my job. In 2005, my motivation was no longer about making money. I won the championship and continued to compete full time until 2012.

What do you think motivates athletes to dope?

I remember people telling me it's impossible to compete at this level clean. It's a tempting trap for people to fall into.

Were you ever tempted?

No, not really. You have to understand that there are people better than you, and that hard work and determination and discipline don't always pay off. I promised my family that I would never do it, and it's one of my greatest achievements to have honored that promise for a career that spanned almost 20 years. I was lucky that my parents instilled a certain value system in me.

How do you feel about Yuriy Bilonog?

I can't say I have a lot of love for him, but I understand where he's coming from. He grew up in a system where you wake up and take your Flintstones vitamins with a dose of Dyanavel [an amphetamine], and that's just the norm. In some cultures, athletes are promised stability for their families and futures if they do well. The stakes were never that high for me.

Playing Dirty

Doping is among the gravest sport-related sins. It can mar the achievements of an entire country's athletes—as when, last November, the World Anti-Doping Agency revealed evidence of systematic cheating in Russia's track and field program. But athletes around the globe face pressures to succeed at all costs: What makes one more likely than another to take performance-enhancing drugs?

In the journal Psychology of Sport and Exercise, University of Birmingham sports psychologist Maria Kavussanu and colleagues draw from the concept of moral disengagement—how individuals disconnect their behavior from negative emotions like guilt and shame—to help explain doping. Rooted in aggression research, the concept has been applied to a wide range of behaviors, including responses to killing. Researchers found that the more British college athletes agreed with doping-related statements that indicated disengagement, the more they tended to express a willingness to dope in hypothetical scenarios. "The hope is to develop an intervention by confronting athletes and trying to make them aware of the concept," says Kavussanu, who plans to put the findings to use in a new International Olympic Committee–funded research project. —Colleen Park

Six ways athletes excuse cheating

1. Moral justification ("It helps the team.")

2. Euphemistic labeling ("juice," not "performance-enhancing drug")

3. Advantageous comparison ("Others do worse things to win.")

4. Displacement of responsibility ("The coach insisted.")

5. Diffusion of responsibility ("It wasn't my decision—it was the whole team's.")

6. Distortion of consequences ( "I don't see how doping hurts anyone.")