Poison Part 10 — It’s just one little pill.

I remember coming across a section of Sergey Lazovski’s journals in which he asked himself a question and analysed it in some depth. He asked, “What will become of these athletes once their careers are over?”

It was not a question to which he ever found a satisfactory answer. Far from it. The wall fell, he headed to California, and a bunch of East German women athletes who looked like men swiftly faded into obscurity, along with their medals for a country that ceased to exist. If one attempts to trace them today it proves virtually impossible.

But not completely. In my efforts to understand Formula FM65, to which Blair had been so successfully exposed, I had traced a number of former athletes who had been in Lazovski’s original trials of the drug. Those still in Germany were easy enough to find, though of the six I’d contacted only one was willing to talk about the experience of using the drug.

After nervous exchanges, and fears that she’d lose her medals, I was able to reassure her that this was simply a follow up exercise to assure the treatments had incurred no ill effects. At this she had become at first a little hostile and then more open, as she realised I was not part of the sports institute that had insisted she’d undertaken the treatments.