Remi Korchemny (russian: Реми Корчемный; born 23 June 1932) is the former sprint coach of a number of high-profile

athlete An athlete (also sportsman or sportswoman) is a person who competes in one or more sports that involve physical strength, speed, or endurance. Athletes may be professionals or amateurs. Most professional athletes have particularly well-devel ...

s, including

Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...

Olympic champion Valeri Borzov. He is serving a lifetime ban from the sport for his involvement in providing performance-enhancing drugs. After the 1972 Olympics, Korchemny moved to America. There he worked as a coach or advisor for a number of high-profile athletes, including British sprinter

Dwain Chambers Dwain Anthony Chambers (born 5 April 1978) is a British track sprinter. He has won international medals at World and European levels and is one of the fastest European sprinters in the history of athletics. His primary event is the 100 me ...

, and American athletes

Kelli White Kelli White (born April 1, 1977, in Oakland, California) is an American former sprinter. She won two gold medals in the World Championships in Paris in 2003. However, on June 18, 2004, she was stripped of her medals, because she tested positive ...

Chryste Gaines Chryste Dionne Gaines (born September 14, 1970, in Lawton, Oklahoma) is an American Olympic athlete who competed mainly in the sprints. Education Gaines is a 1988 graduate of South Oak Cliff High School in Dallas, Texas.Chris Phillips Chris Phillips (born March 9, 1978) is a Canadian businessman and former professional ice hockey player. Phillips was a member of the Ottawa Senators for his entire career, which began with the 1997–98 season and ended with the 2015–16 seaso ...

, Alvin Harrison,

John Register John Register (1939–1996) was an American realist artist noted for his paintings and drawings, which were notably often minimalist, spare depictions of hotels, cafés, and empty chairs. Background Register was born in 1939 in New York City to ...

and Jamaican athlete

Grace Jackson Grace Jackson-Small (born 14 June 1961) is a Jamaican former athlete who competed mainly in the 100 and 200 metres. She won an Olympic silver medal in the 200 metres at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, and is a former Jamaican record-holder ...

Life in the Soviet Union

Korchemny was born on 23 June 1932 in

Ukraine Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inv ...

. In 1937, when he was five years old, his father was

executed by firing squad Execution by firing squad, in the past sometimes called fusillading (from the French ''fusil'', rifle), is a method of capital punishment, particularly common in the military and in times of war. Some reasons for its use are that firearms are us ...

on charges of sabotage amid a labor dispute while his mother was sent to a

forced labor camp A labor camp (or labour camp, see spelling differences) or work camp is a detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor as a form of punishment. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons (espe ...

for four years, leaving Korchemny to live with his grandparents. As an impoverished youth, he would race the boys at his school for food. Drafted into the

Red Army The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, after ...

as an engineer, he was introduced to athletics, eventually becoming a coach in 1957. During the 1972 Munich Olympics, his sprinter

Valeriy Borzov Valeriy Pylypovych Borzov ( uk, Валерій Пилипович Борзов; russian: Валерий Филиппович Борзов, Valeriy Filippovich Borzov; born 20 October 1949) is a former Soviet sprinter. He is a two-time Olympian, ...

won the Olympic gold medals in the 100m and

200m The 200 metres, or 200-meter dash, is a Sprint (running), sprint running event. On an outdoor 400 metre racetrack, the race begins on the curve and ends on the home straight, so a combination of techniques is needed to successfully run th ...

. In 1975, after years of lobbying to leave the Soviet Union, Korchemny was allowed to move to the United States following brief stays in Israel and Italy.

BALCO scandal

Korchemny was one of the main figures in the 2003

BALCO scandal The BALCO scandal was a scandal involving the use of banned, performance-enhancing substances by professional athletes. The Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) was a San Francisco Bay Area business which supplied anabolic steroids to profes ...

. He was indicted on 12 February 2004, and on 29 July 2005, he pleaded guilty in US District Court to distributing illegal performance-enhancing drugs to athletes between 2000 and 2003. Korchemny was sentenced to one year of

probation Probation in criminal law is a period of supervision over an offender, ordered by the court often in lieu of incarceration. In some jurisdictions, the term ''probation'' applies only to community sentences (alternatives to incarceration), such ...

on 24 February 2006, avoiding potential years of jail time. In the aftermath of the scandal, Korchemny agreed to retire on 12 March 2007. He was the first coach disciplined by the

United States Anti-Doping Agency The United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA, ) is a non-profit, non-governmental 501(c)(3) organization and the national anti- doping organization (NADO) for the United States. To protect clean competition and the integrity of sport and prevent ...

. Korchemny is serving a lifetime ban from

USA Track & Field USA Track & Field (USATF) is the United States national governing body for the sports of track and field, cross country running, road running and racewalking (known as the sport of athletics outside the US). The USATF was known between 1979 and ...

for conspiracy and cover-up.

Post-scandal

In 2013,

BALCO The Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) (1984–2003) was an American company led by founder and owner Victor Conte. In 2003, journalists Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada investigated the company's role in a drug sports scandal later re ...

founder

Victor Conte Victor Conte Jr. (born 1950 in Fresno, California) is a former bassist with Tower of Power and the founder and president of Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO), a sports nutrition center in California. He served time in prison in 2005 after p ...

enlisted Korchemny to train the boxers he worked with such as Amir Khan. In 2019, he coached professional boxer

Mikey Garcia Miguel Angel Garcia Cortez (born December 15, 1987), best known as Mikey Garcia, is an American former professional boxer who competed from 2006 to 2021. He held multiple world championships in four weight classes from featherweight to light w ...

, who was contending for the

IBF The International Boxing Federation (IBF) is one of four major organizations recognized by the International Boxing Hall of Fame (IBHOF) which sanctions professional boxing bouts, alongside the World Boxing Association (WBA), World Boxing Counci ...

welterweight Welterweight is a weight class in combat sports. Originally the term "welterweight" was used only in boxing, but other combat sports like Muay Thai, taekwondo, and mixed martial arts also use it for their own weight division system to classify the ...

championship title against

Errol Spence Jr. Errol Spence Jr. (born March 3, 1990) is an American professional boxer. He is currently a unified welterweight world champion, having held the IBF title since May 2017, the WBC title since September 2019, and the WBA (Super) since April 2022. ...

References

External links

* Mary Nicole Nazzaro
Beijing Olympic Journal: Remi Korchemny Revisited
American Track & Field, March/April 2006 * Mary Nicole Nazzaro

American Track & Field, Winter 2002
Remi Korchemny's scientific contributions
at

ResearchGate ResearchGate is a European commercial social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators. According to a 2014 study by ''Nature'' and a 2016 article in ''Times Higher Education'' ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Korchemny, Remi American track and field coaches Drugs in sport People from Alameda County, California Ukrainian athletics coaches 1932 births Living people