Olympics scenes are real life stories 

 Maatraan team Press Meet

Maattrraan team constituting Director KV Anand, AGS producers, technicians and Srinivas Mohan convened a press meet to showcase behind-the-scenes details of how FX team made Suriya as conjoined twins using motion capture technology. The team also revealed that the second half scenes involving Olympics are based on real life incidents that happened in Soviet Union. Here are the key details shared,

The Maattrraan team clarified that  since Olympics committee is strongly against the usage of any file photos, videos and images. Hence, all the Olympics shots in the movie were entirely shot by the Maattrraan team. 

Soviet steroid program for athletes

The Salt Lake Tribune published in 2003 covered former sports scientist shocking investigative report about a former top Soviet sports scientist (Kalinski) who revealed a secret document about the state-supported steroid research on athletes, weightlifters, boxers, wrestlers, gymnasts, fencers and endurance athletes inject the drugs to boost performance. Soviet scientists had just as much incentive as athletes and coaches to chase Olympic medals. Olympic success translated into free apartments, cars, state stipends and foreign travel for them, too. Their feeling of patriotism is that you should not expose the past of your country.

Mysterious Deaths of 26 Soviet Olympic medalists in 1982 

The scientist wants to hunt down death records of Soviet Olympic champions. A 1984 British study in Nature found that 26 Soviet Olympic medalists died between 1976 and 1982 at an average age of 41. A Finnish study linked steroid using athletes are almost five times more likely to die than age-matched peers.  

The real steroid story from past is fictionally included as part of the 1992 games (not explicitly mentioned as Olympics)

Fast Forward to 2011, India sacks Ukranian coach for steroids 

This issue appears to be still very much prevalent in India until recently (July 2011), when the Indian Sports Ministry sacked a Ukrainian track and field coach and ordered a thorough investigation into an embarrassing doping scandal after eight athletes tested positive for banned anabolic steroids.

Bottomline: The amount of groundwork research and realistic Olympic shots in the movie are impressive. However, it brings up an important question whether our Tamil directors and heroes should try to weave international issues in commercial Tamil cinema?