Doping in East Germany

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East Germany conducted a decades long program to feed performance-enhancing drugs to their athletes. The drug regimes, given either with or without the knowledge of the athletes, resulted in victories in international competitions, including the Olympics.

Systematic doping of athletes ended with the fall of communism in East Germany in 1989, before German reunification a year later. Many former athletes suffer from health problems related to steroid consumption.

History

East Germany closed itself to the sporting world in May 1965.^[1] In 1977 the shot-putter Ilona Slupianek, who weighed 93 kg - tested positive for anabolic steroids at the European Cup meeting in Helsinki and thereafter athletes were tested before they left the country. At the same time, the Kreischa testing laboratory near Dresden passed into government control, which was reputed to make around 12,000 tests a year on East German athletes but without any being penalised.^[1]

The International Amateur Athletics Federation suspended Slupianek for 12 months, a penalty that ended two days before the European championships in Prague. In the reverse of what the IAAF hoped, sending her home to East Germany meant she was free to train unchecked with anabolic steroids, if she wanted to, and then compete for another gold medal. Which indeed she won.

After that, almost nothing emerged from the East German sports schools and laboratories. A rare exception was the visit by the sports writer and former athlete, Doug Gilbert of the Edmonton Sun, who said:

Dr (Heinz) Wuschech knows more about anabolic steroids than any doctor I have ever met, and yet he cannot discuss them openly any more than Geoff Capes or Mac Wilkins can openly discuss them in the current climate of amateur sports regulation. What I did learn in East Germany was that they feel there is little danger from anabolica, as they call it, when the athletes are kept on strictly monitored programmes. Although the extremely dangerous side-effects are admitted, they are statistically no more likely to occur than side-effects from the birth control pill. If, that is, programmes are constantly medically monitored as to dosage.^[2]

Other reports came from the occasional athlete who fled to the West. There were 15 between 1976 and 1979. One, the ski-jumper Hans Georg Aschenbach, said: "Long-distance skiers start having injections to their knees from the age 14 because of their intensive training."^[1] He said: "For every Olympic champion, there at least 350 invalids. There are gymnasts among the girls who have to wear corsets from the age of 18 because their spine and their ligaments have become so worn... There are young people so worn out by the intensive training that they come out of it mentally blank [lessivés - washed out], which is even more painful than a deformed spine."^[3]

Then on 26 August 1993, after the former GDR had disbanded itself to accede to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990, the records were opened and the evidence was there that the Stasi, the GDR state secret police, supervised systematic doping of East German athletes from 1971 until reunification in 1990. Doping existed in other countries, says expert Jean-Pierre de Mondenard, both communist and capitalist, but the difference with East Germany was that it was a state policy.^[4]

The Sportvereinigung Dynamo (English:Sport Club Dynamo)^[5] was especially singled out as a center for doping in the former East Germany.^[6] Many former club officials and some athletes found themselves charged after the dissolution of the country. A special page on the internet was created by doping victims trying to gain justice and compensation, listing people involved in doping in the GDR.^[7]

State-endorsed doping began with the Cold War when every eastern bloc gold was an ideological victory. From 1974, Manfred Ewald, the head of the GDR's sports federation, imposed blanket doping. At the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, the country of 17 million collected nine gold medals. Four years later the total was 20 and in 1976 it doubled again to 40.^[8] Ewald was quoted as having told coaches, "They're still so young and don't have to know everything." He was given a 22-month suspended sentence, to the outrage of his victims.^[9]

Often, doping was carried out without the knowledge of the athletes, some of them as young as ten years of age. It is estimated that around 10,000 former athletes bear the physical and mental scars of years of drug abuse,^[10] one of them is Rica Reinisch, a triple Olympic champion and world record-setter at the Moscow Games in 1980, has since suffered numerous miscarriages and recurring ovarian cysts.

Two former Dynamo Berlin club doctors, Dieter Binus, chief of the national women's team from 1976 to 80, and Bernd Pansold, in charge of the sports medicine centre in East-Berlin, were committed for trial for allegedly supplying 19 teenagers with illegal substances.^[11] Binus was sentenced in August,^[12] Pansold in December 1998 after both being found guilty of administering hormones to underage female athletes from 1975 to 1984.^[13]

Virtually no East German athlete ever failed an official drugs test, though Stasi files show that many did, indeed, produce positive tests at Kreischa, the Saxon laboratory (German:Zentrales Dopingkontroll-Labor des Sportmedizinischen Dienstes) that was at the time approved by the International Olympic Committee,^[14] now called the Institute of Doping Analysis and Sports Biochemistry (IDAS).^[15]

In 2005, fifteen years after the end of the GDR, the manufacturer of the drugs in former East Germany, Jenapharm, still finds itself involved in numerous lawsuits from doping victims, being sued by almost 200 former athletes.^[16]

Former Sport Club Dynamo athletes who publicly admitted to doping, accusing their coaches^[17]:

• Daniela Hunger
• Andrea Pollack

Former Sport Club Dynamo athletes disqualified for doping:

• Ilona Slupianek^[18] (Ilona Slupianek was tested positive along with three Finnish athletes at the 1977 European Cup, becoming the only East German athlete ever to be convicted of doping)

Based on the admission by Pollack, the United States Olympic Committee asked for the redistribution of gold medals won in the 1976 Summer Olympics.^[19] Despite court rulings in Germany that substantiate claims of systematic doping by some East German swimmers, the IOC executive board announced that it has no intention of revising the Olympic record books. In rejecting the American petition on behalf of its women's medley relay team in Montreal and a similar petition from the British Olympic Association on behalf of Sharron Davies, the IOC made it clear that it wanted to discourage any such appeals in the future.^[20]

Documentation

In 1991 Brigitte Berendonk and Werner Franke, two opponents of the doping, published several theses which had been drafted former researchers in the GDR doping products which were at the Military Medical Academy Bad Saarow. Based on this work, in their book (translated from German as 'Doping Documents") they were able to reconstruct the practice of doping as it was organized by the State on many great athletes from the GDR, including Marita Koch and Heike Drechsler‎, who have denied the allegations. Brigitte Berendonk survived a 1993 lawsuit where Drechsler‎ accused her of lying. The lawsuit essentially validates the book^[21][22]

Significant cases

Renate Neufeld

In 1977, one of East Germany's best sprinters, Renate Neufeld, fled to the West with the Bulgarian she later married. A year later she said that she had been told to take drugs supplied by coaches while training to represent East Germany in the 1980 Olympic Games.

At 17, I joined the East Berlin Sports Institute. My speciality was the 80m hurdles. We swore that we would never speak to anyone about our training methods, including our parents. The training was very hard. We were all watched. We signed a register each time we left for dormitory and we had to say where we were going and what time we would return. One day, my trainer, Günter Clam, advised me to take pills to improve my performance: I was running 200m in 24 seconds. My trainer told me the pills were vitamins, but I soon had cramp in my legs, my voice became gruff and sometimes I couldn't talk any more. Then I started to grow a moustache and my periods stopped. I then refused to take these pills. One morning in October 1977, the secret police took me at 7am and questioned me about my refusal to take pills prescribed by the trainer. I then decided to flee, with my fiancé.^[23][24]

She brought with her to the West grey tablets and green powder she said had been given to her, to members of her club, and to other athletes. The West German doping analyst Manfred Donike reportedly identified them as anabolic steroids. She said she stayed quiet for a year for the sake of her family. But when her father then lost his job and her sister was expelled from her handball club, she decided to tell her story.^[23]

Andreas Krieger

Heidi Krieger competed in the East German athletics team, winning the gold medal for shot put in the 1986 European Championships in Athletics.

From the age of 16 onward, Krieger was systematically doped with anabolic steroids, which have significant androgenic effects on the body. She had already had doubts about her sexuality, and the chemical changes resulting from the steroids only exacerbated them. Eventually, she had many of the characteristics of a man. In 1997, some years after retirement, Krieger underwent sex reassignment surgery and changed her name to Andreas.

At the trial of Manfred Ewald, leader of the East German sports program and president of his East Germany's Olympic committee and Manfred Hoeppner, East German medical director in Berlin in 2000, Krieger testified that the drugs he had been given had contributed to his transsexuality.

References

1. ^ ^{a b c} Dr Jean-Pierre de Mondenard (2000). Dopage : L'imposture des performances. Wilmette, Ill: Chiron. ISBN 2-7027-0639-8. 
2. ^ Cited Woodland, Les: Dope, the use of drugs in sport, David and Charles, UK, 1980
3. ^ Le Figaro, France, 19 January 1989
4. ^ "Sports Doping Statistics Reach Plateau in Germany". Deutsche Welle. 2003-02-26. http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,786574,00.html. Retrieved 2007-08-04. 
5. ^ Pain And Injury in Sport: Social And Ethical Analysis, Section III, Chapter 7, Page 111, by Sigmund Loland, Berit Skirstad, Ivan Waddington, Published by Routledge in 2006, ASIN: B000OI0HZG
6. ^ "Dynamo Liste (in German)". [e-mail]. September 2002. http://members.lycos.co.uk/dopingopfer/kommentar_ordner/09_2002/dynamo_liste_web.htm. Retrieved 2008-03-10. 
7. ^ "Dynamo Liste: Die Täter (in German)". [e-mail]. September 2002. http://members.lycos.co.uk/dopingopfer/taeter/taeter_alle.htm. Retrieved 2008-03-11. 
8. ^ "Jenapharm says drugs were legal". ESPN. 2005-04-28. http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/news/story?id=2048448. Retrieved 2008-03-11. 
9. ^ "Obituary: Manfred Ewald". The Independent. 2002-10-25. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20021025/ai_n12658822. Retrieved 2008-03-11. ^{[dead link]}
10. ^ "GDR athletes sue over steroid damage". BBC News Europe. 2005-03-13. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4341045.stm. Retrieved 2008-03-11. 
11. ^ "New doping charges against East German doctors". BBC News. 1997-11-25. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sport/34496.stm. Retrieved 2008-03-07. 
12. ^ "East German coaches fined over doping". BBC News. 1998-08-31. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sport/161913.stm. Retrieved 2008-03-11. 
13. ^ "Doping of underage athletes in the former GDR (in German)". Schwimmverein Limmat Zürich. 2000-03-23. http://www.svl.ch/doping/ddr_doping_minderjaehrige.html. Retrieved 2008-03-10. 
14. ^ "Drug claim could be a bitter pill". Times Online. 2005-03-02. http://www.ergogenics.org/ddrroids2.html. Retrieved 2008-03-13. 
15. ^ "Accredited Laboratories". World Anti-Doping Agency. January 2004. http://www.wada-ama.org/en/dynamic.ch2?pageCategory.id=333. Retrieved 2008-03-13. 
16. ^ Harding, Luke (2005-11-01). "Forgotten victims of East German doping take their battle to court". London: The Guardian. http://sport.guardian.co.uk/athletics/story/0,10082,1605761,00.html. Retrieved 2008-03-11. 
17. ^ "Drugs update". Sports Publications. July 1998. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3883/is_199807/ai_n8790764. Retrieved 2008-03-11. ^{[dead link]}
18. ^ "1977: Here comes Mr. Doping". European Cup - Milan 2007. 2007. http://www.milano2007.org/html_eng/storia_coppa.asp. Retrieved 2008-03-11. 
19. ^ Longman, Jere (1998-10-25). "OLYMPICS; U.S. Seeks Redress for 1976 Doping In Olympics". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A05E0DE173CF936A15753C1A96E958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=3. Retrieved 2008-03-12. 
20. ^ "Despite Doping, Olympic Medals Stand". International Herald Tribune. 1998-12-16. http://www.iht.com/articles/1998/12/16/medals.t.php. Retrieved 2008-03-12. ^{[dead link]}
21. ^ ↑ Brigitte Berendonk: Doping documents - From Research to commit fraud. Springer-Verlag, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-540-53742-2
22. ^ ↑ Cf Uwe Mueller / Grit Hartman: Forward and forget it! Kader, spies and accomplices - The dangerous legacy of the SED dictatorship, Berlin 2009, p. 215
23. ^ ^{a b} Sport Information Dienst, W Germany, December 1978
24. ^ Costelle D, Berlioux M, Histoires des Jeux Olympiques, Larousse, France, 1980

External links

• Secrets of the Dead episode "Doping for Gold"