TAINTED TIMES FROM THIRTY YEARS AGO

They ruled at the Olympics, the Worlds, and the Europeans

Craig Lord

A quick glance around the room confirmed the terrible truth: there were more Olympic, world, and European medal winners standing within 10 metres of me than Britain, France, Spain, Sweden, and the Netherlands-just a few examples of the many teams hung, drawn, and quartered by those in the GDR who ought to have been charged with slaughtering the Olympic spirit and butchering the principals of fair play-had managed to place in their national trophy cabinets throughout swimming history.

Quaffing to my right were Diers, Kleber, Linke, Franke, Fiebig, Sehmisch; reminiscing straight ahead were Knacke, Vogel, Lindner, Kother-Gabriel; sharing a joke to my left were Meineke, Wuschek, Stellmach, Treiber; and over in a far comer with his wife was the token male, Jorg Woithe, a pleasant man whose brawn has bowed to the bulk of a life more ordinary.

On the whole, the women looked to be in good shape, though the tell-tale signs of the crime committed against them were all too evident: masculine qualities manifested themselves in various ways, the most common the presence of many a voice that would do a Welsh working man's choir proud. A few still swim regularly, about half swim from time to time, and half rarely go near a pool. There was not a single one of them that I would not have described as bright and engaging women, psychologists, doctors, teachers, theatrical directors in their midst. Sport often demands a keen mind alongside talent, training, and the will to win. A fifth element visited the youth of these women.

All drugged without parental consent
Take away Sehmisch and Lindner (pre-1973) and you can be certain (talent pierced as it was by syringe and pill, then damned by the bloody pen of the architects and enforcers of the GDR doping program) that all the rest were administered steroids and/or related, banned substances at some point during their swimming lives and mainly without the consent or knowledge of their parents.

The merry few gathered around me for the sixth Olympic reunion in East Germany accounted for (take a deep breath) 9 gold, l l silver, 6 bronze at the Olympics; 17 gold, 9 silver, 5 bronze at world long course; and 24 gold, 13 silver, 2 bronze at European long-course championships between 1970 and 1991. Thank heavens-for I would surely still be counting-that Friedrich, Geissler, Geweniger, Hase, Hempel, Hoffmann, Hunger, Matthes, Metschuk, Pollack, Richter, Horner, and Lodziewski did not show up (not to mention the legions not listed on this year's program).

Many stayed away because of work commitments. Geissler was in mourning for the tragic death of her teenage daughter. She had suffered a genetic disorder throughout her short life.

Nor could Petra Thumer, Olympic champion and world record holder over 400 and 800 m freestyle in 1976, make it to the Friday evening reception either and was missed on the tour of a garden festival the next morning, when a Tupelo tree was planted in honour of the reunion. "For most of the year, the Tupelo (Nyssa Sylvatica) is quite ordinary... deciduous ... slow growing," states my book of trees. It comes good with a golden display in autumn.

How inappropriate for a squad of ex-Wundermadchen. There was nothing slow about their development; if one shoot wilted, another replaced it instantly; they were decidedly more evergreen than deciduous and, while hardy, their golden displays were not so much annual as placed on show whenever the dark guardians at the root of a hybrid success born of crossing talent with drugs wanted to prove a political point in the midst of the Cold War. They were not invincible, but by and large they trounced the world.

Many a positive doping case under the bridge-since the days when red-faced moments were confined to the IOC-accredited laboratory where GDR scientists kept (or were obliged to keep) the doping secret safely under Stasi wraps and beyond the gaze of a suspicious but all-too-often silent world-the medal winners feel they have a right to recall their training days and to celebrate their achievements.

There is little point in placing a name next to this quote-it fell from the lips of so many: "Yes, there was doping. But I trained so hard for so long. I was chosen for my talent and I worked so hard. The medals are mine. I won those races. I want to keep them as a reminder of what I did and how I worked for it."

That they were talented and capable of world-class performances in their own right is not in doubt. Otherwise, they would not have been chosen for a state sports school and then later placed under the supervision of the doctors and coaches who saw something special and added abuse to the cocktail that produced champions.

A bolt from the blue
Take Thumer. She showed up to join the garden party on arrival back at the splendid 50-metre pool in Riesa that stands next door to the hall that housed the temporary pool for the European short course championships back in 2002. Thumer would not look out of place in the competitive pool today.

Fit and boasting a keen definition of triceps to this day, she donned her 1976 suit, swam two 50 metres in fun relay races with local children (she swam a little over 30 sec), employing a technique that was nothing short of astounding given the passing of time, before drying herself down with her Montreal Olympics team towel.

Back then in Canada, Thumer was like a bolt from the blue: not capable of a sub 4:20 a year before, she stunned the swim community in 1976 with a 4:09.89 (30 years ago!) 400 victory and another gold, in 8:37.14 over 800, keeping American Shirley Babashoff at bay in both events. A year later she took gold over 200, 400, and 800 m at the European Championships. It was the last time the world would see her.

And here is why: Before the GDR team left for the 1978 world championships in West Berlin, 10 out of 13 women tested positive for banned substances. All but two would be clean by the time they mounted their blocks at the other side of the Wall. The other two never made it: Thumer and Christiane Knacke, the first woman to race inside a minute over 100 m butterfly (29 years ago!).

Their urine was sent to Kreischa and fresh samples were tested every 12 hours, according to Stasi documents unearthed by anti-doping campaigners Prof Werner Franke, a leading cell biologist, and his wife Birgitte Berendonk. Time and again the same result came back: traces of a precursor to testosterone caused by the anabolic steroid Depot-Turinabol, a drug that came only in injectable form in those days. Depot-Turinabol was the East German word for something now more commonly known as nandrolone.

Up in the Gods as Thumer graced the waters of Riesa stood a stoney faced Volker Frischke, a former coach, Stasi operative, and informer in Berlin. One with the nerve to show up at a reunion of a community upon whose head he had helped to heap shame. What was he thinking? Perhaps he imagines himself forgiven. He certainly can't have forgotten: in 1999, in the midst of a series of doping trials that made an ass of German law and fell woefully shy of even skimming the surface of the sporting crime of the 20th century, Frischke was found guilty in the case against two doctors and four coaches charged with administering anabolic steroids to 19 underage female swimmers at the Sport Club Dynamo Berlin between 1975 and 1989.

Still involved with the system

And here he was. It was gratifying to note that few spoke to him. He is a man on the fringe. Not so Uwe Neumann, another coach steeped in the GDR system and now steeped in the current DSV national team. He has just spent four weeks at altitude training German team swimmers alongside performance director Orjan Madsen.

I followed Neumann, local coach in Riesa, out on to the roof, where he had taken refuge to take in his own drug of choice: tobacco. I asked him how he felt about the reunion of a community that still suffered-and probably always wouldfrom the stigma of the doping years. As he spoke through a grin, his mouth dried up, his throat became constricted. It was quite right that testing was carried out. It was needed sc that innocent talent could prosper. It was right that Madsen has instituted a system under which German swimmers will give blood at the start and end of each of four altitude training camps over the coming year.

"The problem back then (in GDR times) was that there was no level playing field. There was no out-of-competition testing. In the early days, substances were not banned," said Neumann. So, the suggestion is that the GDR was not alone in taking drugs? He laughed, shrugged, and said: "Of course not, Do you imagine that the GDR was capable of producing these drugs in the first instance? The drugs came from America (in the first instance)." Even if true (and there is evidence to confirm that the GDR developed its own performance-enhancing substances), are you suggesting that the USA team, those women who beat the GDR women (as they did) were also swimming beyond natural capacity? He nodded, shrugged, and laughed.

And on it went for a little while longer before we drifted back inside. There is forgiveness in this world but confession usually precedes it. Confession has been a rare path in Germany's poor attempts at dealing with a difficult doping past. All the records were adopted by the DSV (they must have been out of their minds) and GDR results are still perceived as achievements to look up to among the wider community: the fairly sizeable number of autograph hunters at the garden festival confirmed as much.

Sports traitors
Where false champions are applauded, truth is gagged. Pity the swimmer who speaks out. To be ostracized within the community in which you must live out your life is not a mixed blessing people willingly invite into their lives. When Petra Schneider returned home from work one day in the week after a newspaper had run quotes from her acknowledging that she had been doped, she was confronted by the words "Sports Traitor" daubed across her door. Too few of those involved in GDR sport have been prepared to stand up and be counted, too few have supported the brave few who faced their former coaches and doctors in court, too many have been allowed to carry on in sport, in a variety of capacities, without ever having admitted to what they know to be the truth, too few have been punished.

Time heals wounds, the saying goes. Not always. In the words of Rica Reinisch, former backstroke world record holder and Olympic champion: "There are so many victims and so many people who are just scared and intimidated ... there are many mothers who gave birth to deformed children, and they are afraid to come out of hiding, afraid that their lives will be shattered further." Justice, she said, had not been served at the doping trials of the late 1990s.

It probably won't be served either if the 162 former GDR athletes, many of them swimmers, intent on pursuing further action, win the right to sue Jenapharm, the drugs company that made the doping given to them, and the National Olympic Committee of Germany, which took on the responsibility of the equivalent GDR body upon reunification.

Real justice can never really be served for the victims of the GDR era, neither for those who raced for the Democratic Republic that was anything but, nor for those beaten by her. Yet, better efforts can be made by those who administer sport and by those who wrote its history. I wrote a comment recently criticizing the International Swimming Hall of Fame for their failure to acknowledge the GDR's crime alongside some defective biographies of East German swimmers. My words upset a few people but I stand by them and was delighted to hear from the new man at the helm of the ISHOF.

Bruce Wigo has rolled up his sleeves and is putting the ISHOF house in order. Part of that weighty exercise will see a statement posted on the Hall's website alongside GDR results and honoree biogs. It is overdue but most welcome. It acknowledges that "from 1966 on, hundreds of physicians andscientists, including top-ranking professors, performed doping research and administered prescription drugs as well as unapproved experimental drug preparations." The administration of those drugs has "resulted in irreversible damages to many of the International Swimming Hall of Fame's honorees from the DDR, including signs of virilization such as liver damage, an increased growth of bodily hair (hirsutism), voice changes, and disturbances in libido" while many "continue to suffer from the after effects of this experimentation."

The ISHOF will not remove the GDR honorees and results. How could it? It notes: "As neither FINA or the IOC have taken action to revoke their awards or records, the International Swimming Hall of Fame has not sought to remove these athletes from the Hall of Fame."

It is what we're left with and probably the most sensible solution possible. Yet it grates to know that the likes of Frischke and Neumann have dined out on the success of the doped girls-and boys-who trained under their guidance. For that and so many other reasons, the sight of GDR performances being celebrated feels, at the very least, uncomfortable.

A few still live in the past and can't escape it
The past defines a man who lives in it. The same can be said of the present. There is always scope to make ammends, move on, change, adapt, learn. Frischke lives in the past and will never escape it. He was not alone in that regard in Riesa. But the same cannot be said of the swimmers. They have moved on, to professionals, families, to a life more ordinary, perhaps, but what more meaningful that a gold medal claimed on a diet of substances destined to harm their health, as it did in the case of so many of the 10,000 or so athletes said to have been caught in the Stasi's pharmaceutical war.

In the round, catharsis is perhaps all we can hope for in time. In that sense, Klaus Katzur, the 1970 European 200 m breaststroke champion for the GDR, former husband to Thumer and organiser of the reunions, is to be congratulated for bringing a smile to the faces of those who wish to remember their time as GDR swimmers, relive a common experience, talk through their joys and sadnesses.

Meineke, now a doctor, said: "It's great to be here. It's the first one I've been to for a few years. It's good to make contact with people and to talk about old times. I think it's a shame that today so many people in sport prepare apart; no one comes together. A lot of us trained, traveled, and lived together. We have a bond. It's worth remembering the way we trained."
The next reunion will not be held for several years. When Klaus reaches for the invitations and recalls the excellent time had by most in Riesa, he might consider the guest list and aim for those who would not wish to raise a glass of anything but poison with those who have failed to raise an arm and say from the heart and mind-and mean it: "I apologize without reservation. Yes, we cheated and I played my part. This was who I was. This is what I did. Never again."

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