True cost of drug-fuelled Olympic success becomes apparent

Long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the cruelty of the DDR's overlords lives on in the broken bodies of those the regime promoted as living examples of socialist supremacy. Trained for Olympic glory, the athletes of the German Democratic Republic became little more than laboratory rats pumped with harmful drugs to make them beat an envious world.

It is not just the athletes themselves who are growing old with dysfunctional bodies and disturbed minds. Because of the drugs forced upon them, they have given birth to a generation of deformed and ill children. Women such as Martina Fehrecke Gottschalt wish they had sat silent in their classes when the talent scouts from the government came calling.

Picked out in 1972 when the six-year-old admitted she liked swimming, she was taken to a special school to be honed as a champion for the state. Along the way she was given large doses of steroids. She is now infertile, has liver problems and suffers from an overactive thyroid gland. Both her children were born with mental and physical handicaps.

Last month Lothar Kipke, the chief doctor of the East German Swimming Federation who oversaw the doping programme for the regime between 1975 and 1985, was convicted on 58 counts of causing actual bodily harm to 58 swimmers. In May two more former DDR sports officials go on trial for the same crime.

But for Martina, 34 - and thousands like her - it is too late. Her health and that of her team mates in the swimming team, on the track, in javelin, shot-putt and cycling, has been ruined by the commisars who believed victory in sport would be vindication of the success of the socialist way. Since then, she and others have been fighting to prove the link between what happened to them was a direct result of the drugs they were given. There has been no compensation so far but they are confident they will win one day with the help of experts like Dr Werner Franke.

A German molecular biologist, it was his research into the effects of the drugs that triggered the first criminal cases against physicians like Kipke. He said: "It is clear that the taking of male hormones led to gynaecological changes. The fact that many of the birth defects of the children born to these athletes result in the first-born is significant. The longer these women were away from steroids the longer their bodies had a chance to start producing female hormones again."

According to files in secret police archives, some women were ordered to abort foetuses that might have been deformed by the drugs they took. And experts concur that there are simply too many cases of ex-athletes, particularly swimmers - who seem to have been the chosen guinea pigs for most of the doping - falling ill for it to be a coincidence. Petra Kind-Schneider, a gold medallist swimmer in the 1980 Olympics, has liver and heart problems.

Rica Reinisch, another gold winner who was given steroids from the age of 12, suffers from ovarian cysts. And the mental scars are incalculable. Gisheler Spitzer, a sports psychologist at the University of Potsdam, said: "The psychological implications of being doped with so much for so long are immense. These women live with the fact that their achievements are a result of their having cheated.

"Their identities are very much connected with their sport and they now fear they are not able to accomplish anything on their own. Plus there is the fact that as ill as they are now, it could get much worse the older they get."

Jutta Gottscheid recalls taking an average of 40 pills a day - plus injections. She and other children were told to keep them a secret from their parents, that they were nothing more than "super vitamins". "You don't ask too many questions when you're a 12-year- old," she said.

Perhaps the most sinister aspect of the entire affair is that the authorities in East Germany knew exactly what they were doing in drugging the nation's youth. In 1975 Hans Schuster, head of the Research Institute for Fitness in Sport in Leipzig, wrote in a memorandum: "Anabolic steroids have been prescribed in both combination and pure form and they have led to a considerable improvement in performance.

"However, the drugs have resulted in liver damage and changes in appearance when taken by young girls and women."

The findings did not alter government policy and were simply filed away. Carola Beraktschjal, another female athlete, said: "When we were no longer the fastest we were dumped. We were all expendable, just bred to win and then discarded when we didn't. It would be just for us to get some recompense for what we suffered."

Copyright 2000
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