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Friday, September 29
Final call for East Germany's drug curtain
From Craig Lord in Sydney
Just over 24 hours after Sydney bids farewell to the Games in a celebratory flood of fireworks, colour and noise, a far darker chapter in Olympic history will come to a much quieter close, one that will leave 384 medals forever tainted.
At midnight on Monday, all pending cases against coaches, doctors and officials accused of bodily harm for their role in East Germany’s state-run doping programme will be closed for good. Many will now escape a legal process that had much more to do with losing face and a few thousand marks than being punished seriously, but hundreds of others have faced their victims across courtrooms crowded with media and memories of a bygone “golden” era.
The legacy of the 144 gold, 120 silver and 120 bronze Olympic medals won by East Germans at the Games of 1972, 1976, 1980 and 1988 (the Games of 1984 were boycotted) is one of disabled children, sex changes, severe ill-health and a generation of athletes, swimmers, rowers and others cheated out of their true place in sports history. The sensations experienced by the winner on his or her day have been denied to those who finished behind East Germans.
Nor are the “losers” ever likely to get any official recognition of what should have been their greatest moments. Fina, swimming’s global authority, is a case in point. In the pool, East German women won 32 out of a possible 43 gold medals at the 1976, 1980 and 1988 Games. It was a record rewarded with three Fina Prizes (of Eminence), the top honour that swimming gives for services to the sport.
Fina said that it would wait until the legal cases in Germany had concluded before making a decision on the prizes given to Kornelia Ender in 1975, the GDR’s swimming federation in 1986 and Kristin Otto in 1988. The wait is over.
But when asked by The Times what he intended to do about those prizes, Mustapha Larfaoui, the president of Fina, said that swimming had to take its cue from the International Olympic Committee, which had decided to leave the results and medals standing.
The Fina prizes, however, were merits over and above that, awards that could surely now be taken away, particularly in the case of the 1986 honour going to the GDR system? Was a gesture to the victims not now possible? Larfaoui stared into the distance for what seemed an eternity, then murmured: “We will have to think more about this - but history is history.”
That does not stop it being rewritten, of course: in its wisdom and hunger for success, the German Olympic Committee has listed every East German result as its own in the national team handbook for the Sydney Games, even, pathetically, those gained in Moscow 1980 when West Germany did not attend because of the boycott.
A spokesman for the Germans in Sydney said: “Well, none of them ever tested positive and we were different but now we are all the same.” Perhaps he hadn’t read the testimony from the courts in which confirmation that the Kreischa, the IOC-approved laboratory, had tested every East German before they ventured beyond the Berlin Wall to ensure they tested “clean”.
Perhaps he hadn’t read the stories of the women who paraded their disabled offspring into court and told of the terrible internal scars that they will carry through what, for some, will be shortened lives.
Perhaps he had not noticed Rica Reinisch, a triple champion in 1980, revealing that she had suffered five miscarriages and suffers from recurring ovarian cycsts, or the testimony of swimmer Catherine Menschner, who received male hormones from the age of 10 and has suffered permanent damage to her spine and reproductive organs. Then there was shot and discus throwers Brigitte Michel and Birgit Boese, who were told that their reproductive organs were like those of a ten-year-old child.
Come Monday night, the German Olympic Committee, Fina and the IOC might just now think it time to show a little more respect for the likes of Andreas Krieger, who was known as Heidi Krieger when she threw the shot in the days before the drugs forced her to undergo a sex change operation that left her, or him, suicidal.
And somebody might even have the courage to speak to the parents of Joerge Sievers, who was found dead at the bottom of a pool after suffering massive heart failure during training. East German authorities informed the parents that their son had had severe ’flu and had drowned.
They failed to mention the autopsy report that would be unveiled in court more than 20 years later. Among the list of horrors was a “severe thickening of the heart chamber walls”, an “acute infection of the spleen” and “toxic-infectious damage of the liver”.
The game of Cluedo was finally over; by the coaches and doctors, at the pool, with banned and dangerous substances. The Olympic spirit it was not.
