Kornelia Ender was the first "wundermadchen" of the East German medal-winning factory that was found to have been fuelled by a state-run drugs programme. She won four gold medals at the 1976 Olympic Games, all in world record time, three of them in individual events and two of those within 27 minutes of each other.

To this day Ender, born in Bitterfeld in 1959, says she does not know what drugs she may have been given by her coaches and team doctors. In 1991, she broke her silence over her years as an East German swimmer when she told The Times that she had been injected after training sessions with substances that she was told would help her to "regenerate and recuperate".

She recalled having been "shocked" by a muscle weight gain of 18lb in the months leading up to the Montreal Olympic Games but imagined that her physical transformation was simply the result of hard work.

More certain were the results. As a 13-year-old at the Munich Games of 1972, Ender won three silver medals, one of them an individual medal in the 200m medley behind the great Shane Gould.

She also wrote her name into the world record book for the first time in Munich, as a member of the GDR 4x100m freestyle relay that would finish second in the final to the United States.

But not even that early show of talent hinted at what was to follow as she developed into a role modelfor an East German system that produced half pf all the 88 women's world champions in the pool from 1973 to 1989.

In April 1973, Ender swam a touch inside Gould's best over 200m medley to set the first of her 32 individual world records. The time was 2mins 23.01sec. By June 1976, she had improved to 2mins 17.14sec, but the event had been dropped from the Games in that year and Ender's most extraordinary performances were seen in sprint freestyle events.

Ender broke Gould's 100m freestyle world record with a 58.25sec effort in East Berlin in July 1973. She would lower the standard a further nine times over the next three years, culminating in an astounding 55.65sec Olympic victory in Montreal.

She had taken just three years to take the world record down by 2.6sec. The same improvement was achieved over 14 years before her, from Dawn Fraser in 1958 to Gould in 1972.

In those three years, beyond her Olympic tally, Ender won eight world anf four European titles. She was the first woman to break the 2-minute mark over 200m freestyle and in Montreal equalled her own world record over 100m butterfly, to win in 1min 00.13sec, before returning to the water 27 minutes later to win the 200m freestyle in a world record of 1min 59.26sec, beating Shirley Babashoff, of the US, by 1.96sec, the greatest winning margin ever at the event.

Having won two individual silver medals in 1972, Babashoff won four silver medals behind East Germans in 1976, making her one of three who share the record for most silver medals won.

Had it not been for the drugs regime of East Germany, Babashoff may have been considered one of the greatest swimmers in history. She has spent much of her life since delivering post.

Ender, meanwhile, married Roland Matthes, the double Olympic champion over 100 and 200m backstroke in 1968 and 1972. Between them the couple won 16 Olympic medals. They had a daughter, Franziska, who swam at junior level in Germany but never made it to international standard.

After her divorce to Matthes, Ender married Stefan Grummt, a member of the East German bobsleighing team, and the couple has a daughter, Tiffany. Ender now works as a physiotherapist in southern Germany and occasionally competes as a "masters" swimmer, the fun end of the sport for those over 25 years of age.

CRAIG LORD
The Times