Steroids, Springsteen, and Supertramp: East German doping machine's legacy

The East German doping machine that produced incredible results in Olympic competition remains as an example for those who underestimate the perniciousness of steroid and PED use.   Now defunct, the East German model lives on as recently as the paradigm for BALCO, and other doping conspiracies that rob honest athletes of victories and records.  Considering the heavy influence BALCO exerted on American athletes, one can draw a straight line from East Germany to BALCO and Victor Conte, to records such as the lifetime home run mark established by Barry Bonds.

A story in the Telegraph looks again at the East German model.  East German athletic bosses pumped up their competitors with 'roids and with banned (In the GDR) rock and roll from the Western devils:

For more than two decades they were part of the world's greatest athletics scandal, taking vast quantities of steroids in an attempt to prove communism's superiority

Now, though, another guilty secret of East Germany's Cold War Olympic success has finally been revealed – not a cocktail of performance-enhancing drugs, but a mixture of Supertramp, Bruce Springsteen and Shakin' Stevens.

Hits such as Dreamer, This Ole House and Born in the USA have been revealed as the unlikely motivational soundtrack for the country's athletes as they trained at a top-secret sports complex, now earmarked for reopening after 16 years lying disused.

Despite pop music being banned by the communist authorities, a discreet exception was made for sports stars as a treat to help them train harder.

"We always had good music, the latest Western hits," said Torsten Gutsche, 59, a multiple Olympic gold medallist in kayaking, one of nearly 100 successful Olympians who was coached there.

The sinister tunes were rocked out at a secret underground training bunker (shades of Hitler!).

Built in 1979, the underground training facility, consisting of a special depressurised bunker designed to simulate high-altitude conditions, was developed as an alternative to steroid programmes when international doping tests became more sophisticated.

The complex had remained quietly forgotten until this summer, when a doping scandal involving German cyclists sparked renewed interest in the East's controversial sporting past. Now there are calls for it to be made into a museum.

The decompressed facility increased red blood cells, a then legal way to give the GDR jocks an advantage.

Inside, a descending corridor leads to a steel shaft, followed by a decompression room – a gateway into a hermetically sealed two-story chamber, fitted with treadmills, exercise bikes, weight-lifting devices and rowing practice pools.

An elaborate ventilation system extracted air until the pressure was similar to that at an altitude of 4,000 metres (13,000ft), inducing athletes' bodies to produce more red blood cells and extra endurance.

"There is no doubt that the chamber fulfilled its purpose. The results were obvious. And there was nothing illegal about it," said Klaus-Peter Nowack, the head of the Kienbaum sport centre.

Athletes were ordered to train underground for weeks on end, being sent off to big contests only when their red blood cell count was drastically raised.

The GDR amassed an incredible total of medals, astonishing for the population, and the lack of resources in the communist country.  The tally came at a toll.  GDR athletes were forced to ingest steroids;  the females now suffer incredible health problems.

Between 1972 and 1988 they notched up 384 Olympic medals – from a population of just 16 million.

Up to 2,000 former athletes who were forcibly doped are now suffering serious health problems as a result, including Heidi Krieger, the 1986 European women's shot-put champion, who had a sex-change operation in 1997 as a result of having taken steroids that change hormone levels.

Gerd Heber, who coached East German runners and later the athletes of united Germany, said: "We would often spend days with our athletes inside, without seeing any daylight. It was, in a way, also a form of torture, but it has brought us a lot."

Keep in mind the heinous actions of the GDR doping machine when discussing the legality of steroids and PEDs.  Consider how Victor Conte and BALCO designed their programs of systematic doping when discussing the legitimacy of records like Barry Bonds home run marks.

Is this what we should be honoring in our sports world?

 

 

Comments

[Steve Myers]

Looks like East Germany found it comfortable to quietly continue the Nazis' quest for Superman; in this variation, however, only select Germans could be art of that happy group. It did not run along racial lines but, rather, ideological-based, physical ones.

It would be interesting to know whether GDR military trained their SPECOPS soldiers in hyperbaric environments, too. If the 'tanks' supported athletics, why not soldiers' games?