Guest spot: German doping controversy festers

Today we feature a guest spot from Jürgen Kalwa, who writes for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and maintains the blog American Arena.  Mr Kalwa also co-authored the book "Korruption in Sport", reference found at the bottom.

We asked Jurgen to review an emerging doping issue in German spors, to which we referred here.  This story may explode into a BALCO-like situation.  The post will be continued after the jump.

The inner-German public discourse about doping has reached a new level. For the first time, since the large-scale cycling scandal revealed that German riders had never been as clean as they proclaimed, investigative journalists are battling for their reputation. The most recent case involving revelations about a blood bank in Austria and its connections to unnamed German cross-country and biathlon skiers has riled up the bosses of the skiing federation who, in the past, have been counted on to produce Olympic medals and World Championship and make sponsors, including the German army, happy. 

A federation spokesman has threatened legal action in spite of the fact that no names have come out and Hajo Seppelt, the investigative TV reporter at the center of the controversy, has stated: "We are not sure current members of national teams are involved. These are cases from the past."

But Germany is a unique landscape in the world of doping. Because long before BALCO and the scandals of the Tour de France there had never been a bigger and smarter manipulation scheme than East Germany's secret program which fed its young with strong illegal unhealthy muscle-building substances. After the country vanished in 1990 the West German justice system dealt with legal issues. Sports organizations resented and rejected
coaches and consultants from the East, in order to keep their house clean.  This noble stance was shown to be a facade, when German cyclists admitted one by one how heavily involved they were in tainting a popular sport and how they had fooled everybody including drug testing labs trying to catch them. (continued after the jump)

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"Korruption im Sport", was published in 2006 and is the first effort of a group of German sports journalists to educate other journalists (and the public at large) about how corrupt sports has become
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/3931801217/ref=ord_cart_shr?%5Fencoding=UTF8&m=A3JWKAKR8XB7XF

It is not only talking about doping, but about a whole host of shenanigans.

But those confessions also pointed towards another element of the wide-ranging cheating scandal: the duplicity of sports journalists, especially in public television, which is funded by a system of mandatory monthly fees every German with a TV set has to pay. Their commentators had long abandoned their role as independent reporters, but had evolved into cheerleaders chasing after high ratings. Only after the debacle of last year's Tour de France, ARD, one of the two large public television channels, installed a special doping team and gave them free reign to chase the bad guys. Hajo Seppelt became the man in charge.

His research led him to Human Plasma, a blood bank in Vienna, which had been implicated in Austrian doping cases that came to light during the Turin Winter Games in 2006. According to Austrian newspaper Kurier, former WADA boss Dick Pound had given interested media people a hint. When it became clear that Austrian authorities had begun their own official criminal inquiry the rumor mill started churning. The most aggressive naming of athletes was done by Seppelt's new investigative ARD team, which got itself in hot water in the process. When they revealed they had information about connections between up to 20 German skiers and Human Plasma, the skiing federation threatened with a law suit, even though no particular skier had been implicated. The only specific names that, so far, were thrown into the public arena were those of bicyclists  Georg Totschnig (Austria), Michael Rasmussen (Denmark), Michael Boogerd (Netherland) und Denis Menchov (Russia).

The situation is threatening the reputation of a journalist, who for years had been the only German TV reporter to actively pursue leads and stories about doping. While he insists that he has clear indications that Human Plasma practiced "blood doping in the style of Eufemiano Fuentes", the Spanish doctor well-known for his stable of cycling clients, he still wants to protect his sources. "Russians and Ukrainian mafia members are behind
this", he said according to a report in German news daily Die Welt. "Fear [is] a constant companion."