The only way out of the ghetto is through sport, we are often told.
In that vast European ghetto called East Germany, sport represented the only way out of the henhouse for ordinary people, caught between Nazi conditioning and Soviet sovereignty. With so little else to boast about, the state could at least honour its athletes as flag-bearers at international events - as long as they won, that is. To ensure this, the state needed the co-operation of certain doctors and pharmacists, recruited into an official doping programme that would earn them special payments and privileges by result - running distinctly counter to the spirit of Marxism, just as the programme itself ran counter to every kind of public ethic you could think of.
The most obvious scandal was the cynical corrupting of sportsmanship, the debasing of the gold standard. When eleven out of thirteen of the women's swimming events at the Montreal Olympics went to East Germany, there were suspicious murmurs. At the Moscow games, boycotted by the US, they did even better, but nobody failed the drug-test, because the doping had switched from pills to injections, which were (for some reason) not detectable. Only at the joyous dismantling of the Berlin Wall did the truth come out. And thereby hung a worse scandal.
For all along, the doping team had been taking appalling liberties with the health of the athletes. The favourite trick was to pump the females full of male hormones, causing surreal effects ranging from heart and liver disease to irreversible thigh damage and alarming growths of hair, even beards. One of them reveals how it drove her to a sex-change.
All this, of course, was conducted in the tightest secrecy. No-one was allowed to ask what drugs they were taking. A girl whose voice had become abnormally deep was banned from being interviewed. Another one refused the injection, and was promptly dropped from the team. And a third one got a shock when she was finally able to read her own file, which was clearly hushing-up the side-effects. At times, it seems only one step from the Nazi scientists with their experiments on human guinea-pigs.
Tessa Sanderson, the javelin thrower, makes quite a good Greek chorus, having been swindled out of at least one medal in this manner, but confessing that she could have felt the temptation to go that route, if the incentive to win had been strong enough. (Some of the so-called winners are still proud of their tainted medals.) She also admits that the west is not entirely innocent of dirty tricks. But hopefully we shall not again see 10,000 athletes cynically abused in this way, with such unspeakable effects on their health and sanity.
In that vast European ghetto called East Germany, sport represented the only way out of the henhouse for ordinary people, caught between Nazi conditioning and Soviet sovereignty. With so little else to boast about, the state could at least honour its athletes as flag-bearers at international events - as long as they won, that is. To ensure this, the state needed the co-operation of certain doctors and pharmacists, recruited into an official doping programme that would earn them special payments and privileges by result - running distinctly counter to the spirit of Marxism, just as the programme itself ran counter to every kind of public ethic you could think of.
The most obvious scandal was the cynical corrupting of sportsmanship, the debasing of the gold standard. When eleven out of thirteen of the women's swimming events at the Montreal Olympics went to East Germany, there were suspicious murmurs. At the Moscow games, boycotted by the US, they did even better, but nobody failed the drug-test, because the doping had switched from pills to injections, which were (for some reason) not detectable. Only at the joyous dismantling of the Berlin Wall did the truth come out. And thereby hung a worse scandal.
For all along, the doping team had been taking appalling liberties with the health of the athletes. The favourite trick was to pump the females full of male hormones, causing surreal effects ranging from heart and liver disease to irreversible thigh damage and alarming growths of hair, even beards. One of them reveals how it drove her to a sex-change.
All this, of course, was conducted in the tightest secrecy. No-one was allowed to ask what drugs they were taking. A girl whose voice had become abnormally deep was banned from being interviewed. Another one refused the injection, and was promptly dropped from the team. And a third one got a shock when she was finally able to read her own file, which was clearly hushing-up the side-effects. At times, it seems only one step from the Nazi scientists with their experiments on human guinea-pigs.
Tessa Sanderson, the javelin thrower, makes quite a good Greek chorus, having been swindled out of at least one medal in this manner, but confessing that she could have felt the temptation to go that route, if the incentive to win had been strong enough. (Some of the so-called winners are still proud of their tainted medals.) She also admits that the west is not entirely innocent of dirty tricks. But hopefully we shall not again see 10,000 athletes cynically abused in this way, with such unspeakable effects on their health and sanity.