whiteboytrash said:They blitzed the Olympics and smashed world records. But East Germany's sporting prodigies were powered by drugs. Now they regard themselves as forgotten victims - and they want someone to pay. By Luke Harding in Berlin.
Rica Reinisch was just 14 when her swimming coach approached her one day after training and gave her a blue pill. The year was 1979. Reinisch, a swimming prodigy, had already spent four years at an elite sports school in the East German city of Dresden. "My coach came up to me and gave me a tablet," Reinisch says. "He told me: ‘Take it. It's good for you. It will make your body regenerate more quickly.' He made it sound as if it were completely normal."
Just before the 1980 Moscow Olympics the tablets stopped. "It was madness," she says. "But at the time I put my improved performance down to all the hard training. I was, after all, spending seven or eight hours a day in the pool."
The 15-year-old swimmer was one of the games' sensations - winning three gold medals and setting three new backstroke world records, including an astonishing 1 minutes 00.86 seconds for the 100 metres. The next year she set three European records. In 1982, however, Reinisch collapsed at a training camp in the Ukraine, suffering from inflamed ovaries. She was flown back to her training base in Dresden by helicopter.
"I went to see the doctor. He seemed distressed. He told me simply that I should give up top-level sport. My parents were speechless."
Reinisch is one of the forgotten victims. For three decades, East Germans ran, swam and shot-putted their way to glory, winning Olympic gold medals, setting world records and - so it seemed at the time - demonstrating the superiority of communism. But this month the human cost of East Germany's extraordinary sporting success will be laid bare in a courtroom in Hamburg.
About 190 East German competitors are launching a case against the German pharmaceutical giant Jenapharm. They claim that the East German firm knowingly supplied the steroids that were given to them by trainers and coaches from the 1960s onwards until East Germany's demise in 1989. Jenapharm, now owned by Schering, argues it was not responsible for the doping scandal and blames the communist system.
Last month, meanwhile, Germany's athletics federation announced that it was checking 22 national records set by East German athletes. The investigation came after Ines Geipel, a member of the recordholding East German women's 4x100 metres relay team, asked for her record from 1984 to be struck off. She revealed she had been doped. In a separate case another former East German swimmer, Karin Konig, is suing the German Olympic committee for damages. Konig claims that she was also a victim of doping between 1982 and 1987.
I read this article in yesterdays Guardian.
Very sad state of affairs.
