The recent Russian doping scandal is a throwback to Soviet Bloc Olympic medal politics
When East German super swimmers dominated the pool
The Olympics this year are shaping up to have a hefty Eastern Bloc throwback vibe.
In light of Richard McLaren’s 100-page report, all Russian athletes may be banned from participating in the Rio Games in August. McLaren, a Canadian lawyer hired by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), confirmed the claims of Russia’s former antidoping lab director, Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, that the Russian government had commissioned and covered-up a massive doping program, in which government officials helped steal and taint the urine samples of athletes. All of which helped the host country win 33 medals at the Sochi Winter Games (up from their dismal 15-medal showing in Vancouver four years earlier.)
The case calls to mind East Germany and its widespread, state-run doping during the Cold War years.
In 1974, Manfred Ewald, the head of the German Democratic Republic’s sports federation, mandated a nationwide doping program meant to ensure ideological victories in the form of gold medals at international competitions.
By the 1976 Montreal Olympics, Ewald’s vision came to fruition and East Germany, a small, struggling nation of 17 million — roughly the same as New York state at the time — won 40 gold medals in all competitions, 6 more than the United States.
The doping was most successful for the women’s swimming team, which won gold in 11 of 13 categories. The victories did not go unnoticed by fellow competitors. In response to an American swimmer commenting on the “manly frames and deep voices” of the East German women, a GDR official responded that they “came to swim, not to sing.”
Despite the international community’s skepticism about the East German victories, just one athlete from the GDR tested positive for performance enhancing drugs.
“Doping was clandestine in the West,” said Professor Werner Franke, a molecular biologist who has dedicated his life to exposing the GDR’s doping history. “It existed in small circles, so it didn’t have the thoroughness of the East. But doping in the GDR was different from the rest of the East. It was German. It was orderly. It was bureaucratic. It was written up.”
In other words, the GDR doping trains ran on time.
The Stasi, East Germany’s secret police force — notorious for its efficacy and ruthlessness — oversaw the program. Athletes who displayed “probing or dissent” were “harshly punished,” ensuring cooperation and success. Today, the medals won and the records broken by East German athletes still stand.
Likewise, in the recent Russian case, it was the government involvement that enabled the breadth and success of the program.
“The surprise result of the Sochi investigation was the revelation of the extent of State oversight and directed control of the Moscow laboratory in processing and covering up urine samples of Russian athletes from virtually all sports before and after the Sochi Games,” Mr. McLaren writes in the report.
Of course, this shouldn’t have been a surprise at all. Back in 2012, Darya Pishchalnikova, a Russian discus thrower who won a silver medal at the London Olympics, reached out to WADA to implore them to investigate the Russian Olympic program. She even admitted to taking performance enhancing drugs. WADA did the unthinkable. It ignored her confession and then reported her to Russian sports officials. If it weren’t for Dr. Rodchenkov’s whistleblowing, Russia’s state-sponsored doping program might never have come to light.
It wasn’t until after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that East Germany’s doping program was revealed to the world. It was officially called “State Planning Theme 14.25” and over a 20-year period an estimated 10,000 athletes were doped. Children as young as 12 were injected with anabolic steroids, most without their knowledge or parental consent.
The coaches and bureaucrats who implemented the doping program were given light, suspended sentences. Ewald, the architect of the doping program, was convicted in 2000 of being an accessory to “intentional bodily harm of athletes, including minors.” He was given probation for his crimes.
It is the athletes who have paid the consequences. Thousands of the former East German athletes now suffer from long term damage including cancer, depression, eating disorders and liver and heart disease. Many of the women who underwent forced “virilisation” treatments had their bodies changed irreparably. Heidi Krieger, who won gold in the shot put, was given so many body-altering hormones that she underwent surgery to become a man and now goes by the name of Andreas Krieger.
It remains to be seen what effects the modern Russian doping program will have on its athletes, but the state still denies guilt, in any case.
“Today we see a dangerous relapse of politics intruding into sports,” Vladimir Putin announced, without a hint of irony.
