Ahead of the Paris Olympics, Oliver Moody meets the female athletes of East Germany still living with the pain of winning at all costs.
In a maroon-carpeted conference room at a suburban Frankfurt hotel, 80 people are on their feet, clapping and swaying as a motivational speaking coach sings a cover of Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You spliced with unintelligibly fast German rap. One by one, speakers share their stories of overcoming humiliation or burnout in the corporate world. Then a softly spoken woman comes to the stage.
Dagmar Kersten’s speech follows much the same arc as the others: a past life under intense pressure to perform, the hollow disappointment of success, the ensuing breakdown and then the painful process of self-discovery and finding a new equilibrium. But her story is different. It begins with a video of the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul. Kersten, then a 17-year-old gymnast from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) – communist East Germany – approaches the uneven bars. The routine is breathtaking. Her body seems almost weightless as she executes the final dismount. She is awarded a 10 from the judges and the silver medal, second only to the unstoppable Romanian teenager Daniela Silivas. It is everything she has wanted since the age of 7.
Even in that moment of triumph, though, there is something ambiguous in Kersten’s expression. “I’m standing on the podium,” she says. “I’m waving, with a bunch of white flowers in my hand. The spectators are cheering for me. But I feel like a marionette. Like a diplomat in a tracksuit. They had shaped me for 10 years to become a walking advertisement for the GDR. As I stood on this podium, one thing was clear to me – I had lost myself and my dream.”
Kersten, now 53, is one of about 12,000 elite athletes from the GDR who were subjected to the biggest, most systematic and ruthless sports doping programme in history, from the mid-1960s to the 1980s. Like several thousand other athletes in the GDR, Kersten was a child at the time and had no idea what was in the pink and blue “special vitamins” she was ordered to swallow each day. All she knew was that her mind and body were changing. She was putting on weight at the same time as being on strict orders to lose it. Sometimes she was aware of what she calls a “latent aggressiveness” underlying her feelings.
We will never know precisely how many of those athletes had their mental and physical health damaged by the chemicals that were forced upon them, but by one estimate it was about 2000. There have been cancers of the liver, cases of infertility, birth defects in the athletes’ offspring, memory disorders and suicides. The heavy use of male sex hormones was especially harmful for women.
An anonymised list of 73 victims details the casualties. One cross-country skier suffered such bad vascular damage that his heart could no longer beat without the aid of a pacemaker; another developed an abdominal tumour that spread around her body. A field athlete gave birth to two severely disabled children. Another had a child who was paralysed down the entire right-hand side of their body. Jutta Gottschalk, a champion swimmer who was forced to take the drugs from the age of 10, had a daughter born blind in one eye.
Others experienced psychosis, paranoid schizophrenia, suicidal feelings, kidney and pancreatic failure, auto-immune disorders and cancers of just about every conceivable body part. Twelve male weightlifters had to have breast reduction surgery. On average, the victims die about 10 years earlier than the norm and are three times as likely to get seriously ill. The doctors knew exactly what they were doing to these people: the side-effects of the sex hormones were recorded in the files of the Stasi, the East German secret police, as early as 1966.
It is easy to consign these events to the half-forgotten past, to regard them as just another historic injustice in a highly peculiar, semi-hermit state. But the shadow of the GDR doping programme continues to hang over the world of sport today. The British retired Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies and dozens of other athletes who were beaten by the turbocharged East Germans are still engaged in a campaign to obtain the medals that were denied them.
In March, the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Thomas Bach, a German, appeared to hint that it might finally relent, condemning the “iniquities of doping” and praising campaigners’ efforts to “right the wrongs” of the GDR hegemony. But Davies tells me she sees “absolutely” no evidence that the IOC means this in earnest. “Elephants will fly before Thomas Bach does anything,” she says. “No, seriously, it won’t happen.”
The knowledge and the medical expertise that made this hegemony possible did not vanish with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989: they spread around the world. At least one of the GDR doctors is still working with elite athletes.
And the pressures that created this elaborate system of deception – the remorseless drive for competitive advantage and the sense that sport is another battlefront in the struggle for prestige between rival political systems – have not gone away. Russia’s systematic use of performance-enhancing drugs in the early 2010s was exposed by whistleblowers and led to a four-year ban from most prestigious international tournaments, including the 2020 Olympics. China’s swimming squad for the Paris Olympics this summer includes 11 competitors who tested positive for a banned heart drug three years ago. At a US congressional hearing towards the end of June, the American Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps described these failures as an indictment of the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada), which he said was “either incapable or unwilling to enforce its policies consistently around the world”.
The East Germans did not invent sports doping, nor is it limited to authoritarian states. As early as the 1904 Olympics in St Louis, Missouri, the English-born marathon winner Thomas Hicks nearly collapsed after ingesting a cocktail of brandy and strychnine en route. Post-war West German football players were frequently buzzing on speed, which was nicknamed “panzer chocolate”. Over the past few decades, there have been numerous cases where highly successful athletes from the West, such as the American cyclist Lance Armstrong and the Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, have been banned from competing after testing positive for banned substances. Last month, the American Olympic swimmer Michael Brinegar was handed a four-year ban for blood doping after highly abnormal blood values were found in his tests. Brinegar denies any wrongdoing.
The GDR’s real innovation was to take what had been a fairly haphazard way of cheating and turn it into a clandestine national industry. The results were extraordinary. By the 1970s this country with a population of only 16 million – somewhere between Zimbabwe and the Netherlands – emerged as one of the dominant powers in global sport.
At the 1972 Munich Olympics, the GDR came third on the medals table, with 20 golds. In Montreal four years later, it beat the United States to second place, behind only the Soviet Union, winning 11 out of 13 golds in the women’s swimming events. Dozens of world records fell to East German athletes, most of them women. Many of their achievements have not been struck from the official records.
Inevitably, other Olympians smelt a rat. It couldn’t escape their notice that so many East German sportswomen had developed bulky muscles, exhibited belligerent behaviour and had deep voices, explained away by their coaches with the refrain: “Our girls are here to swim, not to sing.”
“It wasn’t a suspicion, it was an absolute fact,” says Davies, 61, who was beaten to gold in the women’s 400m medley at the 1980 Moscow Olympics by the GDR’s Petra Schneider. “You can’t do what they were doing unless they were cheating.”
Schneider later admitted that she had been given male sex hormones from the age of 14 and offered to hand back her medal. Davies says the IOC was repeatedly alerted to the phenomenon at the time but failed to act. “They did nothing. So they let down two groups of women, the women who lost their medals but also these poor [East German] girls that were literally being used.”
For many decades these claims were met with blank denials from the GDR. Even after the East German state collapsed in 1989 and the Stasi’s files were opened up, the incriminating documents were thought to have been shredded. It turned out, however, that the Stasi had not been quite so thorough. At the start of the 1990s, Brigitte Berendonk, a former East German discus thrower who had fled west in 1958, and her husband, Werner Franke, a renowned biologist, made a breakthrough. They unearthed a trove of documents at the medical academy of the old East German army at Bad Saarow, a spa retreat southeast of Berlin. These detailed a scheme with the ostensibly innocuous title Staatsplanthema (State Plan Subject) 14.25. It was a decades-long mass experiment on human subjects.
In the 1970s the regime set about building a whole sports apparatus around so-called unterstützende Mittel (“supportive means”, known as UMs): performance-enhancing drugs churned out by the VEB Jenapharm biotechnology labs. The standard UM was Oral-Turinabol, a steroid pill that raises the body’s testosterone levels. But there was a whole pharmacopia of others: Turinabol injections, testosterone injections, amphetamines, psychiatric drugs, chemicals that had never been tested on people before, all administered on a daily basis.
By the time Dagmar Kersten entered the system at the beginning of the 1980s it was a formidably well-organised machine. Growing up in Cottbus, a university city near the Polish border, she exhibited precocious talent even as a small girl. “I had boundless energy,” she says. “I was clambering all over tables and benches.”
Her father, a sports teacher, encouraged her to practise gymnastics every day. At the age of 9, she was sent away to board at the Werner Seelenbinder elite training school in East Berlin, a short walk from a notorious Stasi prison. Four years after that, Kersten joined the national gymnastics squad and was moved to an apartment block riddled with mice and cockroaches.
The training regime was brutal: up to 38 hours in the gymnastics hall each week on top of regular school lessons. At one point Kersten suffered such acute spinal damage that she had to wear a plaster cast and a plastic splint. She was under strict orders to keep her weight below 36kg, about half the modern average for a German woman. She and the other girls were weighed every day and berated in front of the others if they failed to hit the target. The only realistic way to do so was by vomiting up her food.
“I was so hungry all the time,” Kersten tells me over a cup of tea after her speech in Frankfurt. “It was dreadful. I survived it all somehow, because that’s what everyone did. But many years later, once I’d grown up, someone recounted how it was and I burst into tears. That was super-embarrassing for me, crying in public for the first time.”
The “special pills” were introduced when she was 13. To this day Kersten is not exactly sure what all of them were. Among them was certainly the testosterone-raising Oral-Turinabol, but Kersten says her medical files also suggest there were psychotropic drugs in the mix, such as beta blockers for anxiety and stimulants for concentration. There was also mestanolone, a steroid derivative that had not even been put through rudimentary clinical trials.
On the face of it, Kersten got off comparatively lightly. At the time, apart from the weight gain and subsequent bulimia, there were no obvious physical effects from the drugs. She ended her gymnastics career after the 1988 Olympics and moved west when the Berlin Wall fell the following autumn, disgusted with the regime that had effectively made her a prisoner.
Since then she has had two healthy children and founded a martial arts dojo in the northwest German city of Oldenburg. Beneath the surface, though, the effects have lingered, although they are so bound up with the psychological trauma and extreme physical strain of her adolescence that it is not easy for her to disentangle the various threads. Sometimes she suffers brief but inexplicable memory lapses.
“After I stopped [gymnastics], I started drinking a lot of alcohol,” she says. “I had a feeling that something was missing. On the inside I was nervous and uneasy [when] I should have been happy. I had a great husband, but I didn’t know how relationships worked. I got divorced twice. I held myself responsible and thought, ‘You’re just broken somehow. You don’t tick like the others’.”
This is a feeling that Gesine Tettenborn knows well. Now 61, she lives with her husband in a handsome house on the outskirts of Walkenried, a small town in the southern Harz mountains. When I arrive, she pours cups of herbal tea and fetches a folder covered in incongruously cheerful pictures of limes from a kitchen cupboard. It is her Stasi file: about 100 pages detailing how her coaches, doctors and fellow athletes spied on her for seven years without her knowledge.
As I begin to read, she recounts her life story. Like Kersten, Tettenborn was picked out for higher things at a very young age, excelling in the long jump and sprint races at her primary school in Weissenfels, a town west of Leipzig. She was invited to her first training camp at the age of seven. It was fun. The coaches were good to her.
I had a feeling that something was missing. On the inside I was nervous and uneasy [when] I should have been happy.
At 15 she transferred to a specialist sports school in Erfurt, and then to the national track athletics squad. It was a tough gig: classes from 7am to 9.30am, training from 10 to 12, a quick break for lunch, more classes, then another two hours on the track. And, of course, the obligatory “special vitamins”. But Gesine Walther, as she was known back then, felt flattered and hopeful that she might one day be granted permission to visit her relatives in West Germany.
“I don’t think you can imagine today how ideologically saturated life in the GDR was,” she says. “It kicked off in the cradle. The children were three months old and the pictures of the Russian tanks and the peace doves were already hanging on the wall. We identified with striving for performance and we didn’t find it bad at the time because we thought of ourselves as something special – as elite pupils, you could say.”
Did it ever occur to her to ask what the pills were? “We were raised to trust the coaches and the party functionaries,” she says. “We were raised not to question anything. In the East we had a completely different way of thinking to the West. We were raised to believe that our system was the most progressive system the world had ever known. We just wanted to get to the top of the world, whatever it took.”
She got there disconcertingly fast. At 17 she was summoned as a reserve sprinter for the GDR women’s 4x100m relay squad at the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Two years later she was in the team that won gold in the same event at the European Athletics Championships. In 1984, at a track meeting in Erfurt, her 4x400m relay team set a new world record of 3m 15.92s. They seemed nailed down for gold at the Los Angeles Olympics a few weeks later.
But Tettenborn’s rise was abruptly broken off by high politics. She had always had a subversive and faintly unbiddable streak, secretly reading banned books such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. A few years earlier her brother had tried to escape to the West and got caught by the Stasi. Now that she was a celebrity athlete on the eve of triumph, Amnesty International seized on the case in an attempt to pressure the GDR regime, which refused to release him because of the risk of public embarrassment. To defuse the situation and get her brother out of jail in a prisoner exchange, Tettenborn tells me she deliberately got pregnant in order to sabotage her Olympic career.
She retrained as a tailor and settled down in her mother’s fabric workshop. She got married, had four children and moved west in 1989 as soon as the GDR collapsed. For a time, it seemed as though things had worked out for her. Then, in 2002, she suddenly fell ill and developed psychiatric problems at the age of 40: depressive spells, panic attacks, psychotic episodes. “My GP asked me if I’d done high-performance sport back in the GDR,” she says. “And then he drew my attention to the doping trials.”
While Kersten and Tettenborn had been busy rebuilding their lives, Franke and Berendonk – the husband and wife who discovered the blueprints for the doping conspiracy – had gone on the warpath. They hired lawyers, found dozens of victims who were willing to testify and kicked up such a stink that the German authorities put more than 40 prosecutors on the case.
The first court cases began at the end of the 1990s. They were a legal watershed: the defendants were being prosecuted for crimes that had not been recognised as such in a state that had ceased to exist, much like the Nazi medical officials who were in the dock at the 1946 Nuremberg doctors’ trial. They were also dramatic. One of the victims’ lawyers was rebuked for describing a doctor as the “Josef Mengele of the GDR”. In another hearing, the former swimmer Christiane Knacke-Sommer told the court: “They destroyed my body and my mind … They even poisoned my medal.” She then took her bronze from the 1980 Olympics and hurled it at the floor.
Tettenborn, however, went one step further: she applied to the German athletics association to strike down her national record, and began to write a book about her life. Her Stasi file, codenamed “Operation Sprint”, shows how three covert informants from her school and a handler established “operative surveillance on all sides” around her from her teens, reporting back to the ministry about her “difficult character”, her homesickness and her doubts. There are snatches of conversation with her friends and warnings that she could be exploited by “enemy positions” – Amnesty International – for “publicity-effective propaganda acts” at the 1984 Olympics. There is even a copy of a formal declaration she had to sign to declare that she disowned her brother.
She found studies suggesting that some of the drugs she was given can damage the hippocampus, an area of the brain that plays a key role in laying down memories and processing emotions. “In your youth you’re still developing, and so I developed a certain personality that I could live with pretty well at first, right up to the 40th year of my life,” she says. “But at some point my body and my psyche couldn’t handle it any more and I had to face the facts. I do think you should try to think positively. But if you just shut out all the negative things, you get ill. And then it breaks over you like a wave.”
Writing about it “did me good”, she says. “I noticed that it made me more mentally stable again. I didn’t want to become a victim. I thought, ‘Become active, become a subject, and don’t just surrender your own story.’ "
It is striking how many former athletes from the GDR have chosen to remain silent. One explanation is that it takes a great deal of courage for people such as Kersten and Tettenborn to raise their heads above the parapet. The few dozen who have done so have often been abused as “Nestbeschmutzer”, literally meaning birds that foul their own nests. Some have received death threats or were raided by police officers who remained sympathetic to the old regime. Berendonk and Franke faced numerous unsuccessful suits for libel.
Many of the athletes have simply denied the whole thing, including Marita Koch, one of Tettenborn’s old team-mates, who still holds the world record in the women’s 400m, set in Australia in 1985. She never failed a drugs test. Now retired but still giving lectures in eastern Germany, she recently received a lifetime achievement award in Dresden. Another, the swimmer Sylvia Gerasch, carried on competing for reunified Germany until as late as the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney.
Others may feel that they have suffered enough and have little to gain from squaring up to the past. “It’s almost as though they don’t have the intellectual equipment to react honestly and self-critically when the [GDR] ideology is exposed as a sham,” Tettenborn says. Kersten agrees: “I think people are afraid of having to admit, first, that they weren’t the great athlete everyone thought they were, and, second, that they were instrumentalised and that they suddenly have to question, ‘Am I really the person who won those six gold medals?’ "
Another possible answer comes from Hansgeorg Bräutigam, the judge who presided over the first big trial. “I’m not exactly sure how to describe this, but some athletes who testified in my court were just emotionally closed,” he told Steven Ungerleider, an American sports psychologist who wrote the book Faust’s Gold about the doping programme. “They did not remember anything, almost like a temporary amnesia.”
Justice came in small and frustrating increments, if it came at all. In the dock Manfred Höppner, the deputy head of the GDR’s “sports medicine service” who had been directly responsible for the programme, insisted that he had been trying to look after the athletes’ health. He quoted from the poet Bertold Brecht: “Great sport begins once it has long since ceased to be healthy.” In 2000 Höppner was convicted on 20 counts of aiding and abetting bodily harm but given only an 18-month suspended prison sentence.
At least he had the decency to issue a half-apology. Höppner’s boss Manfred Ewald, a former card-carrying Nazi who switched sides in 1945 and became one of the most powerful figures in the GDR in his late twenties, remained unrepentant to the end. “I have nothing to add,” he said in his final statement to the court. “I stand by what I did, and I am grateful.” He got off with a 22-month suspended sentence.
As for the doctors who had handed out the pills, a handful appeared sincerely remorseful and tried to make amends. Most did not, hiding behind defences familiar from the Nuremberg trials: they had, they said, simply been following orders. There was another complicating factor: while the nature of the pills and jabs had been kept secret from under-18s such as Kersten and Tettenborn, the adult athletes had often been told quite frankly that they were taking performance-enhancing drugs.
I stand by what I did, and I am grateful.
Many of the doctors involved were allowed to continue practising medicine and a number of them moved to Austria to set up sports clinics of their own. Shortly before the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Ungerleider sent Wada a dossier on 39 former GDR sports doctors he believed had been “shopping their training tablets all over the world”.
The most intriguing case is that of Bernd Pansold, a sports doctor and Stasi informant who played a leading role in developing the programme over more than two decades. During the doping trials he was convicted and fined 14,400 deutschmarks. But Pansold had already reinvented himself as one of Europe’s best winter sports scientists at his new clinic in Obertauern, a ski resort near Salzburg. He was also recruited by Red Bull to run its performance centre in nearby Thalgau, serving the winter sports arm of an empire that includes several elite football clubs, a Formula One team and numerous extreme sports tournaments. Since then, Pansold has coached some of the most prominent stars in alpine sports, including Lindsey Vonn, an American who was perhaps the greatest female ski racer in the modern history of the sport. There is no evidence that Vonn took any banned substances and Pansold has repeatedly insisted his doping days are behind him.
Sharron Davies says the latest slew of Olympic doping scandals demonstrates that the world’s sport authorities have failed to learn lessons that should have been obvious in the Cold War. “What’s so disappointing is that they don’t seem to be proactive with really trying to stop this, particularly in the big countries that give a great deal of money to the governing bodies, like Russia and China,” she says. “We’re not catching the people that are supplying [the drugs]... I think we need to be a lot more proactive, and harder with it. And we’ve got to mean it as well.”
- Unfair Play by Sharron Davies & Craig Lord (Swift) is out in paperback
Written by: Oliver Moody
© The Times of London