THE SPORT OF ROWING and suppliers were the ones who had crossed potentially ethical and eventually legal barriers. In GDR, it was the government that established the universal policy of athlete doping. Prof. Werner Franke, German Cancer Research Center: “Doping in the West was always a clandestine thing. It was in small circles, so it had nothing of the dimension and the thoroughness it had in the East. “Doping in the GDR was different from the doping in the West of the world, but it was also different from the doping in other parts of the East. It was German! It was orderly. It was bureaucratic. It was written up.”5519 Two years before the 1976 Olympics, Staatsplanforschungsthemas55201425 was adopted. Based on six years of research carried out on female shot putter Margitta Gummel, the steroid Turinabol, developed by the DHfK, manufactured in pill form by Jenapharm, was given to a wide range of GDR athletes.5521 The Olympic Gold Medal haul went from twenty in 1972 to forty in 1976. Most disturbingly, serious health problems documented by DHfK scientists such as heart and liver damage, chronic overuse injuries to joints, tendons and ligaments and, among women, excessive hair growth, deep voices and abnormal development of their sexual organs were either not disclosed or explained away to the athletes and their families. In recent decades, the true cost of systematic doping has become clear as athletes’ bodies have broken down. Recently, Sports historian Dr. Ghiselher Spitzer conducted a study of more than fifty former GDR athletes. The list of ailments he discovered in abundance included cancer, 5519 Qtd. by Rooper, Doping for Gold. 5520 State Research Plan Theme. 5521 Rooper, op. cit. depression, eating disorders, miscarriages, stillbirths and birth defects.5522 Mike Staines, who earned a 1976 Olympic Silver Medal behind the GDR Pair:5523 “My son just began rowing this spring [2010] – and with some good success I might add. His coach at Radnor High School in Pennsylvania is Valerie Gospodinov, who was on the Bulgarian national rowing team in the 1980s. In a conversation in the launch, she told me that every day for most of her rowing career they were given a paper cup of pills to take each morning. She had, and still has, no idea what they were, but fears the worst.”5524 Jürgen Grobler What was it like to be an athlete or a coach in the Eastern Bloc? How much freedom of thought or action is ever really possible in a totalitarian system? GDR teams were closely monitored and supervised by members of Stasi, short for Ministerium für Staatssicherheit,5525 both at home and during trips out of the country. Given the privileges these athletes enjoyed at home, defection might not have been as great a problem as it certainly has been for Cuban baseball players, for example, but that did not dissuade the ever- present Stasi from severely limiting any social contact with Western opponents. What were the ethical responsibilities of athletes and coaches living within this system? Since the reunification of Germany, many of these people have acquired positions of great prestige and responsibility throughout the rowing world. One is Jürgen Grobler, since 1991 the head of the British men’s rowing team.5526 5522 Ibid. 5523 See Chapter 129. 5524 Staines, personal correspondence, 2010 5525 Ministry of State Security 5526 See Chapter 136. 1522
