This is part I of the series. Please remember this is copyrighted material
SOME OF THE ELEMENTS OF THE DISGRACED EAST GERMAN SPORTS MACHINE REMAIN PART
OF THE TRAINING...
By Philip Hersh
Tribune Olympic Sports Writer
September 12, 2000
Germany will mark a decade of reunification two days after the Closing
Ceremonies of the 2000 Olympic Games in which its athletes should be among
the top three nations in the medal count. Much of that success still is due
to the remnants of a notorious East German sports system that has outlived
the demise of the country that created it. A shameful but successful past has
blended into a surprising present and points a way to the future in German
sport.
BERLIN--Franziska Van Almsick, a swimmer born and raised behind the Wall
in East Berlin, was 14 when she became a youthful symbol of her reunified
country by winning two silver and two bronze medals for Germany at the 1992
Olympics.
By the 1996 Olympics, where she won two more silver medals and one more
bronze, Van Almsick had earned an estimated $7 million from a variety of
sponsorship deals with companies based in the former West Germany. She was
the new generation, introduced to sport in the communist East but never
competing against the capitalist West before the countries' 41-year political
separation ended a decade ago.
This week Van Almsick, 22, is headed for her third Olympics, having qualified
to swim three individual events and at least two of the three relays at the
2000 Sydney Games that begin Friday. She has been training where she always
did, on the old East side of town at the massive athletic complex of Sports
Club Berlin, down the street from the Werner Seelenbinder School she attended
from age 10 to 19.
After nearly three years without visiting her old school, Van Almsick went
back not long ago. As she walked through the main door, the first thing she
saw was a wall display picturing her and other top athletes produced at
Werner Seelenbinder, once the most celebrated East German sports school. Its
students frequently would win more Olympic medals than Great Britain.
"This surprised me," Van Almsick said. "After the Berlin Wall came down,
everything East German was bad. We had to fight against the German government
to say we needed this kind of school for good sport in the next years. Now
these young athletes are proud to see the good names that went to the same
school."
A decade after the Oct. 3, 1990 reunification, as Germany again sends a
single team to the Olympics, the big picture of sports in the former East
Germany is equally surprising.
The system behind East German sports success has been widely reviled for the
dehumanizing abuses revealed since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. But the
institutions central to the old system--the sports schools, the national
training center near Berlin, the sports research center in Leipzig--are not
only functioning, they are, in the schools' case, flourishing.
"At the beginning the feeling was to bulldoze everything," said Gerd Neumes,
a West German who has been the Werner Seelenbinder principal since 1991. "Now
the perspective has changed."
This owes to more than what is called ostalgie, the idea that combines the
German word for east (ost) with a nostalgic longing for totems and
touchstones of the past.
"Now we think the system is not as wrong as we thought before," said Jochen
Schubert, proud that his 12-year-old daughter, Kristin, will attend the
Werner Seelenbinder School next year. "When we want to get good sports
results, we must have learning combined with sports."
The German Interior Ministry, which has sports within its purview, funds both
the Institute for Applied Training Science in Leipzig and the national
training center in Kienbaum. In both cases, eradicating the past was less
important than providing for the future.
"Sports was an integral factor of the reunification," Interior Ministry
spokeswoman Eva Schmierer said.
The 2000 German Olympic team will include many athletes from the former East.
Some--long jumper Heike Drechsler, discus thrower Jurgen Schult, marathoner
Katrin Dorre and kayaker Birgit Fischer--are old enough to have won Olympic
medals under the East German flag. Other team members were given their early
training in the East, including former Werner Seelenbinder students Jan
Ullrich, the 1997 Tour de France champion; Jens Fieldler, 1996 Olympic
champion in match sprint cycling; Frank Moeller, 1996 judo bronze medalist;
and Van Almsick.
East Germany's comprehensive system of talent identification, beginning in
preschool, plus talent development in sports schools and clubs and advanced
sports science had allowed this former Soviet satellite of fewer than 17
million people to join the USSR and the United States as the world's sporting
superpowers. The goal was international recognition for this stepchild of a
nation.
"We were taught in school that it takes dozens of embassies but only one
Katarina Witt to make East Germany known in the world," Martin Plant, an
instructor at the University of Georgia who is from the East German city of
Rostock, said of the two-time Olympic figure skating champion.
The means to that end included what East Germany officially called
"supporting means"--or doping, developed by endocrinologists at what is now
the Institute for Applied Training Science in Leipzig. To those who contend
doping was largely responsible for East Germany's success, IAT acting
director Arndt Pfuetzner cites the former East German athletes who have
undergone relentless doping controls since 1990 but still have impressive
results.
Athletes from the East won two-thirds of the medals claimed by combined
German teams at the 1992 and 1996 Summer Olympic Games. Six of the 11
starters in Germany's first 2002 World Cup soccer qualifying match, a 2-0 win
over Greece on Sept. 1, were from the East.
"When the system collapsed, East German athletes didn't," Pfuetzner said.
"They went on with comparable or sometimes even better results. That explains
how doping played a marginal role in success. Otherwise there would be no
East German athletes after 1990."
Doping may or may not have been marginal, but formerly secret files have
provided evidence of how undeniably ruthless the system was in pursuing
medals during the 20 years (1968 through 1988) East Germany sent its own team
to the Olympics.
The abuses ran from the state-supported doping program, in which
performance-enhancing drugs were given even to preteen athletes with no
regard for future health consequences, to the meticulously documented spying
on nearly every aspect of the lives of elite East German athletes by the
former state secret police, or Stasi.
In sports this potent mix of power and paranoia was fueled by a desire to
upstage West Germany at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Its effect has been
underscored in Stasi documents and in testimony from athletes who were
doped--some suffering from ill health, some mothers of children with birth
defects--in the recent doping trial that convicted former East German sports
chief Manfred Ewald of systematic doping of his country's athletes.
Yet 21 of the 25 East German sports schools still exist, even if the daily
curriculum has been changed from what was six hours of sport and two hours of
academics to exactly the reverse. (Van Almsick missed too much work to earn a
high school diploma; in the past, that would have been overlooked).
Twenty-three similar schools have recently been opened in what was West
Germany.
"The number of facilities is rising because of these school's effectiveness
in developing talent," said Otto Hug, a spokesman for the Frankfurt-based
German Sports Federation, which oversees the country's elite and recreational
sport. "More children from the former East are trying to enroll because of
the standing these schools have with their parents."
East Germany, a dictatorship, called itself the German Democratic Republic.
In the past an invitation to attend a GDR sports school was the key to the
kingdom in a theoretically egalitarian society that made athletes a
privileged class.
"Everything at the school was less important than sports, and we know they
took illegal things," Neumes said. "There was one and only one purpose.
Swimmers only swam; runners only ran. This specialization can no longer be
tolerated."
Each school was part of a sports club. Werner Seelenbinder School belonged to
the Berlin club closely affiliated with East Germany's political elite, an
association problematic for the school after reunification.
"This was a very symbolic place," said Neumes, whose previous job was in the
Neukoelln district of West Berlin, near the now-demolished Wall.
That symbolism was a primary reason for his appointment.
"They had to find somebody who was not integrated in all the things that
happened here--somebody without a past," Neumes said.
In the past more than half the students lived in dormitories. Now only 100 of
the 1,300 students, ages 6 to 19, are residents. In the past students were
the chosen ones. Today they can choose the school, although only after a
coach or sports club official has recommended them.
In the past a student like Marcel Bunar, 18, would have been asked to leave
because he wasn't meeting specified goals in sport. Bunar, who entered as a
soccer player, gave it up because he didn't want to play anymore.
"The past is not interesting for us," Bunar said.
For all that, the ambiance around Werner Seelenbinder School and SC Berlin
remains undeniably that of a country whose initials, "GDR," could have stood
for "Gray, Dreary, Repressive." At the SC Berlin track, where children 8 to
18 were working out after school, many parents cast furtive glances at a
stranger speaking English, as if they might still be reported to the Stasi
for unauthorized contact with the West.
"It is not so easy to change the minds of the people," Neumes said.
The old ways
Hartmut Schumann does not believe he ever will entirely get there.
Schumann, 50, is director of the national training center at Kienbaum, a
country town 25 miles east of Berlin. Trained originally as a sea captain in
Rostock, he has worked at Kienbaum since 1978.
"For the generation like me, born in the 1940s who lived 40 years during East
German teams, it has hard to get away from that," Schumann said. "I don't
know that psychologically I will ever be totally involved in the new system."
Kienbaum was at the the core of the old system. Begun in 1952 and expanded
into Kienbaum I and Kienbaum II in 1980, it is a poor relation to impressive,
modern facilities like the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs.
Kienbaum, it is said, was East Germany's kaderschmiede, the blacksmith's shop
that had the perfect conditions to forge Olympic stars.
Unlike the sports schools, which had to continue in some form after
reunification because there were no immediate alternatives for students
already enrolled, Kienbaum was in limbo from 1991 to 1996. Former East German
coaches who had taken jobs in other countries helped keep Kienbaum alive by
bringing their athletes to train in the facilities, trails and lagoons spread
over its 148 wooded acres.
"The IAT was of specific importance in terms of sports science for athletes,"
Interior Ministry spokeswoman Schmierer said. "The GDR and the Federal
Republic guaranteed its future existence in the German unification contract.
"Kienbaum is different. Its existence was guaranteed because it has a good
infrastructure, a good training structure and it also is used by foreign
athletes."
Kienbaum once was a closed world. Only those with serious involvement in East
German sport were allowed inside its main gate. It was a company town: The
employees lived in apartments across the road from the entrance.
When its future as the Federal Sports Training Center had been assured, it
shifted from being an elite-only training center to one that can be used by
almost anyone willing to pay room and board.
A staff that once numbered 220 as part of East Germany's old "full
employment" plan has been cut to 40, only two of whom are directly involved
in sport. One is director Schumann, the other is Karl-Ernst Wannicke, a
Kienbaum physical therapist since 1964.
"It looks like it did 20 years ago," Schumann said, "except the paint was
better then."
Facilities that were advanced when first built, such as a 100-meter indoor
track with timing devices every 10 meters that dates to 1971, now are more
functional than fabulous. But everything had been done to give East German
athletes the best training conditions possible when they came to Kienbaum a
few times a year, generally before major competitions. Typical were the
javelin, discus and shot-put throwing areas, which had garages with large
doors in the launching area so the throwers could be out of the rain.
"There was always something new for each Olympic period, but there was a
misunderstanding that Kienbaum had vast advantages over comparable centers in
the west," Schumann said. "The reason Kienbaum was so successful had to do
with the entire sports system, not so much with Kienbaum. We provided 100
percent coverage to find and enhance talent and 100 percent backing for our
athletes."
In East German days, top athletes whose sports had training facilities at
Kienbaum would come three to four times a year, staying up to a month. Now
the facility, which has dorm space for 300, is used mainly on weekends and
school vacation times by athletes of many ages and skill levels.
During a weekday visit earlier this summer, the only resident athletes were
12- to 14-year-old triathletes from Saxony-Anhalt, one of the five former
Eastern lander, or states, among the 16 states in the Federal Republic of
Germany. The sprawling training center's outdoor and indoor facilities--the
latter in buildings of stunning ugliness--were otherwise empty.
A tiny interior door in the main building at Kienbaum I led, almost
mysteriously, to an enormous, state-of-the-art gymnastics room. The building
also contains gyms, a weight room and a 25-meter pool used for recreational,
post-workout swimming. The building is totally unadorned--not a trophy,
plaque or photo of any of the hundreds of champions who passed through here.
"Once we had many pictures of East German athletes," Wannicke, the physical
therapist said. "They took them down. I don't know why, but I think it is
pretty stupid."
Blood and water
In the dimly lit pool at SC Berlin, Franziska Van Almsick was working out
with a contraption that looked like a whale's flukes. On the pool deck, a
coach took blood from the ear of Kerstin Kielgass, a medalist in the 1992 and
1996 Olympics who will compete in Sydney.
Such ear-pricking raised U.S. speedskaters' suspicions when they first saw it
being done to their East German counterparts in the 1980s. The blood sampling
generally was nothing more than a way to see whether there was any body
tissue in the blood, a measure of overtraining.
In the lobby of the pool building, a display lists the names of all the SC
Berlin swimmers who won world or Olympic championships. Neither Van Almsick
nor Kielgass is on the list.
The list ends with the 1988 Olympics, where East Germany's women swimmers won
10 gold, five silver and seven bronze medals. Only 10 countries at the 1988
Olympics won more total medals in all sports combined.
"With the sports schools," Van Almsick said, "we had the best system ever.
"They are the only chance for German athletes in the future."
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Part II: Into the forbidden basement--a visit to the research institute where
the sophisticated training and doping methods were developed.
