Editorial: “China Takes a “Great Leap Backward”

By Phillip Whitten

PHOENIX, February 9. THE story in Monday’s Shanghai Daily News seemed benign enough.

“China’s First Flume Opens,” the headline announced. The story went on to say, “previously, flume technology has been monopolized by developed countries, such as the United States, Japan and Germany, for more than 25 years,” but that Chinese sports authorities hoped the $3.6 million flume would make the Chinese swim team more competitive for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.”

"It will revolutionize the conventional swimming training and can lift swimming speed within a short time," proclaimed Zhu Dexiang, described as an expert of flume swimming from the China Ship Scientific Research Center.

This may be an overly optimistic expectation of the flume. After all, swimming flumes have, at best, limited value in terms of swimming biomechanics and they are of even less value in swimming training, facts well known to the Chinese. So what is the purpose of the Shanghai flume and why all the hoopla surrounding it?

The answer may lie in paragraph 8 of the 9-paragraph story:

“Helga Pfeifer, a German professor of flume technology, commented: ‘Its high-intensified training can effectively realize the development of related capacities like endurance, speed, or swim-specific strength.’”

Far from being a "flume expert," Helga Pfeifer is the architect of the East German doping program and the on-deck coordinator at all major competitions from 1982 to the end of the East German regime. She had disappeared from public view a decade ago, only to resurface now. In China.

Pfeifer is a sports criminal. She is one of the individuals most responsible for East Germany’s astounding success in subverting drug controls – no East German swimmer ever tested positive. She is responsible for undermining the Olympic principle of fair play and for cheating generations of athletes of the rightful rewards of their hard work. She is also responsible for the life-threatening and life-disrupting ailments being experienced by former East German athletes who, as teens, were doped by Pfeiffer and her colleagues without their knowledge or assent.

In the last few years, China has appeared to be diligently doing her best to erase the last vestiges of the doping scandals of the 1990s that made her a pariah in the swimming community.

John Leonard, Executive Director of the American Swimming Coaches Association and a leader in the fight against doping, had this to say: "It is disappointing to discover that a key figure in the former East German swimming regime that has been totally discredited due to systematic doping of athletes, has resurfaced in China, a nation that has worked hard in recent years to clean up its doping problems in the sport of swimming.

“It is impossible to believe that [the Chinese] are not aware of Helga Pfiefer's connection to the doping issue. Whatever her current role is in China, the perception is that she is doping-knowledgeable and doping-complicit and that is the wrong image for a nation trying to publicly clean up its doping act. It would be like USA Swimming hiring BALCO kingpin Victor Conte. It wouldn't matter if USA Swimming hired him as a janitor, it would simply be the wrong thing to do.”

Hiring the notorious Helga Pfeifer as a “flume expert” is an ominous development and a Great Leap Backward.

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