By Craig Lord<\/p>\n
JUST 24 hours after Sydney bid farewell to the 2000 Olympic Games in a celebratory flood of fireworks, color and noise, a far darker chapter in Olympic history came to a much quieter close, one that will left 384 medals forever tainted.<\/p>\n
At midnight on Monday, October 2, all pending cases against coaches, doctors and officials accused of bodily harm for their role in East Germany\u2019s state-run doping program were closed for good. Many have now escaped a legal process that had much more to do with losing face and a few thousand marks than being punished seriously, but hundreds of others have faced their victims across courtrooms crowded with media and memories of a bygone "golden" era.<\/p>\n
The legacy of the 144 gold, 120 silver and 120 bronze
\nOlympic medals "won" by East Germans at the Games of
\n1972, 1976, 1980 and 1988 (the Games of 1984 were
\nboycotted) is one of disabled children, sex changes,
\nsevere ill-health and a generation of athletes, swimmers,rowers and others cheated out of their true place in sports history. The sensations experienced by the winner on his or her day have been denied to those who finished behind East Germans.<\/p>\n
Nor are the "losers" ever likely to get any official
\nrecognition of what should have been their greatest
\nmoments. FINA, swimming\u2019s global authority, is a case in point. In the pool, East German women won 32 out of
\na possible 43 gold medals at the 1976, 1980 and 1988
\nGames. It was a record rewarded with three FINA Prizes (of Eminence), the top honor that swimming gives for
\nservices to the sport.<\/p>\n
FINA said that it would wait until the legal cases in
\nGermany had concluded before making a decision on the
\nprizes given to Kornelia Ender in 1975, the GDR\u2019s
\nswimming federation in 1986 and Kristin Otto in
\n1988. The wait is over.<\/p>\n
But when asked by swiminfo what he intended to do
\nabout those prizes, Mustapha Larfaoui, the president of
\nFINA, said that swimming had to take its cue from the
\nInternational Olympic Committee, which had decided
\nto leave the results and medals standing.<\/p>\n
The FINA prizes, however, were merits over and above
\nthat, awards that could surely now be taken away,
\nparticularly in the case of the 1986 honor going to the
\nGDR system. Was a gesture to the victims not now
\npossible? Larfaoui stared into the distance for what
\nseemed an eternity, then murmured: "We will have to
\nthink more about this – but history is history."<\/p>\n
That does not stop it being rewritten, of course: in its wisdom and hunger for success, the German Olympic
\nCommittee listed every East German result as its own in the national team handbook for the Sydney Games,
\neven, pathetically, those gained in Moscow 1980 when
\nWest Germany did not attend because of the boycott.<\/p>\n
A spokesman for the Germans in Sydney said: "Well, none
\nof them ever tested positive and we were different but
\nnow we are all the same." Perhaps he hadn\u2019t read the
\ntestimony from the courts in which confirmation that the Kreischa, the IOC-approved laboratory, had tested
\nevery East German before he or she ventured beyond the Berlin Wall to ensure they tested "clean."<\/p>\n
Perhaps he hadn\u2019t read the stories of the women who
\nparaded their disabled offspring into court and
\ntold of the terrible internal scars that they will carry through what, for some, will be shortened lives.
\nPerhaps he had not noticed Rica Reinisch, a triple
\nchampion in 1980, revealing that she had suffered
\nfive miscarriages and suffers from recurring ovarian
\ncycsts, or the testimony of swimmer Catherine Menschner, who received male hormones from the age of 10 and has suffered permanent damage to her spine and
\nreproductive organs. Then there was shot and discus throwers Brigitte Michel and Birgit Boese, who were told that their reproductive organs were like those of a ten-year-old child.<\/p>\n
On October 2, the German Olympic Committee, FINA and the IOC might just have thought it was time to show a
\nlittle more respect for the likes of Andreas Krieger, who was known as Heidi Krieger when she threw the shot in the days before the drugs forced her to undergo a sex change operation that left her, or him, suicidal.<\/p>\n
And somebody might even have had the courage to speak
\nto the parents of Joerge Sievers, who was found dead at the bottom of a pool after suffering massive heart
\nfailure during training. East German authorities informed the parents that their son had had a severe case of the "flu" and had drowned.They failed to mention the autopsy report that would be unveiled in court more than 20 years later. Among the list of horrors was a "severe thickening of the heart
\nchamber walls", an "acute infection of the spleen" and
\n"toxic-infectious damage of the liver."<\/p>\n
The game of Cluedo was finally over; by the coaches
\nand doctors, at the pool, with banned and dangerous
\nsubstances. The Olympic spirit it was not.<\/p>\n
Recently, John Leonard, Executive Director of the American Swimming Coaches Association, announced a campaign to remove all the East Germans who are honored in the International Swimming Hall of Fame. It is an idea whose time has come. FINA should reconsider its policy of inaction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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