Topic: News: Study: Doping deforms bodies and souls

[Chris Ⓐ LeRoux]

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Study: Doping deforms bodies and souls

The dirty little secret grew up to be the filthy big tragedy.

Sad numbers from a study discussed at the Play the Game sport conference in Iceland reveal that children born to athletes who were doped with steroids in official sports programs of the old East German state have a very high rate of physical and mental abnormalities. Some have deformities, some mental challenges. And 38 per cent of the athletes themselves have suffered severe depression with suicidal tendencies.

The human consequences of East German steroid use, long whispered about, were quantified in a recently published two-year study conducted by the Humboldt University in Germany. The study involved 52 Olympic and elite-level former East German athletes, now aged between 40 and 60 and their 69 children. This represents only a fraction of an athlete population that grew up in a state sport system that essentially sacrificed their health for the propaganda value of victory in sport during the 1970s and 1980s.

German researcher Giselher Spitzer told the Play the Game sports conference the incidence of abnormalities is frighteningly higher for those in the study than in the general population. Seven of the athlete offspring have physical deformities. Four are mentally handicapped. More than a quarter of the children have allergies and 23 per cent have asthma.

He said the risk of miscarriage and stillbirth in the female athletes was 32 times higher than in the German population. Thirty-two of the 52 athletes have received therapy for psychiatric issues and a quarter of those studied had suffered some form of cancer.

Most of the time in East Germany’s golden era of sport, athletes were told a lie that they were ingesting vitamins, not performance-enhancing hormones. They were regularly fed pills at East German sport schools and training camps.

Twenty years ago, East German heptathlete Birgit Dressel died from a toxic-allergic shock. When she died on April 10 1987, there were more than 100 different medications in her body. Her internal organs simply shut down in chemical confusion.

Hormonal tinkering changed the life of shot putter Heidi Kreiger. From the age of 15 she was fed Oral-Turinabol. The dosage of male hormone tripled in a two-year period. She became suicidal. If the heavyweight throwing athlete felt any ambiguity about her sexual identity before, the drugs “certainly intensified it,” Krieger said in a Times online interview. In 1995, Heidi Kreiger underwent a sex-change operation and now lives as Andreas Kreiger. He runs a clothing shop in Magdeburg, German, has a wife and takes a booster shot of male hormones every three weeks — “otherwise I become tearful and depressed.”

Roland Schmidt, once a leading weightlifter, developed huge breasts that had to be amputated. Swimmer Petra Schneider, a gold medal-winner in the 400-metre individual medley in the 1980 Olympics, has serious heart and back problems.

All for what? For the sporting glory of a country that doesn’t even exist anymore.

It was a crime against the athletes, and it wasn’t exactly a successful strategy from the government’s side. Did anyone ever detect rocketing respect for East Germany when it was collecting all that gold at the Olympics and world championships?

The German government set up one fund for doping victims five years ago. A total of 194 former athletes each received the equivalent of $13,700 (U.S.) under that compensation program. Then, late in 2006, the government and the German Olympic Sports Union created another compensation program for athletes of the old East Germany. Some 167 recognized victims each were slated to receive $12,210 (U.S.) by the end of February 2007. It’s still puny compared with the damage done to human lives.   

“We take the moral responsibility and we want to make sure that something like that cannot happen again,”  said German Olympic president Thomas Bach. The government contributed two-thirds of the $2.03-million compensation fund.

The athletes’ lawyer, Michael Lehner, said the payments didn’t make up for all their suffering. “But for the victims, the most important thing was to be recognized as such,” he told The Associated Press.