Sporting honour was not the only casualty of the drug Olympics

AS usual, swimming took pride of place during the first week of the Olympics and one of the features has been Germany’s failure to win a gold medal. As of yesterday they were reduced to just one bronze.

That performance was in marked contrast with the three Olympics Games in which the East Germans competed from 1976 to 1988 (they boycotted the Los Angeles Games in 1984). During those three Games they won a total of 31 out of 43 gold medals in the women’s swimming races. They also won 19 silver and 14 bronze medals. Behind the medals was a frightening story that had echoes of Hitler’s demented plans to raise a master race.

In the early 1970s, the East Germans began recruiting thousands of young, talented sports people and moulding them into world-beating swimmers and athletes by feeding them a cocktail of body-building drugs - such as anabolic steroids and hormones - with little knowledge or concern for what they were doing to the health of those young people.

“They were presented to us as vitamin pills and I believed it because it sounded so normal,” Karen Koenig explained. She was a member of the 4x100m freestyle relay team that broke the world record in 1984 when she was 15.

“It was a ritual activity, like brushing your teeth,” she explained. “Every day I took pills.”

Before leaving the country to compete, they were checked to ensure the drugs could not be detected. They got away with it and dominated international swimming. Even if one were to recklessly assume that all of the other 12 gold medal winners in women’s swimming were clean in those years, it would still mean that over 72% of the women who won swimming gold medals in those three Olympic Games were using performance-enhancing drugs.

In the circumstances, it is easy to understand why other people resorted to drugs in order to be competitive. They did not see it as cheating; it was just balancing things out.

Michelle Smith competed against the East Germans in 1988, finishing way down the pool. After the collapse of the East German state, the country’s drug regime was exposed, and many of their coaches fled to China, which suddenly burst onto the swimming scene. China won four swimming gold medals at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and then took 12 of 16 women’s titles at the 1994 world championships, before the team was decimated by a rash of positive drug tests at the Asian Games later that year. Hence China won only one swimming gold medal at the Atlanta Olympics, where Michelle Smith came to the fore.

The manner in which authorities essentially turned a blind eye rather than trying to clean up the sport was much worse than the lack of sporting ethics. Many young people were either innocent or ignorant of the dangerous drugs they were being fed. Many were not only robbed of their youth but also of the chance of ever living a normal life.

“Most of the people who were victims of this doping programme never stood on the winners’ platform,” Catherine Menschner noted. “An incredible number of children were sacrificed so that at some point one of them could rise to the top.”

She received male hormones from the age of 10 and suffered permanent damage to her spine and reproductive organs.

Former swimmers now testify to the horror of the long-term impact of hormone treatment. They tell of disabled and deformed offspring and their internal scars, of liver, kidney, heart and lung defects. They will carry those scars for their remainder of what are likely to be shortened lives.

Rica Reinisch, a triple gold medallist in 1980, had five miscarriages and suffers from recurring ovarian cysts.

Brigitte Michel (discus) and Birgit Böse (shot putt) were left with reproductive organs similar to those of a 10-year-old child.

Weightlifter Roland Schmidt was one of more than a dozen male athletes who developed breasts that had to be removed surgically - in his case, after he had contracted breast cancer. They were the lucky ones in comparison with Jörge Sievers, who was found dead at the bottom of a pool after heart failure during training.

The authorities informed his parents that he had a severe case of the “flu” and drowned. Twenty years later, his autopsy report was released showing that the youngster had “thickening of the heart chamber walls,” an “acute infection of the spleen” and “toxic infectious damage of the liver”.

Those East German women who were so dominant in the swimming world were not winners. They were the real losers and the people behind the frightening experiment belong in a gallery of horrors.

SOME people took umbrage at my column last week suggesting that Paddy Ryan of Old Pallas, Co Limerick, was suffering from a hangover and drank “some whiskey as a cure” on the day that he won the hammer throw at the Antwerp Olympics in 1920.

The shame of it - suggesting that any Irishman would have a hangover and, worse, seek a cure!

The use of alcohol is now restricted in the Olympics and banned altogether in certain events. Authorities argue that it assists by helping athletes to relax.

The Paddy Ryan story was published in Citius, Altius, Fortius, which later became the Journal of Olympic History, the primary publication of the International Society of Olympic Historians.

The article (headlined Paddy Ryan - Olympic Hammer Throw Champion) was written by Dave Guiney and Bill Dooley, and can be found in Volume 4 (No 1) pp 17-18.

“In 1920, Paddy Ryan won the Olympic title by the widest margin on record,” according to the article.

“At the time of the Antwerp Olympics, he was 37 years old and his 1.91 metres (6’3”) was carrying a great deal of excess avoirdupois, his weight being somewhere in the region of 18-19 stone. Imbibing rather freely of French and Belgian wines the night before the hammer throw, he greeted Lawson Robertson, the American coach, who called him on the morning of the great day with the rather discouraging remark, ‘I’m dying’.

“Paddy needed a helping of ‘Irish’ or ‘Scotch’ to counteract the effects of the weaker vintages and made for the first available saloon in which he and another member of the American team tarried a little longer than they had first intended,” the article continued.

“In a last-minute rush for the stadium, Ryan halted a lorry in the streets of Antwerp and sitting in the tail with his legs dangling out, drove in state to the scene of action.”

“To mention Paddy Ryan or any of his ‘Irish Whale’ compatriots at that time in the same breath as drugs demeans the memory of these men,” one of the letter writers complained. Lest there be any further letters, let it be emphasised, I am not suggesting here that he hijacked the lorry - he merely bummed a lift!

As to whether Paddy drank Irish or Scotch on the great day, he later told Dave Guiney, who represented Ireland in the shot putt at the London Olympics of 1948, “I wouldn’t wash my feet in Scotch whisky.”

Who would?