Drug cheat losers deserve place in the Olympic hall of shame

IT is probably inevitable that we will be told that the Chinese are exploiting the Olympic Games for their own political purposes, as if the Americans, the Germans, the Russians, the British, or all the others had not done so already.

The Games have been seriously tarnished by drug cheating, and if there were a gold medal for hypocrisy, it would be a close contest between those countries.

As for ourselves, we even had a horse that tested positive in the last Olympics.

It all seems so different from the early days.

In the 1920 Olympics at Antwerp Paddy Ryan of Old Pallas, Co Limerick, won the hammer throw representing the United States. When his coach met him that morning, Ryan was in terrible shape.

“I’m dying!” Ryan said. He had imbibed rather too freely the previous evening, so he went for a whiskey cure.

Although alcohol is a drug, it was not restricted in the earlier Olympics, because it was not considered performance enhancing. “It provokes the desire, but it take away the performance,” Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth.

Ryan and a colleague went for a whiskey cure, but they stayed longer than planned. In a last-minute rush for the stadium he had to hitch a lift of the back of a passing lorry.

It was suggested that Ryan drank Scotch that day, but he denied this.

“I wouldn’t wash my feet in Scotch whisky,” he told Dave Guiney, who represented Ireland in the shot-putt at the London Olympics in 1948.

Drug cheats did not just come from behind the Iron Curtain.

Ben Johnson of Canada tested positive after winning the 100 metres at the Seoul Olympics in 1988. Five of the seven men behind him — including all three medallists — were caught on performance enhancing drugs at different times.

The East Germans were among the worst culprits. They fed steroids to their athletes and swimmers like vitamin pills.

In the three Olympics games in which East Germany competed from 1976 to 1988, having boycotted the Los Angeles games of 1984, their women swimmers won a total of 31 of the 43 swimming gold medals, along with 19 silver and 14 bronzes.

Behind that supposed success is a frightening story with 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.

They were taken from their families and put up in special boarding schools, where they were fed a cocktail of body building drugs, such as anabolic steroids and hormones with little knowledge or concern for what those were doing to the health of the young people.

Before leaving the country to compete, they were checked to ensure the drugs could not be detected. They virtually dominated international women’s swimming.

In the circumstances it is easy to understand why other people resorted to drugs in order to be competitive.

Rather than viewing it as cheating, they probably rationalised it as levelling the playing field.

Organisers of the Pan American Games in 1983 hired West German scientists to set up a lab to test for illegal drug use. The results were startling.

“At first we mostly caught weightlifters but then also American athletes in particular,” Dr Wilhelm Schaenzer said.

“So after three days, half the US team left and when they were asked by journalists at the airport why they were leaving, apparently they’d all caught a cold.”

After the collapse of East Germany, 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.

Petra Schneider, who won the gold medal for East Germany in the 400 metres individual medley at the Moscow Olympics of 1980, later admitted she had been on steroids without knowing it.

Britain’s Sharron Davies, who won the silver medal that day, called for the medals to be stripped from all the East German swimmers.

Channel 4 did a documentary about the whole affair and Davies visited Schneider and found her suffering from heart problems.

She will be on heart pills for the rest of her life. Davies suddenly got a different perspective.

“I would not like them to take her medal away, but they should change the record books,” Davies said. “It is ridiculous that we know these were drug-aided medals and there is no official mention.”

Some of the stories told by East German women are horrific.

They tell of disabled and deformed offspring, their own internal scars, and of liver, kidney, heart and lung defects. They will carry those scars for the remainder of what are likely to be shortened lives.

Rica Reinisch, one of those taken as a 10-year-old, became a triple gold medallist in 1980.

She subsequently suffered five miscarriages and suffers from recurring ovarian cysts. Brigitte Michel and Birgit Boese were left with reproductive organs similar to a 10-year-old child, while the weightlifter Ropland Schmidt was one of more than a dozen male athletes who developed breasts that had to be removed surgically — in his case after he contracted breast cancer.

They were the lucky ones in comparison with Joerge Sievers, who was found dead at the bottom of a pool after heart failure.

His parents were informed he had a severe case of the “flu” and drowned, whereas he died of heart failure complicated by kidney and spleen problems.

Thousands of others who never reached Olympic heights have been scarred by health defects in that crazy search for so-called glory.

Those East German women who were so dominant in the world of swimming were not winners.

They were the dopes — the real losers. People behind the frightening experiment, and those who facilitated it, should be hung in a gallery of horrors in an Olympic pantheon.