German Olympic team faces crisis as drugged athletes sue

[Fiona]

GERMANY'S Olympic team faces a financial crisis because of a £1m lawsuit by former East German athletes who were forcibly drugged by their Communist masters.

A 36-year-old former women's World Championship swimmer, Karen König, will this week take her case to a Berlin court as the first of 137 pursuers who claim they were forced to take performance-enhancing drugs by the former East German sports system in the 1980s.

The case is a final lap in a tortuous battle being fought through the German legal system amid arguments that the athletes' cases were time-barred or that the nation's present Olympic committee, being based on the old West German association, could not be held liable for the sins of its former sworn enemy.

But court judgments have ruled the case should be heard and the new German Olympic Committee (GOC) can be held liable.

Although König is suing for a relatively modest £7,200, the authorities fear if she wins then the other 137 athletes will push the costs through the £1m mark, forcing the already cash-strapped GOC into financial crisis. There could be as many as 10,000 additional claimants who will argue that their lives were affected by the doping programme.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) in the east, the West German Olympic Committee took over the assets of its former rival and athletes from the two nations competed in the same team.

König was selected by East German swimming coaches at the age of 10 to begin special full-time sports training. At the time she regarded it as the fulfilment of a dream. Training was tough and lasted from six in the morning until eight at night. Of the 14 other swimmers she began training with, only she managed to survive the rigorous selection process.

The doping began from the age of 11. As part of her nutrition regime she had to take daily drinks from a series of specially-marked beakers. Her trainers insisted they must watch as she drank from the beakers. She also took five white pills. It is still unclear what the white pills were. At the age of 14, she was given anabolic steroids, light blue pills, which her trainers explained helped the body recover during exceptionally hard phases of training. To stress the point, she said, the trainers would press the pills into her hands.

The effects of the steroid was to quadruple testosterone levels in the body which helped spur dramatic muscle growth, essential for swimming. She told the German magazine Der Spiegel she had no idea she was being drugged. She said: "The people in charge told us that doping belonged only to the capitalist West. And we believed them."

At the age of 15, König was part of a World Championship-winning women's swimming relay team which also set a new world record. As a reward for her services to East German sport, the Communist authorities sent her on a voyage to Cuba.

But she was noticing some strange effects on her body, including severe attacks of acne. However, she says she did not believe that she was being drugged until a fateful meeting with her former trainer in 1990. The coach suggested that she should begin training again and said he still had a few of the old blue pills in the cupboard.

Now 36, König is a sick woman. She speaks with a deep masculine voice, which makes her sound like an elderly chain smoker. She suffers from severe clinical depression and doctors have told her that the drugs will lead to future liver damage and abdominal problems.

She said: "I was furious that I had been deceived for so long. Now I want to unveil the whole DDR doping system as every single person involved should be made responsible for what they have done. Not just the doctors and the coaches but also all those who were in charge of our sports system."

Others who were part of the Communist sports apparatus have suffered even more dramatically. The most infamous is the case of Heidi/Andreas Krieger, the former female shot-putter who was physiologically turned from a woman into a man by the drugs she was given. Krieger now sports a beard and is married to a woman.

For its part, the GOC is resisting the lawsuit and claims the athletes, and their parents, were made fully aware of what was going on at the time and took the drugs willingly.

scotsman.com