Bonn urged sport agencies to give West German athletes drugs, claims report

Systematic doping in German sport was not limited to the socialist East, a new study has found.

The research claims that Bonn urged state sport bodies to give West German athletes performance-enhancing drugs over four decades to hold their own in global competitions.

“Our athletes should have the same conditions . . . as the Eastern bloc athletes,” an unidentified West German interior minister is quoted as saying in the 800-page study.

Researchers at Berlin’s Humboldt University collated and analysed a catalogue of drugs used: athletes were given steroids, footballers amphetamines.

Sports bodies came under political pressure ahead of the 1972 Munich Olympics to improve the medal count of West German athletes. At the 1976 Olympic Games, the report states, some 1,200 injections of a performance-enhancing drug cocktail were given to West German athletes. By the 1980s the drug Erythropoietin or EPO, which improves physical endurance, was in widespread use among athletes – including minors.

The West German doping programme was created in parallel to – not in response to – performance-enhanced victories by East German athletes, according to the report’s authors .

It notes that systematic doping began in the 1970s – though they found details of earlier, more sporadic tests.

National soccer team
For instance an unspecified number of players on the West German soccer team that won the World Cup in 1954 were using methamphetamine Pervitin, commonly known as speed.

West Germany's Federal Institute of Sport Science (BISp) is identified in the report as funding most of the doping research. The organisation, still in existence today, declined to publish the report – Doping in Germany from 1950 to today – when it was completed in April, citing legal concerns about naming individuals identified in the report.

According to media reports the study lists doctors, sports officials and politicians – many still active in their respective fields – as being involved in the doping system.

After details of the report were leaked the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper on Saturday, the federal interior ministry – which supervises the BISp – said the legal concerns had been clarified and the report could now be published.

Germany’s Olympic Committee, which commissioned the research in 2008, said it would “study the report intensively and, if necessary, take the necessary consequences”.

State-sponsored doping
"I don't think it is appropriate to compare what happened in West Germany to the practice in East Germany, namely state-sponsored doping without the knowledge of the athletes," said Michael Vesper, general director of Germany's Olympic Sports Federation. (DOSB). "One has to take a more differentiated view."

Hans-Dietrich Genscher, interior minister during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, denied any knowledge of systematic doping.

"I don't know who is supposed to have exerted pressure," he told Bild am Sonntag newspaper. "I consider that very unlikely."

Former East German athletes who were given drugs demanded that the report be published and, if necessary, that official records be rewritten.

"The East-West polarisation is over, this makes clear that sport was abused politically on both sides," said Christian Schenk, East German decathlete, to the Welt am Sonntag newspaper.