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World beware: German alchemists at work

Drugs and

EDITOR'S NOTE male hormones play a part. So do menus, training camps in the mountains, a computer in Leipzig and a committee of high commissars. From a variety of sources, an correspondent tells how East Germany produces its outstanding athletes.

By Hugh A. Mulligan

Special Correspondent

EAST BERLIN P Back behind the floodlit fence in her Communist fatherland, super mermaid Kornelia Ender is a star without a billboard or even a fan club.

Her value to the state, like her role in society, is not as a teenage heroine of the masses but as a factory-proven product of the socialist system designed almost exclusively for the export market.

The average comrade ambling along the Alexander Platz, East Berlin's main thoroughfare, has no idea how this fabulous 17-year-old fraulien lives, where she trains, what national resources were harnessed to pluck her out of a neigh-

borhood swimming pool in Halle a decade ago and set her on a computerized course to Olympic gold..

The comrade in the street does not seem to care. He may know from the press and TV that his country won 40 gold, 25 silver and 25 bronze medals at the Montreal Olympics, second only to the Soviet Union in gold medals and six more than the United States. He may even know that Ender won four gold medals two within less than a half-hour-and a silver. But he feels no personal identification with her or the other athletes. Nor does the state encourage any.

Even from the party faithful, the German Democratic Republic guards its athletes and its athletic secrets as closely as its MIG bases and missile sites.

Kornelia Ender and her teammates live in another world, a world. as walled off from the everyday masses as the glittering capitalist shops along the Kurfuerstendamm on the opposite side of checkpoint Charlie.

It is a world of goals and graphs. and special diets, of trainers with stopwatches and heavy "performance bibles," of white-coated doctors taking blood tests and injecting hormones, of training camps in the Bulgarian mountains and a computer in Leipzig and a committee of high commissars

ruling the jock roost from a ministry in Berlin.

Privilege and status dwell here: a chance for a bigger apartment, a higher place on the waiting list. to buy a car, a better job for father, an assured place at the university, opportunities to travel, even a vacation in another bloc country, and sometimes, for a fine performance, an envelope full of marks that no one will admit ever existed.

Occasionally prying western eyes are given a guarded glimpse· of the East German sports scene: the sports university at Leipzig, some of the 691 gym centers or 890 track and field complexes, the new pool at Rostow or the sports club at Kark Marx Stadt, but always on a carefully guided tour that divulges no secrets of the latter-day alchemists transmuting raw muscle into Olympic gold.

But secrets will out, as long as there is a Berlin Wall to vault or an electrified fence' to hurdle. It is now known how East Germany, with a population of 17.5 million, managed to select 292 athletes for the trip to Montreal and have 159 of them return wearing medals.

The secret of the system is the system itself.

"It was clear in 1973 when I took blood samples from her ear lobes that Kornelia Ender could swim the 100-meter freestyle in 56 seconds flat," said Alois Marder, a sports doctor who was a key part of the system until he defected to the West two years ago. "It was statistically proven that she was going to do this. By monitoring her performance charts and her metabolism on the basis of blood tests, it was determined what she was capable of achieving and how much training was needed for her to reach a world record."

For 10 years Marder was department chief of research into high-performance athletes at the Chemie Sports Club in Halle, where Fraulien Ender came to be trained as a worldclass swimmer. The system had decreed that this unknown 13-year-old would soon swim at the speed that brought Johnny Weissmuller a. world record and a gold medal at the 1924 Paris Olympics. Catching up with Tarzan, five decades later, was the goal set by the system for this gifted girl swimmer.

The Chemie Club is one of 18 sports clubs that serve as laboratories for the new breed of alchemists bubbling up Olympic gold for East Germany. Located in each of the 15 counties or sports districts, plus three run by the

army, the clubs concentrate on high-performance athletes attending their specialized sports schools at both elementary and high school level.

Each club and school complex specializes in certain sports: rowing and weight lifting at one, skiing and figure skating at another, etc. Children are selected at age 9 or 10 on the basis of talent, size, and expected body growth, after they have been watched for two years at a local sports center or have distinguished themselves at "sportakiades," youth competitions held on a regional and national basis. Last year 3.5 million children took part in the East German sports program.

The computer has decreed that at age 14 to 15 single-scull rowers must be at least six feet tall, weigh 170 pounds, have at least three full years of growth ahead of them, and have no spine or back defects. Lesser physical specimens need not apply at the medal factory.

The Leipzig center devises 'menus and diets for the centralized club kitchens to cook for the different sports disciplines. Weight lifters and rowers chomp into 5,000 calories a day. Gymnasts, figure skaters and other weightwatchers have their calories counted for them by the computer.

At the Chemie Sports Club the future medalists often dine on steaks, oranges, eggs and other items not always seen in the markets of Halle. "Three years ago," recalls Dr. Marder, "it was difficult to meet the menu standards. The food was not always available. Bananas were always hard to come by, and sometimes eggs. But the clubs always had a priority on available food and were given what the public never saw.”

The entire system of turning out world-class athletes is administered from Berlin by the High Performance Sports Commission. The ministry's chief commissar is Manfred Ewald, who also serves as chairman of East Germany's Olympic Committee. Berlin monitors the Leipzig center and its computer and calls the tune on matters of procedure and protocol.

Athletes below the age of 16 are forbidden to smoke. After that, it is merely frowned upon. Until 1972, the sexes were rigidly separated at the training camps and schools. Now boys and girls train together, often meeting the same goals, as California swimming coaches knew they could years ago. Sex relations used to be strictly forbidden for athletes under 19, but now "partner relations" are allowed and sometimes even "steered" by the commissars.

Kornelia Ender, at 17, is engaged to 25-year-old Roland Matthes, a world-class swimmer who didn't fare too well against the Americans this time. At Montreal's Olympic pool, Kornelia demurely handed her engagement ring to a judge before entering the water with her famous explosive dive.

Top swimmers like Ender may train to pop music-she prefers soft rock-but a warning is given if such western diversions become habitual.

At age 14-never earlier, but more often at 15-the athlete destined for gold first encounters the most controversial part of the system. Where needed, according to Marder, the men in the white coats begin administering steroids, sex hormones, daily over a period of four to five weeks to build up the arm and back muscles.

First used in America, steriods have been in common use for several years among a number of Olympic teams. "East and West are pretty well balanced on manipulating their athletes with steriods," says Dr. Adolf Metzner, a West German sports doctor who specializes in the problems and detection of doped athletes. "Discus throwers and shot putters with those herculean builds have 'anabolika (German for steriods) to thank."

Metzner has no doubt that male hormones helped the East German girls win gold medals in 11 of 13 swimming events and nine of 14 track and field events at Montreal. "Anyone who watched on TV was shocked by the sight of those enormous muscle-bound women with huge shoulders and arms that a furniture mover would be proud of. Weight lifting alone would never account for such massive back development."

East German officials at Montreal angrily and adamantly denied that biochemistry had a hand in the medal sweep. A Canadian broadcaster who asked trainer about the deep voices emanating from some of the strapping water sprites was huffily told: "They have come here to swim, not to sing, why do you concern yourself with their voices?"

Many devotees of the Olympic code look upon the advent of steriods, stabilizers and other medical aides as the most devious development in the alchemist's art.

"The greatest danger to the games today is the manipulation of athletes with biochemistry," said Willi Daume, head of the West German Olympic Committee and father of the Munich Olympics. "Modern laboratories have been turned into alchemists' kitchens with the unscrupulous aim of dehumanizing athletes to improve performance. Doctors no longer believe that the health of athletes is their highest objective but rather the manipulation of athletes."

Dr. Marder, who now works as a research assistant in sports medicine at the German Sports University in Cologne, is certain that steriods were widely used at Montreal. "It's nonsense to think controls can be set up to detect them. From my viewpoint, few shot putters can reach 19 meters (62.3 feet) without steriods, and I am 100 per cent convinced it is not possible to exceed 21 meters (68.9 feet) without steriods." In this summer's Olympics, the winning toss was 21.05 meters.

In his time at the sports club in Halle, steriods were given to both boys and girls to help them "reach high performance levels." Dr. Marder said he knew for "certain it was going on, but not from my own experience. It is obvious from watching the Montreal Olympics that the practice still continues."

Side effects among girls—a subject many doctors think requires much further study-include basic body changes such as deepening of the voice; a broad back and wide shoulders; flattening of the chest; skin changes; and sometimes, among non-caucasian women, hair growths on the chest. The masculinizing process may also result in such delayed psychological effects as pronounced lesbian tendencies.

"Long-range effects are to be expected when the side-effects are disregarded," said Dr. Marder, "but generally within two years. after the steriod injections have ceased the muscles diminish and the body returns to more feminine proportions." S

Many women athletes in the West refuse male hormone injections from team doctors because of the danger of their bodies becoming too masculine. "They don't want to look like tanks in their tank suits," quipped one of the U.S. trainers.

Dr. Marder is convinced that the West has greatly exaggerated and misread the part played by steriods and drugs in the East German success story at Montreal. "That was only a small part of the picture. It was the system itself that triumphed. In East Germany sports are a matter of foreign policy. They are aimed at polishing the image of the social system abroad, not providing heroes for the masses.'

Whatever the troubles at home, East Germany's athletic alchemists have been given the job of turning out Olympic gold as proof to the world and especially the West that the socialist system works.

"In 1973," says Dr. Marder, who was there then, "the East Germans decided as a matter of national policy to clobber the American women athletes at Montreal and all the training sights were set on that goal. In 1980 in Moscow they want to demolish the American team completely, both men and women, in all sports. Except maybe basketball."

From his years in the laboratory in Halle, he thinks it may happen.

"The day of the weekend athlete is over," Dr. Marder shook his head sadly. "Despite the success of their men swimmers, America can no longer remain so set in its ways of training high-performance athletes. A Jim Thorpe or a John Naber may still come along, purely by chance, but why leave the future to chance? Top athletes require better training opportunities, better social and medical care. East Germany doesn't have the vast pool of talent available in the United States but it has the technology to produce high-performance athletes.”

In other words, the smoke from the factory is there for all to see. Westerner, beware; comrades take care, alchemists at work.

Except for those who live in the town, children board at the sports school. Sometimes in the case of a very talented prospect, the whole family is moved to an apartment near the club and the father is given a suitable and usually better job than the one he had.

At age 8, Kornelia Ender was sent to the Chemie Club, which specializes in rowers, swimmers and middle-distance runners. She had been swimming in the Halle public pool for three years. When Dr. Marder was there, Chemie had a staff of 70, including 11 doctors,

and eight trainers for its 150 swimmers. His medical speciality was researching the effects of hard training on bodily functions.

"If only three or four are worldclass swimmers, why bother to train the other 147?" Marder asks, then answers his own question. "Because the system has determined statistically that you need to train at least 100 top swimmers to get one or two of world class." The sports schools follow a normal curriculum but training takes precedence and dictates the daily schedule: Swimmers turn up at the pool at 8:30 each morning, train for 21⁄2 hours, attend class for two hours, break for lunch, return to. class for three hours then go back to the pool for another two-hour. session.

The training programs are not devised by the individual coaches . who may know their swimmers best, but by the "scientific center for swim" at Leipzig University's Research Center for Physical Culture in Sport. Experiences of the various trainers with high-performance athletes and data from: blood samples taken by the club doctors are collected, studied and fed into the computer at Leipzig on a weekly and monthly basis.

Every cough, cramp and kink is duly reported to Leipzig. Graphsand charts tell the athlete what he has to achieve. At two-year intervals the training programs are completely overhauled on the basis of the data fed into the computer and a new "performance bible" is issued. It dictates every detail of the care, feeding and massaging of future medal winners, even down to the number of laps they should do each morning in the pool.

At Montreal, one of the East German girls revealed that the training bible now requires beginning swimmers, the 10-year-olds, to swim a minimum of 800 kilometers (500 miles) a year. This is roughly the distance from Berlin to Stockholm.

"Each child is given a minimum and maximum goal," Dr. Marder explained. "If at the end of the year, he or she is not inside the figures, the option is given of staying on for another year or going home. A swimmer who grows too fast or gets too heavy may be switched to another sport, like rowing. When a child has reached full growth and still does not meet performance levels, the decision is automatic: there is no purpose in continuing."

During training, Marder and the other club doctors monitor the athlete's metabolism by taking blood samples from the ear lobes and sending the data on to Leipzig for the computer to determine how hard they should train or how fast they should be growing.