BERLIN -- Germany's ongoing effort to come to terms with the mad-chemistry experiment known as East German sports took another small step forward Wednesday in Berlin.
Lothar Kipke, the former top doctor to the East German swim team, was given a 15-month suspended sentence and fined 7,500 German marks for taking part in a system that fed steroids to thousands of teenagers without alerting them to potentially devastating health risks. The athletes were told they were receiving "vitamins."
Kipke, 72, admitted to distributing the drugs during the heyday of the East German sports machine, but contended that he was unaware of their danger. Two former East German swimmers now charge that the drugs caused birth defects in their children, and countless others face such ongoing troubles as excessive body hair and deep voices.
Another former East German athlete cites steroid use in her eventual decision to have a sex-change operation and live as a man.
Judge Peter Faust rejected Kipke's claims of ignorance. The sentence he handed down was the 10th in a series of verdicts against former Communist sports officials that have paved the way for the eventual trial of Manfred Ewald, the former head of the East German Sports Federation.
The abuses of the system are well known, but many welcome the current trials as a useful reminder of the price of the win-at-all-costs attitude the former German Democratic Republic took to new extremes.
"A life in sports is only maybe five or 10 years, but life after sports is more important," said former Soviet ice-hockey star Igor Larionov, one of the first athletes behind the Iron Curtain to speak out against doping in a 1988 open letter to Russia's mass circulation weekly Ogonyok. Larionov, now a star with the Detroit Red Wings, refused to take pills he believed to be steroids when he was with the Soviet team through most of the 1980s.
Ewald was charged in September with being an accessory to causing bodily harm to 142 young female swimmers, and his trial will be the one likely to draw an international audience.
Steroids continue to be an issue in top-level sports, but no country has used them as systematically -- or as effectively, in terms of competition results -- as the former German Democratic Republic.
It is the GDR, after all, that gets credit for developing the testosterone-booster Androstenedione. East German sports scientists found that Andro was effective in maximizing the impact of anabolic steroids even after athletes had stopped taking the drug before a competition to avoid testing positive.
During his celebrated pursuit of Roger Maris' home-run record, St. Louis Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire was using Andro -- although he has since reportedly given it up. Despite the media controversy over McGwire and Andro, if anything the fuss made Andro more popular.
"The McGwire scandal over Andro was an inadvertent market test for male hormone products in the modern world," said John Hoberman, author of such noted books as Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race and Mortal Engines: The Science of Performance and the Dehumanization of Sport.
"The result based on everything I've seen was that sales skyrocketed," Hoberman said. "American society has now had about a year and a half to impose real controls on a testosterone precursor that everyone knows is consumed directly at the least by a large population of adolescent males who can go shopping on the Internet. And the fact is that, a year and a half after the Andro scandal broke, no such controls are in place."
Hoberman has a new book in the works that will argue that it remains very much an open question whether societies really do want to crack down on these sorts of chemical enhancements.
"To what extent, at the bottom line, are modern societies really interested in controlling hormonal products that either can or are imagined to boost human performances of various kinds?" he said. "This includes not only sports. There is an increasingly interesting niche market of all sorts of products aimed at aging baby boomers. Not Viagra. That's what I call honorary hormone. But it says something about the potential size of the market."
"These trials in Germany are one part of a larger whole. Eventually what is really on trial are the pharmacological practices of the modern world.
"The real question is to what extent steroid doping in sport may eventually be remembered as the prelude to a whole range of hormone therapies that are directed at the general population."
