Turning the tide: Moves underway to fix years of Olympic injustice caused by East German doping regime
Moves are underway to right decades of Olympic wrongs and provide a sense of justice to the athletes cheated out of medals by East Germany’s doping program. JULIAN LINDEN has details.
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Ever so slowly, the thick, stubborn door that’s been blocking Olympic justice is being prised open.
More than half a century after the filthiest crime in Olympic history was hatched, the first tiny steps are finally taking place to recognise the innocent female victims of East Germany’s notorious sports doping regime.
No-one is popping any champagne corks yet because it’s already been such an arduous and secretive process that is still waiting for someone in authority to sign off.
But the drums are starting to beat a little louder because there has been a clear and significant pivot by senior sports officials.
Subtlety, the narrative has already switched from will it ever happen to when will justice be served?
The biggest remaining concern is that the most out-of-touch leaders at the IOC will keep stalling long enough so none of the women who were robbed of their Olympic glory will see the medals in their own lifetime. Their defence for ignoring the women’s pleas is that it all happened so long ago and has exceeded the statute of limitations.
But that’s an excuse that just doesn’t wash with so many in sport and is being replaced by a new way of thinking, one that recognises it’s now on the officials to right the wrongs of the past while the women are still alive.
While some of the Australian victims are in their early 50s, others are in their 60s and 70s. So, if not time, then certainly their patience is starting to run thin.
Michelle Ford is 61 and considered to be one of the lucky ones because she was Australia’s only individual gold medallist at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, swimming her guts out to win the 800 metres freestyle final.
A teenager at the time, Ford should have been a rare triple gold medallist but was denied by her German Communist rivals, who were all doped to their eyeballs.
“The only opponents who finished ahead of me in finals at the Moscow Olympic Games were East Germans fuelled by banned substances,” Ford explained in her explosive new book Turning the Tide.
“When the truth was revealed in the 1990s, we learned that the dosages of the male hormone testosterone given to those who beat me were higher than the Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson had taken in the year leading up to his 100m track victory and subsequent disqualification at the Seoul Olympics of 1988.
“All five girls ahead of me in Moscow were teenagers who had been through the GDR sports school system and were put on the anabolic steroid Oral Turinabol from as young as 12. The aim was to give them strength, by artificial means, that boys get naturally at puberty.
“We’ve known this for three decades, courtesy of GDR State Security police files saved from the shredders in the year after the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989 and the subsequent police investigation.
“When officers raided the garage of Dr Lothar Kipke, among the horrors unearthed was clear evidence that all those who finished ahead of me in my three finals at the 1980 Olympics had been doped.”
Co-written by British investigative journalist Craig Lord, a renowned expert on East Germany’s state-run doping system, Turning the Tide presents more evidence that hundreds of women from around the world, including around a dozen Australians, were robbed of Olympic medals in the 1970s and 1980s.
The book also provides a shocking reminder of how long the abhorrent culture of body-shaming has existed in Australian swimming, with airline stewards told not to serve full-sized meals to female competitors on the team’s flight to Europe in 1980.
“When the trays came round, there were no bread rolls and the obvious carbohydrates, like potatoes and dessert, had been removed,” Ford wrote. “Protein was served. The girls looked from side to side and noticed that the boys and staff had the lot.
“We asked the crew if we could have something more and were told that they had been given strict orders not to serve us. We didn’t understand at first, and then realised that they only meant us, the girls. Denied the liberty of a night out on previous trips, we were now denied a decent, rounded meal.”
Turning the Tide also adds fresh light to some of the untold stories behind Ford’s incredible rollercoaster career, while exposing the misogyny in Australian swimming and delving into the ugly side of sport and politics – revealing how she was subjected to death threats for competing at the Moscow Olympics when the government was urging athletes to boycott the Games because of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.
Just as in elite sport, timing matters in publishing too, so it’s perhaps no coincidence Ford’s biography will hit the stands while the push for reconciliation for the victims of East Germany’s doping program is building unstoppable momentum.
Athletes from all around the world who were impacted are now joining forces but no-one is asking for any East Germans to be stripped of medals, accepting they were also victims of a rotten system.
All they are requesting is that the clean competitors who were cheated out of their rightful rewards be given their due recognition.
For years, the IOC has stonewalled any requests for reconciliation but there’s clues popping up everywhere that the leaders are now softening their old hard line approach.
In the foreword to Turning the Tide, penned by the IOC’s current President, Thomas Bach wrote: “Michelle’s sporting record speaks for itself, but her continued fight against the iniquities of doping, particularly her continuing fight to right the wrongs of the era in which she competed highlights her amazing tenacity and the fighting spirit, which was the foundation of her incredible sporting performances as a young athlete.”
While stopping short of making any promises, Bach’s written acknowledgment of the ‘wrongs of the era’ does point to a shift in the IOC’s stance on the issue because he is German himself and also a shrewd lawyer, who always chooses his words very carefully. His comments are further proof the IOC’s ageing leadership has finally got the memo that cultural attitudes to the historical treatment of women have changed forever.
And if they didn’t know it before, the penny has also dropped for their IOC to hurry up and do the right thing by the women still waiting for justice because any further delays could have irreversible consequences for the Olympic brand.
The IOC is already under pressure to establish gender equality and promote more inclusiveness to appeal to younger audiences, but the real game changer has been the empowerment of the MeToo and Time’s Up movements, which have publicly called out powerful organisations for the way they treat women. Sporting bodies have not escaped scrutiny and the IOC is already on notice after demonstrating it is willing to bend its own rules to suit men – retrospectively awarding American athlete Jim Thorpe the two gold medals that were stripped from him after the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. Shamefully, the IOC didn’t act until 30 years after Thorpe’s death so the burning question is how much longer will they keep the women athletes waiting.
As previously reported by this masthead, highly – placed sources have confirmed that a global coalition of affected competitors has been secretly preparing to wage a legal battle if Olympic officials continue to ignore their requests for fairness.
This masthead has also revealed other major international sports federations – including swimming and possibly athletics – are getting tired of waiting for the IOC to take the lead so are considering taking matters into their own hands. While World Aquatics and World Athletics do not have the authority to award Olympic medals or certificates – only the IOC can do that – individual federations can award retrospective medals to competitors who were robbed at their own world championships.
Regardless of whether Olympic bosses support them or not, the federations are planning to go it alone, which would leave the IOC as an outlier. With the start of the Paris Olympics now less than five months away, the IOC has been warned if there’s one thing athletes and administrators agree on, it’s that no-one ever wants to be last.
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Originally published as Turning the tide: Moves underway to fix years of Olympic injustice caused by East German doping regime
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