Last week, the British newspaper The Daily Mail launched a new campaign to award 1980 Olympic gold to swimmer Sherron Davis and other athletes affected by the doping system in the GDR. This is another attempt of many to force the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to reconsider the results of those times. What exactly do the British want and why the IOC is in no hurry to meet their seemingly fair requirements — in the material. Petre Schneider from the GDR. In the same year, Schneider was named Swimming World Swimmer of the Year and has set four world records in her career.
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«Sherron Davis competed that day not with a man, but with another creature: a young girl whose physiology was changed by men in order for her to win,» Franke said at the time.
Athlete from the GDR took turinabol, which stimulated the release of testosterone, which helped muscle growth. A side effect of this drug was body hair growth, irregular menstruation, and Schneider also developed heart and liver problems.
Doping in the GDR made men out of women sometimes in the literal sense. Heidi Krieger, the European champion in the shot put, had such powerful side effects from the drugs that she had no choice but to change her gender. Now Krieger lives with the name Andreas, but the medal that is awarded to people who have contributed to the fight against doping in sports still bears the name Heidi.
At the Olympics in Moscow, swimmers from the GDR won 11 out of 13 gold medals, and in general, from 1973, when the first World Championships in water sports took place, to 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, East German athletes set 110 individual world records, and on three Olympics — 1976, 1980 and 1988 — won 31 gold medals out of 40 and 64 out of 120 awards of any value.
The scale of the doping program in the GDR, about which books have been written and films made, is impressive. Some 10,000 East German athletes are believed to have taken illegal drugs. Later, about 300 athletes, including Schneider, testified against their coaches and doctors who involved them in the doping system.
In 1998, Sherron Davis and Petra Schneider met, and their conversation was filmed for a documentary. The British swimmer refused to accuse her rival of foul play — on the contrary, she called her another victim of the system.
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«I feel nothing for her but sympathy for all that she's been through,» Davis admitted.
Schneider invited Davis to take her Olympic gold medal for herself. However, the Briton refused, saying that she did not consider it necessary to take away awards from East German athletes who took doping. “It has often been said that we want to take away their medals,” Davis wrote in her book. “But this is not true. There is no such requirement in any petition, either American or British. We just want recognition from the International Olympic Committee.”
However, the IOC throughout all these years refused to revise the results of competitions with the participation of athletes from the GDR. Firstly, I understood that there were no legal grounds to take such measures against those who had never taken positive samples. Secondly, because of the official statute of limitations for such cases, which is 10 years. Thirdly, because of the fear that after one positive decision, a wave of other protests will follow. In 1990, then IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch even turned down an offer from a number of East German swimmers to donate their Olympic medals to those who deserved them.
