By Barry Whelan Oct 21, 2009, 5:09 GMT
Hamburg - When victims of East Germany's systematic doping programme took part in a protest action at the world athletics championships in August it seemed an innocuous enough affair.
The former athletes, trying to raise awareness of the plight of doping victims and back their calls for a special pension, gave away 20,000 pairs of cardboard glasses at Berlin's Olympic Stadium with the message that the country is still closing its eyes to doping.
However, German discus thrower Robert Harting took particular umbrage at the protest action, saying controversially that he hoped his discus would bounce up and hit the victims' glasses 'so that they really can't see anything any more.'
Harting's rage was partly linked to the future of his coach, Werner Goldmann, who was allegedly involved in the East's doping system, showing that the anger is not only confined to the doping victims some 20 years after the break up of East Germany.
For former athletes like Andreas Krieger, who as Heidi Krieger was a European shot put champion, the suspicion is that Germany's leading sporting bodies and politicians would rather the subject of doping in the GDR be consigned to the history books.
The Harting affair again demonstrated that as long as former East German coaches continue to work and doping victims suffer from a range of doping-related illnesses it is not an issue that will easily disappear.
East Germany became a sporting powerhouse at the Olympics and various world championships after the communist state realized early on that sport was an ideal vehicle to promote its ideology.
In the Olympic Games from 1968 to 1988, East Germany won 384 medals despite a boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Games, and was second in the medals table in the last three Games in which it took part.
Unfortunately its considerable efforts to improve performances, notably seen with success in the swimming pool and in track and field, came thanks to the illicit use of performance-boosting drugs.
In particular, anabolic steroids were commonly used on young athletes, some of them minors and often without their knowledge.
Krieger, who was fed male hormones, eventually underwent a sex change, and others have also suffered from catastrophic side-effects of steroids taken to promote muscle growth and reduce recovery times.
'We did not question the pills because in GDR times you were expected to trust your coaches,' Krieger said in an interview with the Times last year.
'Nobody thought, 'Is this dangerous for me?' The coaches said the pills were important to keep us fit and healthy. I did not even consider the possibility that they might be harmful.'
In the aftermath of the doping programme and following German unification, the emergence of the state-sponsored programme led to a string of lawsuits and compensation payments.
The German Olympic Committee and umbrella sports body DOSB has paid some 2.9 million euros (4.1 million dollars at the time) to the victims, while payments have also come from the Jenapharm company which produced most of the doping substances in former East Germany.
In addition, some of those responsible have faced criminal proceedings, including the late Manfred Ewald, who as minister of sport and president of East Germany's Olympic committee, was regarded as the architect of the doping programme.
In July 2000 he received a suspended 22-month prison term on a charge of being an accessory to causing bodily harm to 20 top sportswomen who were provided with steroids without their knowledge.
Today many of the doctors and coaches implicated in the decades-long doping scandal are still active in sport, a fact which continues to rankle with their victims.
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