[music]
Andreas Kreiger: When I turned 16, my coach started giving me pills. He showed me the pills. They were wrapped in silver foil.
Host: East German, Heidi Krieger wasn't expecting the training for the Olympic shot put team would entail the lifting of pills as well as weight.
Kreiger: He told me they were supplements, that everybody took them. There was nothing to worry about and that I needed them. Back then, I trusted my trainer, so I took them, but I didn't know what they were.
Host: Her coach and trainer knew they were performance-enhancing drugs, steroids, hormones, and other pills that would make Heidi bigger and stronger. They eventually put her on hormone treatments that altered her body's metabolism. Eventually, Heidi Krieger underwent a sex change to become Andreas after years of doping.
Kreiger: I don't think there's one particular person I can blame because back then, the system was interlinked. The pharmaceutical company produced these pills and gave them to the sports doctors, who in turn gave them to the coaches. I think it's the system itself I would blame for what happened to me.
Host: That system helped the little country of East Germany to play second in the medal count at the Olympics in the 1988 summer games in Seoul. Leading the medal count was the Soviet Union at 132, the United States placed third. Robert Edelman is a professor of Russian history and the history of sport at the University of California, San Diego. He's also a director of the Wilson Center's project, the Global History of Sport in the Cold War. We reached out to him to comment on this week's revelations that Russia may be taking a page from the East German playbook in its use of performance-enhancing drugs to resurrect some of those old feelings of the Cold War.
Robert Edelman: Any place that is outside the trajectory or you would say maybe the orbit of the West has some of those feelings and certainly starting very early in the Cold War right from 1945, they became a way that cultural diplomacy was a way to project an image of the Soviet Union to a third world or post-colonial world with which they were competing against the United States for support. We call it hearts and minds. Success at sport was something that they were able to use to their advantage.
Host: Do the Russians, and particularly in the Soviet period, view the issue of doping and performance-enhancing technology differently from the way we might in the United States or in Europe?
Edelman: You would be surprised that there's a lot of symmetry there. Even as early as the late '40s, early '50s, both sides are very much interested in figuring out ways to enhance their performance. Remember, none of this stuff was illegal at that point in time, so pharmacology was just one part of the process that went on globally.
Host: The accusations on the table today describe a state-sponsored doping culture in Russia. There's a marked difference in a tacit acceptance of something that everyone views as a norm, as like, "Oh, everybody does it, so we do it" versus an explicit driving of doping to raise the standard of athletes. Do you know which it is in Russia right now and what was it back then?
Edelman: A state-sponsored is a remnant from the Cold War as a concept that explains the way people behave. There are all these levels between Vladimir Putin and the athlete training in Saransk or someplace like that. I would say if there's a linchpin to this, it's that middle level of coaches who are responding to officials, who are responding to ministries, who are responding then eventually to the highest level of power.
Not exactly directly state-sponsored in the way the GDR was, but nevertheless, there's a high level of complicity all the way around. Of course, that speaks to another part of this latest episode which is the endemic corruption, which is something that you had in the Soviet period. It wasn't like the Soviet period was clean, this is just a new variation of what was going on in the past.
Host: Robert Edelman is a professor of Russian history and the history of sport at the University of California, San Diego.
Copyright © 2021 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.
New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.
