Jurgen Schult was riding his father`s clunky, old bicycle in a 10-kilometer district championship when his athletic ability became obvious. Schult not only won the race but, more importantly, he ”almost killed the bicycle.”
That strength is what attracted the attention of the East German sports officials who scout every competition, no matter how small, for youngsters with athletic inclination. Schult had escaped such notice longer than most. Then 14, he was already beyond the age at which most such discoveries are made.
He had grown up in Neuhaus, a small town near the West German border. At home, he had roller-skated and cycled and played volleyball and table tennis and soccer, his favorite sport.
Not long after the fateful bicycle race, Schult was invited to the Sport Club Traktor Schwerin, 35 miles away, for a series of tests-running, sprinting, throwing-and a physical exam with heavy emphasis on lung capacity. He was soon enrolled in the boarding school attached to the Sport Club Traktor, and his thoughts of playing high-level soccer were about to end.
”I didn`t know what the test was,” he said. ”I recognized later what it means.”
It meant that, 14 years later, Schult would be the world champion, the world record-holder and the Olympic favorite in the discus. It meant that East Germany had found, developed and shaped another champion with a sports system unique for its inclusiveness, commitment, organization and success.
The selection process that identified Schult`s potential is a critical element in explaining how a relatively poor country of 16.6 million people has become one of the world`s sporting Big Three, along with the United States
(pop. 241 million) and the Soviet Union (pop. 280 million). In the upcoming Summer Olympics, only its fifth as an independent entry, East Germany could well win more gold medals than any of the other 159 nations expected to compete.
For this is the world`s most productive sports machine, run with ruthless efficiency by a totalitarian government. Given near total control over the lives of its citizens, East German officials have all the advantages they need to offset the relative liability of being a country with approximately the same population as New York State and the same land area as Ohio.
”It helps we are a small country,” said Peter Herrmann, editor of the East German sports magazine Start. ”All corners are in view from the middle.”
Like most decision-making in communist countries, centralized planning applies to sport in East Germany. The East German constitution says, ”The state and society shall encourage the participation of citizens in cultural activities, physical culture and sport in order to aid the comprehensive development of socialist personality traits . . .”
Sport success has become a manifesto of communist verities and an attempt to forge a national identity for this nation, which was founded in 1949 and is still trying to rebuild from the destruction of World War II.
”Sport is a matter of presentation for countries. It is like in America, you have, `Go for the Gold,` ” said Volker Ranke, vice president of the German Sports and Gymnastics Union (DTSB).
The DTSB, headquartered in East Berlin, is a sports ministry. It has authority over the 35 national sports federations and more than 17,000 sports clubs, both those for elite athletes, such as Traktor Schwerin, and those for the masses, such as the enterprise sports club of the fishing combine in nearby Rostock.
The DTSB claims 3.6 million members, nearly 22 percent of the population, who pay monthly fees ranging from 40 cents (children) to $2 (adults). It also includes some 269,000 coaches and 160,000 referees, most of them volunteers.
The 40th anniversary of the DTSB`s founding is Oct. 1, the next-to-last day of the 1988 Summer Olympics, which begin Saturday in Seoul. DTSB officials should have quite an anniversary party, because East German athletes are expected to stockpile medals in women`s track and field, women`s swimming, rowing and canoe/kayak, and win others in boxing, team handball, cycling and men`s track and field.
The celebration began at the 1988 Winter Olympics, in Calgary, where East German athletes won 25 medals, second only to the Soviet Union`s 29. That moved East Germany into fourth place on the all-time Winter Olympic medal list, five behind the U.S. The East Germans stand eighth on the all-time list for the Summer Olympics.
What makes those numbers remarkable is the catching up East Germany had to do because the International Olympic Committee has allowed it to compete in the Olympics as a separate entity only since 1968. (They sent some athletes as part of a combined team with West Germany from 1956 through 1964).
Most of the countries ahead in the medal standings, with the notable exception of the Soviet Union, have been in the Summer and Winter Olympics since their respective beginnings, in 1896 and 1924.
By 1972, the East Germans had progressed to the point where they were second to the USSR at the Winter Games and third to the USSR and U.S. at the Summer Olympics. In 1976, the last summer Olympics in which most of the world competed, East Germany was second only to the USSR in gold medals won.
They top the list in some sports and completely dominate others, such as women`s swimming. In 1972, they won no Olympic swimming medals. In 1976, they won 11 of the 13 women`s events.
That such a small country can do so well led a Canadian author to call his book on East German sports ”The Miracle Machine.” Cynics and skeptics have frequently insisted the secret behind the miracle is neither
organizational nor physical but chemical, owing in large part to the scientific application of performance-enhancing drugs.
”Experienced coaches. Good scientists. Very motivated athletes. That is how we do it,” said Wilfred Jaeger, chairman of Sport Club Traktor.
It quickly becomes clear that total commitment and a systematic approach at all levels of sport are far more important to East German success than building better bodies through chemistry. But the notion of a secret is an obsession for both outsiders and insiders. It was the fixation among a group of journalists who toured the East German sports system in June and among the officials who escorted them.
– – –
”Quite a number of people think we show them only 50 percent of the college, and some people think there is another college underground where we hide the secrets,” said Dr. Karl-Heinz Bauersfeld, scientific research director at the East German College for Physical Culture, in Leipzig, where the country`s coaches are trained.
The college`s buildings hunker grimly against Leipzig`s smokestack skyline. They are old buildings, in need of paint, and dimly lit.
In such a gloomy atmosphere, one would not be surprised if, from the basement, a Frankenstein creation emerged wearing a bobsled helmet, a swim cap, ski-jump goggles, a track singlet, luge elbow protectors, cycling pants, volleyball knee pads, soccer shin protectors, ice skates-and an Olympic gold medal hanging from the neck.
After all, that is the composite picture of the East German athlete.
It is there that research is done to turn men into supermen and, so the cynics claim, women into supermen as well. There that students are taught to become the taskmaster coaches who apply that research to athletes.
So why is it that all one sees are students doing dives to demonstrate their knowledge of skills they will teach; a museum of student artworks celebrating East German sport; labs in which athletes on life cycles are having their heart rate and lung capacity measured; small children frolicking in a pool; and students doing practice teaching on young gymnasts?
All the good stuff-the work with new drugs, the pregnancy and abortion experiments, the other rumored chicanery-all that stuff is going on in the basement, right?
”You may go to the basement if you want,” Bauersfeld said.
Only one East German athlete, shot-putter Ilona Slupianek, has ever been suspended by an international organization for illegal doping. In 1977, Slupianek was banned 18 months for steroid use, but she came back to win the gold medal in the 1980 Games.
Drugs are probably much more widely used by U.S. and other Western athletes, according to Dr. Robert E. Voy, medical chief of the U.S. Olympic Committee.
”Why should we do research on something that is forbidden?” said Dr. Dagmar Meissner-Pothig, an assistant medical director at Leipzig, referring to international sports bans against performance-enhancing substances. If the East Germans have an advantage in doping, sources say, it may be that they are more sophisticated in using it to build bodies until they can bear higher training loads.
Bauersfeld feels jealousy partly motivates westerners to search for drug use and other underhanded methods rumored to be used in East Germany.
”This attitude,” he said, ”comes from frustration in countries that cannot produce with very good conditions what we produce here with very simple conditions.”
A visitor to East Germany is immediately struck by the advanced age and mediocre condition of sports facilities for even elite athletes. Any big-time U.S. university has equipment and arenas that surpass the quality of nearly everything in East Germany put together. The College of Physical Culture has had no significant additions since 1978, and no stadiums have been built in East Germany in the 1980s.
Sport Club Traktor, founded in 1955, looks like a down-at-the-heels university or part of an old military installation. It is compressed into a few acres, with a main arena built in 1962 and a handful of buildings that look like storage sheds or warehouses from the outside. Its athletes have won two gold, four silver and three bronze Olympic medals.
Although it is not as powerful or well-endowed as other clubs, such as SC Dynamo Berlin, SC Traktor is not atypical of the 22 elite sports clubs in East Germany. The club`s roster includes 372 athletes from ages 13 to 30, supported by 40 full-time coaches and a large medical staff: six physicians, five physicians` assistants, four nurses and 10 physical therapists. And this is a center for just four sports: boxing, track, volleyball and yachting.
With its limited population and beleaguered economy, East Germany makes no attempt to excel in all Olympic sports. There are, for instance, no basketball nets in SC Traktor`s main arena.
– – –
There are also some 60 ”enterprise” sports clubs in Schwerin, sponsored by factories or other local industries and subsidized with the 8 percent of union dues that goes for sport. These clubs, some as small as seven members, are both recreational outlets for people of all ages and early proving grounds for youngsters. Soccer is the most popular sport in number of participants, followed closely by fishing.
