Valieva and doping in East Germany

A LOT of the internet this week has been dedicated to the ongoing issue of Kamila Valieva and her participation in the Ladies Figure Skating event at these Olympics. I think an interesting case study for us to consider is East Germany's sports programs of the 60's and 70's.

East Germany, a nation formed in 1949 and defunct since 1990 began gaining recognition as a sports powerhouse in the 1960's and 1970's. This was common among Communist nations-it was seen as a way of establishing an esprit de corps if you like, or a feeling of national pride among the populace of a new country. The USSR funded sports programs through the government, providing housing and training etc. for its athletes, and it's therefore not much of a surprise that they owned gold medals in nearly every discipline at the Olympics. East Germany, or the GDR as it was known, formed a very similar system and began to dominate almost immediately. Despite it's smaller comparative population, it sat along with the USSR, and USA atop the medal count for several Olympics.  

It later came to light the widespread state sponsored doping that the GDR employed to ensure their athletes success (oh, can you already see where I'm going with this?). Coaches provided pills and other treatments to athletes in a wide range of sports, from gymnastics to swimming to track and field. And those athletes went on to achieve great success-500 Olympic medals in the years between 1956 and 1988!

The effects of these drugs in later years were widespread as well, and they were in a word, horrifying. They ranged from "male-type hair growth and deepened voices to liver and heart disease, depression, infertility, miscarriages, and even death." (Cited) And of course a state sponsored program of cheating has to be kept a secret or else there's no point. So the drugs were manufactured in a government owned and run facility and a decent portion of government agents were farmed out to ensure no one leaked information to outside sources. Athletes and coaches had to be monitored closely during interviews to make sure they didn't let anything slip.

One particularly sinister aspect of this sports and doping program is that the state specifically looked for talented children whom they could not only begin rigorous training, but also rigorous doping. Injections, pills, blood transfusions, and more given to children and pre-pubescent adults. Sometimes the children took as many as 5 pills a day, not understanding what the pills contained. In the years following, many have suffered severe physiological and physical complications and it's no surprise.

It might lead you to wonder a host of other things. For example: What is the impact you may wonder on the skeleton of landing, say, quadruple jumps, as a young pre-pubescent girl with 0% body fat? The repetition of skills deemed too difficult or dangerous for the majority of athletes for essentially the entire history of a sport, and yet a child is able to do them easily? What then could be the long term effects on the body of this kind of rigorous training, let alone any performance enhancing substances that might be used to force a body to allow her to complete that training?

As a lot of athletes know-injuries are sometimes part and parcel of sports. Tara Lipinski often reminisces about her experiences as a clean 15 year old Olympic gold medalist. What she neglects to mention is that she had a hip surgery at the age of 18. Her surgery took several hours to complete because she (again 18 years old) had begun to develop arthritis and cartilage began to grow over the bone. 

All of this is to say that the people who poison children are definitely going to hell. Kamila Valieva and her teammates at Sambo-70, even if they have not been given performance enhancing drugs may have already suffered...irreparable damage given their training regimen, age, and physiology. And if you watched the ladies free skate at these 2022 Olympics, you know that the emotional and mental damage done to these girls is just the tip of the iceberg.

And all for what? It seems strange-silly even-in retrospect to think all that damage to an estimated 10,000 East German athletes (Cited) was done to establish national pride for a country that doesn't even exist today. And moreover, the medals they won are tainted. The US and other nations have filed suits requesting that results from past Olympics be changed due to the scandal (cited). In fact, many East German athletes that were unknowing victims of the doping program have filed suit against the German government and those responsible. Some athletes even requested their results to be struck. (Cited) And I suspect the only reason many of the standings have been unchanged is that such a complete overhaul of Olympic records would sink the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which isn't willing to overhaul the standings of SO MANY Olympic competitions. A Pandora's box like that can likely never be closed.

Russia likely won't collapse as a nation in the same way East Germany did, and yet all that damage done, for what purpose? The competition of this week's ladies' competition has been completely tainted and overshadowed by the Valieva situation. And if it's found that the Sambo-70 staff which trains all 3 ladies athletes (not to mention the gold and silver medalists from the 2018 Olympics and a gold medalist from the 2014 Olympics) are drugging their athletes, the medals awarded today will be stripped and the official results changed. The IOC may be hesitant to overhaul results spanning a 30 year Olympic history for a defunct country, but I suspect has no such reservations about changing results to cover for this embarrassing moment in Olympic history. The price is being paid, and we have to wonder why it's only being paid by the athletes.