In the 1970s, female East German athletes came from nowhere to dominate international sport. But behind their success lay a horrifying secret. Doping for Gold reveals the truth behind the biggest state-sponsored doping program the world has ever known, creating a timely perspective on today’s many sports drug scandals.
A Firefly Production for Thirteen/WNET New York and ITVS International in association with Five, Channel Four International and History Channel (UK).
91 Responses to “Watch the Full Episode”
I cannot wait to see this broadcast. I think it is great to present to the kids the longterm affects of performance enhancing drugs. It is an opportunity to wash away the short -term glamour and expose the ugly truth you’ll have to live with for the rest of your life.
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer people. Honnecker knew how to handle them.
Mr. White, I suggest the book, Faust’s Gold by Stephen Ungerleider, PhD. He wrote a detailed account of the GDR doping scandal.
Lets keep in mind that this program is in regards to the misuse of steroids with women….not healthy adult men, for which there is no definitive connection linking steroid use to any serious long term health consequences…..provided, of course, it is used by healthy adult men.
In 1977, a year after the GDR’s stunning success at the Montreal Olympics, I was part of a group of western coaches allowed to visit the GDR. We spent three weeks there talking with their coaches, athletes and administrators. We were taken aback at some of their comments, such as, “Our success is not just the result of drugs!”. And it was true. They had the most highly organized sports structure of any country in the world. However, drugs were an integral part of their system.
It was many years before the extent of this drug use was disclosed.
Mike Wallace and 60 minutes did a show on the GDR successes. He asked what was the single greatest reson for their Olympic results. I answered, “Steroids”. My response did not make the air. In restrospect, it should have.
As a child i watched the 76 olympics and was stunned. The East German women looked like men. I thought to myself how unnatural. The medals won were not on merit alone, obviously they had alot of help with the massive use of anabolic steroids. How tragic for the athelets, who now suffer from heart disease, liver disease, miscarriages, mental disease,etc. The GDR is to blame not the athelets.
Thanx for airing this and it was good. Not sure how to put my feelings into words at this moment, but its very good for sure.
What about all the american cheater, shame of the U.S.A!
I was a competitive swimmer from the age of 9 through 17, and vividly remember watching the Montreal Olympics in 1976.These women/girls were my own age and I remember thinking they looked like football players. Huge. The comments of the American swimmer brought back the feelings I had then, too. No matter how hard we trained, it still felt we could not compete against whatever was going on with the East Germans. I wondered if there were some in the more minor leagues who were also doing this as well. I never advance beyond NY State competitions, but watching the times they were getting at the Olympics that year, I felt washed up at 16. I relate to the innocent trust the DDR swimmers had in their coaches. At that age you don’t know enough to question or be suspicious, you trust your coach to train you with your best interest. I agree with the previous writer who said all of the athletes worked hard for their victories, yet understood the sense of betrayal on the part of the US Swimmers who worked so hard and could not begin to compete with the illegal advantage of the swimmers who had been doped, and therefore lost their chance to take home medals.
An excellent exploration of this subject. Thank you for also offering this for on-line viewing.
“. . . no definitive connection linking steroid use to any serious long term health consequences . . .”
Are you kidding? Ask Aaron Henry or Greg Conigliaro. I think they may tell you differently.
Your program was very interesting and scarey. What they put these young girls through let alone without their consent, the consent of their parents. What the higher authorities did by taking advantage of innocent young aspiring girls for the gain of their gold. thank you for showing this and opening eyes.
I am not a native English speaker. For me and for most friends I talked to whether native speakers or not, using translators with a recognizable thick accent of the langauage they translate from was extremely irritating. Whether they were real Germans with a thick English accent, or professional actors with a fake accent, it is childish and amateurish, and extremely irritating and distracting! Guess what…they translate into ENGLISH! Shouldn’t they be native ENGLISH speakers! The idea that an accented translator’s voice, whether real or fake, would add “authenticity” is blatantly wrong and flatout childish! It’s too sad, such an excellent program was ruined by this gaffe… I couldn’t finish the program and had to switch channels. I hope some other day the program will re-air without the ruining effect of the hyperdramatizing translators. Just a hope.
I think still all the former DDR swimmers did worked hard as the americans swimmers as well. The use of drugs is been on the international scene since the 60′ I do not think that we all should pick on this DDR swimmers only. who knows what going on to the road to China?
I was in Leipzig back on 1993 and all I could see was a swim program
that was stablished for trainers and people releated to sports science, very interesting by the way. Bottom line What ever happened there DONE IS DONE and les’t move on.
As a pharmacologist/toxicologist, I watched this program with great interest. Chronic anabolic steroid use is associated with adverse effects on every major organ system. Their use in developing youth is tantamount to state-sponsored poisoning.
Heartbreakingly tragic.
will this be screened again? Please let me know when it will be repeated!!!!! I MUST SEE THIS!
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What struck me is how easlity the leaders made the decsion to sacrifice their own Youth for thier own visions of success and glory to show off their country, what they accomplished was less than glorious, and tragic for both women and men. Doping in any form will have effects on the human body, whether they are interms of sexuality, bone growth or liver dysfunction.
Piero M Ortega .. YOU sound like YOU were one of those who shot the girls with the needles…
I thought this was about heroin damn just kidding.I feel so so bad for the germens but they should lose all medals period . I grew up in the USSR and we always thought the germans doped because how could they be so small and so good.
At the 1976 Olympic in Montreal, when the east german coach was asked by a journalist why female east german swimmers had a so deep tone of voice, he was answered that “our athletes are here to swim, not to sing”.
This program was very interesting in the light of the upcoming Olympics which are also teinted by multiple suspicions of doping practice being continued and refined. The original olympic idea of celebrating the achievements of amateur sports has disappeared completely and it all started perhaps as early as the first modern Olympics in 1896??? Not unlikely. Sadly, even now that some of the severe side effects of doping are well known people still experiment with new drugs whose side effects aren’t yet fully known. The motivation behind all this is money. There is just too much money to be made in this field to resist the temptation I guess. I have given up watching the Olympics for years, because it is just too depressing.
On another note: Why the false accents?? Goodness, that is just soooo embarassing. I am a native speaker of both English and German and I am ready to bet my life that the “Germans” translating the comments of their real German counterparts on stage where actually not Germans at all. Why do you do these things? It sounds like a bunch of Hogan’s Heroes trying as hard as they can to imitate a German accent that does not actually exist in this form at all. That you can very easily see if you listen to that German doctor on the show who chose to speak English himself…..Das he sound like zat? I don’t sink so!! Why don’t the native English speakers just speak the perfect English that they are capable of? It is so irritating and frankly also a bit condescending and patronizing as well. Please stop that, its truly awful.
It is now ~1 a.m. on Tuesday May 13. You are broadcasting video of athletes from former East Germany, and your audio is about FDR. Someone is asleep at the wheel, and very deeply so. Fire them, because we are used to better.
At the Montreal OLympics we watched the E. G. swimmers so onehand pushups on the deck. We were sure they were chemically enhanced. When we only won the final relay, we were sure. Swimmers like Shirley Babashoff should have had 4 golds for her swims. Why don’t they just star their times as Chemically Enhanced and let our girls have the credit they deserve. Not FINA, nor USA Swimming, USOC or IOC has spoken on this matter. Track has.
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Wow this was deffinatly interesting for me to watch. I am in volleyball and very compeditive but i would never take steriods. Those girls were very good and worked to the extreams. I feel really bad that they had to go through all that and now people want to take that way from them. It really wasnt there fault, they had no idea what they were all taking.
The faked accents of the English dubbings are more than just degrading. Can they be called anything else but fascist? Does PBS now use Nazi methods of ethnical demarcation?
I was 10 yrs old when the Montreal olympics were held and I lived in the Canal Zone at the time. Years later I always heard the jokes that people made about the E. German athletes but never realized exactly what happened or how bad it was. This was an excellent program on the subject. It is sad what these athletes have had to endure since their doping.
“What price GLORY?” Exposed to steroids in a private Los Angeles gym in the early ’60’s (homes to Coloumbo-Swartzeneger-etal) (To include gifted athletes from USC) I could not believe the difference it made in performance or the outcomes of the participants. “Normal athletes could NOT complete!”
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This program aired tonight on WGBH om Boston and I saw it for the first time. Very well edited and shot. I appreciated every minute of it. But for me, a non-athlete who does not pay much attention to the Olympics in comparison with other people, the issue first and foremost was how the government was, as one woman said, in the program: “criminal.” That word summed it up. “Criminal” is what they did. What a horrible, sad and frightening display of corruption in government. Just horrible. My heart really went out to all those harmed by this scandal.
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It was an inhuman System… and a lot more in the GDR. In 1989 the shredder overheated… so thanks to Mr. Franke and Mrs Berendonk for saving and publishing these documents and put it under public domain. In fact we germans like to document… . And the really ugly is the punishment of the offenders. It was only minor offence… and all the doctors are still doctors, most of the trainers are trainers and all are still practising and fighting for? amnesty. And noone of the officials today are really interested in enlightenment. Medals are money… .
In fact the records still exists in the books. And as we know now they’re all doped so these records should last forever. But they didn’t. So the drug abuse still goes on… they are just replaced by some more efficient drugs.But that’s nothing who cares? Ms. Ines Geipel tried to delete her record from the DLV list and it was kind a of a big wave. Her name was replaced to a ‘*’ but the record still exists.
@?Ostide Calisse I think it was Dr. Pansold. He also said: In the east you can manage your live even with a deeper voice. He still practises as perfance ?diagnostician for the red bull team including Maria Riesch and Lindsey Vonn. Of course he didn’t lost his ?approbation. His punishment was 7200€ for doping minors.Courage is different…
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HI!
After watching this I cannot help but recall the women’s swimming events of the ‘76 games and remember how crestfallen the American swimmers appeared on the medal stand, particularly Shirley Babashoff (who was defeated for gold three times by the DDR’s Kornelia Ender and Petra Thumer). One can’t help but wonder how different Babashoff’s life might have been had she had won. After the games, her she retired to a life of relative obscurity while other multi-gold medal winning athletes went on to considerable fortune and fame.
Certainly many nation’s athletes, the US included, have doped and it’s to the detriment of everyone and it has ruined the credibility of many athletes and many sports.
I see a post on here of a Name left by SB. if I think about it, could you SB, be Shirley B? If so I would love to contact you because we are related. I am Your Cousin Paul’s Daughter and I grew up with him calling me by your name cause I was consistently in the water! If you are her, please PLEASE E-mail @ Countrygrace2009@yahoo.com
To Hany han the important thing was to listen to the message that setroid use and any performance enhancing drug brings detrimental affects to the body cauising sterility among other things and even death. So lets focus on themessage and not whether the translators had accents or not and by the by…it does make the tesimonials seem more authentic which is why they did it. All women and people who gave testimonials and were translated were understoood to me a fluent english and spanish speaker so brush up on your own english and focus on the message not the delivery.
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I just fininshed watching this episode. The East German doctors, coaches and other officials, who thought this
was ok, should be punished. These were innocent children, unaware that they were injesting or given
injectables. At what cost is winning? These women will in all likelyhood have health problems, or worse
yet their children will also have health issues/problems. So sad.
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As Jack Weger above said, it’s not only affecting the women, but in a long term it might concern their children too. This shouldn’t happen in the 21th century,don’t you think? Sometimes it seems to me that technology has taken over the human spirit actually.
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Wow. What a shocker. Another American show demonizing Germans. It is, however, a welcome relief from yet another Holocaust program.
Of course, American athletes would never DREAM of using performance enhancing drugs.
Daniel, watch the show. It mentions Americans (and others) that doped, including half of the Americans leaving the Pan Am Games with ‘colds’ when they found out there was going to be testing. The show places emphasis on the fact that the East German athletes themselves had no idea they were doped (often starting as young teens) and in fact have suffered quite a lot due to the doping. They are the victims. The focus is on the fact that it was state sponsored. So yes, if you are a East German communist government sympathizer, you will not like the show.
Sorry Daniel Dannen, I’m with Aaron Reed, and I am 100% German. I don’t see anyone picking on
Germans here, but the state sponsored doping as with the state-sponsored Hollocost, earn there own credits, and unfortunately for us German Americans, and more for their victims, these were run by Germans. both histories warrant retelling. Also, plenty of ugly actions taken by nations of all sorts can be found on PBS programming.
This program shows systematic, state-sanctioned abuse of children to feed the insatiable glory whores of the corrupt and twisted system. And it is truly horrifying. All medical field workers work by the hippocratic oath to first do no harm. No ethics were in place, and doctors involved should be inprisoned for long periods of time. The survivors have to cope with greatly altered bodies from the norm, and have impossible times trying to cope. It’s an ultimate violation of your body. I wonder how these trainers and doctors live with themselves causing this kind of damage and heartbreak to young athletes in their charge and protection. I guess money and prestige softens the blow and lessens the guilt. But you do have to look at yourself in a mirror.
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Seriously, people watching know that the people interviewed are German. You don’t have to hire voice-over actors with fake german accents. It’s incredibly annoying.
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