Robert Harting was ripping off his shirt like the Incredible Hulk and tossing Berlino, the burly mascot bear, over his shoulder like a rag doll. The giant had just won the world discus title with a last-gasp throw and the Olympiastadion was roaring with laughter and joy. All hail Germany's colourful new hero!
Except a few miles away, at his home in Berlin, Gerd Jacobs, with a transplanted heart and struggling with kidney and lung ailments, would not join the party. He looked at his television and could feel only the deepest bitterness, unable to believe in what he was seeing.
In this same city, but in a different world, Jacobs had once been coached by the man now guiding Harting to glory. He recalled the days in the old East German sports machine when he was a young shot putter and the throws coach, Werner Goldmann, would give him blue tablets and tell him they were vitamins when they were actually anabolic steroids.
Those drugs did not turn Jacobs into a champion, but they ruined his life. Their long-term effects so dangerously enlarged his heart, he needed a transplant. His illnesses caused stress, he had to quit his job as a salesman, his wife left him and, now 43, he is unemployed, struggling to get by on insurance pay-outs and the £8,600 compensation awarded to him for medical suffering due to the systematic state-run sports doping.
For his coach, Goldmann, it was different. When Berlin Wall came down in 1989, so did the pretence. He was one of six former East German coaches who signed a letter admitting their part in systematic state doping. However, in the unified Germany, he was spirited back to the coaching fold.
But Jacobs never forgot. "I'm furious about him because he has spoiled my life. He signed that note but never said anything to people he doped. He was never repentant. I've never found anyone who heard an apology. He's considered clean because he signed that letter, but it's meaningless."
Jacobs relates his story in a Berlin clinic at a meeting of doping victims whose fury was rekindled when the World Championships came to town. The new divide between the forgotten East German doping victims like Jacobs and new German heroes who want to forget the past was highlighted by their clash with Harting.
Outside the Olympiastadion, Doping-Opfer-Hilfe, an organisation which represents ex-GDR athletes who suffered terrible health problems after being doped, handed out 20,000 symbolic cardboard spectacles to spectators so they do not to forget the athletes' plight and turn a blind eye to doping "because it must be still out there".
Michael Lehrner, the lawyer who set up the organisation, has fought for €5 million (£4,360,000) compensation for 200 victims but believes that among 10,000 athletes doped by the state more than 1,000 may have suffered cancer, hormonal dysfunction, kidney failure, heart disease and other serious health problems.
He knows of 10 athletes who died and he relates the plight of others, nodding towards a balding, middle-aged man a few yards away. That was Andreas Krieger, once Europe's best woman shot putter.
Yet this is all too uncomfortable for today's athletes. Especially those elite throwers like Harting who are still coached by Goldmann, a man recently sacked from his position at the German Athletics Federation (DLV) after the German Olympic Sports Confederation ruled he had doped throwers in the 1980s.
There is no suggestion that Harting or any of Goldmann's present proteges have been given any drugs and Goldmann is still permitted to coach. He says he is not responsible for the system as it was 30 years ago.
Harting, a 24-year-old wild card with a wild tongue, will not have a word said against Goldmann. Yet when asked about the doping victims' mild 'glasses' protest, his response was disproportionately vicious.
"I hope that when I throw my discus it will head straight for those glasses that the doping victims are distributing here and then they won't see anything any more," he said.
What, blinding the doping victims? No wonder Lehrner's association demanded Harting be kicked out of the team. Instead, the DLV just noted their disapproval and let him compete in the final, even though the previous week he had suggested in an interview that certain doping substances should be allowed, a statement he later retracted.
After winning gold, Harting apologised for his comment. But the damage was done. "It showed what he really thought. Harting has the brain of a sparrow. No, two brains, here and here," said Jacobs, pointing to his biceps. "Watching him win, I felt very angry."
Why? Jacobs showed me a sheaf of documents from the time he was one of the most promising young shot putters in the GDR's sports machine, a training partner of Olympic champion Ulf Timmermann.
"They show the whole programme of what pills, and how many, I was to take on what days for a week and for a month," Jacobs said.
He was told they were vitamin C tablets. In fact, they were the steroid Oral Turinabol. "I didn't know what they were at the beginning but my girlfriend at the time worked as a nurse in a hospital and after she told me what they were, I stopped taking them."
Jacobs took drugs for six years before he was discarded by the team. There were hundreds like him who never quite made the grade and hundreds who were never the same people again.
The dreadful side-effects for Jacobs really kicked in a decade later. "My heart had become so enlarged, I needed a transplant. Now I can't work any more; I'm having problems just getting by. My wife left me and I'm on my own."
What Jacobs seeks is justice, though he believes "some of the things which happened to me can never be proved because the documents were destroyed by doctors in East Germany."
There is no justice, he feels, in being given a life sentence of pain while his first coach, Peter Boerner, who initially plied him with drugs, had his two-year jail term suspended and fled to the Canaries and his second, Goldmann, is free to coach a champion who thinks anti-doping protestors deserve blinding.
"A year ago, after Harting had read that I had said something critical about Goldmann, he just said, 'Let's fight like men!'," said Jacobs. "I didn't take it seriously but that says what sort of man he is."
But to millions of Germans, isn't Harting now a hero? "You can't explain it, not only in Germany all over the world. It's like a circus in Rome," said Jacobs.
But Professor Werner Franke, Germany's great anti-doping crusader, does not blame Harting. "He's only his master's voice," he says. And the master is Goldmann.
When, after Harting's victory, Goldmann was asked about the complaints of Jacobs and other victims, he said: "I have no desire and no need to speak about the past". Could he categorically state he was no longer involved in doping. "You can believe it," he said.
But Jacobs says: "I try my best to forget about it and get on with my life. But I will never forgive."
No comments:
Post a Comment