Steven Ungerleider - 10 Mar

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CONTENTS

To the Franke and Berendonk family: you are the true heroes;

To my girls, Sharon, Shoshana (PC), and Ariel (TB), for holding down the fort and for your unconditional love and support during these roller-coaster rides;

And to the memory of my parents, who taught me right from wrong and who gave me the skills and courage to step up to the plate when I need to!

This was not an easy project. From the moment of inception to the last word, it was an enormous roller-coaster ride. Fortunately, I had a great ride, with lots of thrills and spills, and landed safely, with my feet planted squarely on the ground. There are many people I wish to thank: foremost let me begin with the athletes who were not only the heroes of this manuscript but real live people who struggle daily with the demons of their dark GDR history. I express thanks to Dr. Birgit Heukrodt, Rica Reinisch, Jutta Gottschalk, Sylvia Gerasch, Karen Knig, Catherine Menschner, Liesel Westerman Krieg, Carola Nitschke-Beraktschjan, Martina Gottschalt, Ute Krause, and Birgit Matz. A very special note of gratitude to Judge Hansgeorg Brutigam of the Berlin District Court. And to many more who gave me some of their precious time to allow me to understand the GDR athletic machine.

I thank the following for granting me interviews under very difficult situations: Dr. Dorit Rsler, Dr. Jochen Kuehl, Dr. Harry Gordon of the U.S. Department of Justice office of the Drug Enforcement Agency, and to Ulrich Snder. To the folks at St. Martins Press, many thanks for your assistance and patience. This includes Peter Wolverton, Carolyn Dunkley, Barry Neville, and Bert Yaeger.

I also thank Marina Prufer for her great photos and court sketches, Jan Hegemann, attorney, and journalists Frank Bachner of Der Tagesspiegel, Hans Joachim Seppelt of SPF television, Marianne Heuwagen of Zeitung, Lars Broder Keil of Atzte Zeitung, Dirk Schmidtke, and Alan Maimon, Berlin bureau chief of the New York Times, and to Bob Voy, M.D.

Special thanks to my colleague and translator, Karin Fleischhacker, who made my job a whole lot easier, and to Ulrich Franke. And always a word of appreciation to my academic mentors, Professor Martin Acker and Dr. Milton Rosenbaum. And to my staff at Integrated Research, I thank all of you with heartfelt appreciation: Jan Bartunek, Colie Mason, Jerry Nordahl, and Colette Kimball. A special thanks to my dear friends of thirty-five years (yikes), Michael Levin and Stu Perimeter, for all of your support while I write and dont answer your phone calls. Also, a note of appreciation is extended to lawyer Richard Young, assistant Peggy Winter, to my colleagues at Justice for Athletes, Bill Mason, Steve Baum, David Ulich, and a very special thanks to Dr. Alan D. Rothstein for your precious support.

Many thanks to Christian Paschen and to Berlin attorney Dr. Michael Lehner, who gave the victims of the GDR a voice and fought through the maze of the German legal system to bring about true justice. And to Professor Werner Franke and his wife, Brigitte Berendonk, for their gracious contributions of time and energy and support. They are the anchors and voice of truth for this project. Without their tireless efforts and perseverance, many more victims would have suffered.

To Alice Rosengard, a very special person with a great eye and outstanding intuition, a million thanks! You made this manuscript come to life and you are a pleasure to work with!

I also thank my colleague Dr. Gisela Ulich for her time and energy in translating many important documents and articles for me. Finally, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my dear friend, German scholar, sports-law expert, and fellow sidewinder, attorney David Ulich of Sheppard Mullin, for his support, emotional encouragement, professional advice, and insight at many critical points along the roller-coaster ride.

During the 1970s and 1980s, East Germanys corrupt sports organization dominated international amateur athletics. In the three decades when the GDRs secret State Planning Theme 14.25 was in effect, more than ten thousand unsuspecting young athletes were given massive doses of performance-enhancing anabolic steroids. They achieved near-miraculous success in international competition, including the Olympics. But for most, their physical and emotional health was permanently shattered.

Fausts Gold draws on the revelations of the ongoing trials of former German Democratic Republic (GDR) coaches, doctors, and sports officials who have now confessed to conducting ruthless and destructive medical experiments on young, talented athletes selected for the elite Olympic training camps. The book also draws on the extensive research of Brigitte Berendonk and her husband, Professor Werner Franke. Berendonk, herself a victim of the GDRs doping machine, escaped from East Germany to begin a decades-long crusade to bring justice to those who were not so fortunate. Her story and those of her fellow athletes in the GDR offer an unflinching view of life in an amoral totalitarian regime, as well as a true-life detective story in which she and Franke are pitted against a formidable opponent: the East German secret police, known as the STASI. These elements are woven into the complex tapestry of the politicized modern Olympics.

Over and above matters of sport and the culture of athletics, I have attempted to provide some insight into a nation obsessed with victory, no matter the cost. In following that obsession, the architects and agents of the GDR doping system forever altered our concepts of sportsmanship and competition.

In the late 1970s, I began to work as a sports psychologist with many elite athletes, some of whom went on to compete for our United States Olympic teams. Over the years, I kept hearing these athletes bitterly protesting the unfair advantage posed by the enormous change in the athletic prowess of the East German competitors, a change that observers assumed was due to some type of synthetic hormone.

We would be in the locker room with these female swimmers, the U.S. athletes would tell me, and we would have to check the symbol on the door to make sure we had the right bathrooms. These swimmersthey were huge. They had shoulders like Dallas Cowboys, hair growing all over their bodies. It was quite startling, they reported. Many swimmers who competed internationally commented that it wasnt just the physical attributes of the East German women that was troubling, but also their aggressive behavior. They would spit on the floor, one swimmer told me. They would look at you like they wanted to rip your tongue out. It was all a bit surreal, and very intimidating. The more complaints we heard, the more we coaches and consultants told our American competitors to just stay focused, dont get distracted, and swim your best race; dont worry about the other folks.

In 1984, when I was appointed to the first sports medicine group of the United States Olympic Committee, I learned more about this issue. There were more rumors, more anecdotes, more drug testing, and speculation about the East Germans, but no proof. In the late 1980s a group of my colleagues went to Germany and met with officials in Leipzig, at the most prominent sports institute for GDR training. It was there that some informal documents surfaced that provided evidence that there really was a secret system in place to dope many GDR athletes. None of us had any idea of the scope of this plan, nor did we know that the dam was about to break.