Doping Study Throws Shadow Over Germany’s Success
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Version 0 of 1. SOCCER — There seems to be no place where we can hide from the drug issues contaminating the joy that sports can provide. It is bad enough being a New York Yankees follower, now that Alex Rodriguez is finally discredited for, in the words of Major League Baseball, “use and possession of numerous forms of prohibited, performance-enhancing substances.” But what is coming out of Berlin, following a study that looks back to most peoples’ childhood and beyond, means that even our cherished memories might no longer hold credibility. Germany is historically one of the most revered soccer powers on earth. Its athleticism versus Brazil’s hypnotic beauty or Italy’s tactical nous dominated World Cups over the past 60 years. Germans — previously as West Germans — always seemed so indomitable in their belief that to run the extra mile meant victory. I recall Franz Beckenbauer, the only man ever to be captain of a World Cup winning side (1974), to coach one (1990) and to organize one (2006), telling me where his inspiration came from. “I was a child of 8,” he said, “when West Germany came from behind to beat the Magical Magyars, Hungary, in the 1954 World Cup.” That final in Switzerland became known as The Miracle of Bern, and the 8-year-old Beckenbauer was on the streets to welcome the team, and his particular idol, captain Fritz Walter, when they brought home the trophy. That, surely, is how sports grips us. The innocence of childhood filled with the skills, the running and the spirit of our heroes. Alas, a German government release Monday of some — but by no means all — of a 500-page study titled “Doping in Germany from 1950 to Today” lays bare the extent of drug use. And it breaks down the walls that some of us have built around our memories of how things were in “the good old days.” Researchers at Humboldt University in Berlin and the University of Münster have detailed, among many other things, the doping of soccer players. It includes players on the 1966 West Germany side that lost one of the most venerated of all finals, in extra time against England in London in 1966. It states that a FIFA official, Mihailo Andrejevic, wrote to the German Athletic Association regarding slight traces of the banned stimulant ephedrine in three of Germany’s players in that match. FIFA has denied any knowledge of that letter. But its contents are in any case the tip of a monstrously large iceberg of alleged misuse throughout sports over the decades in Germany. The knowledge that East Germany systematically abused athletes by giving them dope from childhood to the top stages of world and Olympic sports appears to have been matched by West Germany. In soccer, this preceded, according to the report, the teams that Beckenbauer graced as the most elegant of “liberos,” the free-moving defender who could attack when he set his mind to it. His cherished memory of 1954 is now questioned by the study’s report that players in Berne were given Pervitin, an amphetamine. It was commonly known as “speed” in sporting circles, and as “Panzer chocolate” because it had been developed to help make Nazi pilots and soldiers fly or fight for longer and better. One aspect in the report that makes for chilling reading is that all of the players who took the dose were injected with a shared syringe. And one, the winger Richard Herrmann, died eight years later, of cirrhosis at the age of 39. So the grim catalog goes on. It impinges on each of the three World Cups — 1966, 1970 and 1974 — for which “der Kaiser” Beckenbauer played so artistically and so competitively. It relates to ephedrine being used by members of the 1966 World Cup team. Ephedrine is one of those drugs that can be used as a decongestant, a common cold cure, but also as a stimulant. The study goes into the whole pharmacy of drugs used to corrupt sporting performance — including anabolic steroids and testosterone. It states that the Bonn government funded the institutional push to match what was happening across the wall, and, tellingly, to match America. The authors quote a sports federation official saying in the early 1990s: “Coaches always told me that if you don’t take anything, then you will not become something. Anyone who became something was taking it.” It, apparently, was testosterone. Germany’s government paid a lot for the study, but its full publication remains hampered by privacy and legal issues. And some sections of the research, relating to athletes from the late 1990s onward, remain unpublished. Indeed, it took a leak of the findings, in the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper over the weekend, to flush out what has been disclosed thus far. But this Pandora’s box, once opened, will not remain secret. The rights of the athletes and players who were clean demands full disclosure. Soccer looks less clean today than I believed it to be. The odd player risking a stimulant was bound to be in the system. But soccer’s defense was, and is, that it requires quick reactions as well as stamina, and that no single drug gives you both. Now, though, Beckenbauer’s adulation of the Miracle of Bern is damaged. It would be nice, but hard, to share the opinion of Thomas Bach, the president of the German Olympic Sports Confederation and a candidate for the International Olympic Committee leadership next month: “This,” he said, “is a good day for the fight against doping.” But a bad day for sporting memories held dear. |