Rotterdam, October 1987. Dörte Thümmler stood before the uneven bars in Amsterdam’s Ahoy Hall, knowing what she had to do. Her teammate Gabriele Fähnrich, the reigning world champion, had only just returned to competition after a long injury layoff and had fallen during compulsories. Now the fifteen-year-old Berliner—just 1.47 meters tall and 36 kilograms—was suddenly East Germany’s best hope for gold. She executed her routine flawlessly: the Tkatchev, the Deltchev, the toe-on front with a half turn, landed with just a small shuffle backward. When the score appeared—a perfect 10—she had won the world championship title on uneven bars, sharing the gold with Romania’s Daniela Silivaș. Dutch journalists were stunned. “Thümmler?” one said. “In a poll of favorites, her name would not have appeared on a single ballot.” In claiming this title, she continued a long tradition that included Maxi Gnauck and Fähnrich herself.
Thirty years later, Dörte Thümmler spoke publicly for the first time about what that victory had cost. At a press conference held by the Doping Victims Assistance Association in April of 2018, she stood alongside other former gymnasts, all of them bearing similar damage. For eight years by that point, she had been unable to work, living on a full disability pension. Medical specialists at Berlin’s Charité hospital had diagnosed her with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. She had only thirty percent of the strength typical for people her age. She was forty-six years old.
What Thümmler and the others revealed that day was something far worse than simple overtraining. Across East Germany’s gymnastics program, young girls had been fed into a system that treated them as experimental subjects rather than children. They trained seven hours a day, six days a week. They lived in boarding schools separated from their families. They were told the pills were vitamins. And when their bodies inevitably broke down—often before they even reached adulthood—they were left to live with permanent disabilities.
The roar in Seoul’s Olympic Gymnastics Hall is deafening as Dagmar Kersten dismounts from the uneven bars. It’s September 1988, and the seventeen-year-old has just executed an exquisite routine. Despite a small hop on the landing, a 10.0 flashes on the scoreboard. But perfection isn’t enough. Romanian Daniela Silivaș, who built an insurmountable lead after compulsories and optionals, takes gold with a perfect total of 20 points. Kersten’s silver is still East Germany’s highest finish in women’s gymnastics at these Games, confirming that the legacy of Karin Janz and Maxi Gnauck is still alive and well.
What Kersten doesn’t know—what she won’t discover until years later, after the Wall falls and the archives open—is that she’s been part of an experiment. The pills her coaches gave her weren’t just vitamins. She was a test subject in one of the most sophisticated pharmaceutical programs ever applied to athletes, a system that treated her body as a laboratory and her performance as scientific data.
“I would never have thought that something like that existed among us—it was outrageous,” Kersten would later say. “That’s why the whole process of confronting it was so shocking, as well. That’s when you realized that you had been used for such things. I had always seen the people we trusted as people who saw us as human beings. You don’t treat children like that; it’s the very last thing anyone in a position of trust should exploit. It’s also outrageous that some of this is still being covered up today. It’s a slap in the face to those who are now reading their files from back then. To deny that such things were possible at the time is an insult. There’s more than enough evidence. People always say, ‘We’d rather not talk about that.’ It’s such a shame that this topic can’t simply be discussed openly. No one wants to face it. No one wants to engage with the gymnasts of that time. We were given psychotropic drugs and OT [Oral-Turinabol]. Some of these substances were even tested by the NVA [National People’s Army]. They were supposed to help gymnasts who fell react more quickly. Anabolic steroids weren’t the only things they could give.”[1]
For decades, the gymnastics world believed its sport stood apart from the chemical manipulations reshaping track and field, swimming, and weightlifting. Doping, the conventional wisdom went, was incompatible with a discipline requiring grace, balance, and split-second coordination. Steroids built bulk; gymnastics required mobility. The logic seemed airtight.
But the archives of the Ministry for State Security tell a different story.
Dagmar Kersten, 1988 Olympics. Kersten has been the most vocal East German gymnast on the subject of doping.
Note: This article is not intended as medical advice, nor does it endorse the use of steroids. It is a historical account based on a collection of Stasi files.
Two stories dominate the history of doping in gymnastics. The first is a story of incompatibility: the widespread belief that performance-enhancing drugs simply don’t work in a sport built on precision, balance, and spatial awareness rather than brute strength. The second is a story of geography: the assumption that systematic doping was an Eastern Bloc problem, a product of Communist sports systems that treated athletes as instruments of national prestige. Both narratives contain elements of truth. But both also obscure a more complicated reality.
The case of Eberhard Gienger dismantles both myths at once. Gienger was not an East German athlete subjected to a centralized doping program. He was a West German star—1974 world champion on high bar, 1976 Olympic bronze medalist, inventor of the Gienger release, and later a member of the Bundestag (the lower house of the German federal parliament)—and decades after his competitive career ended, he acknowledged using anabolic steroids. His admission unsettles the comfortable boundaries of doping history. Doping in gymnastics was not impossible. And it was not uniquely Communist. It was, instead, embedded in a broader landscape of sports medicine, scientific authority, and permissive norms that transcended Cold War divides.
Eberhard Gienger
A Brief History of Doping in West Germany
Beginning in the 1960s and accelerating through the 1970s, West German sport developed what scholars have called a “culture of doping”—a diffuse, decentralized system supported by sports physicians, university laboratories, and tolerant athletic federations.¹ Anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, insulin, and other substances circulated widely in elite training groups, often under medical supervision. Officially, anti-doping rules existed; in practice, enforcement was inconsistent, and testing regimes were weak. Athletes and coaches operated in a gray zone where performance-enhancing drugs were accessible, normalized, and seldom punished.
Unlike East Germany’s state-directed model, the West German system relied on networks rather than directives. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Federal Institute of Sports Science (BISp) funded studies on anabolic steroids and peptide hormones—research framed not as doping but as legitimate scientific inquiry into performance optimization.² The Hamburg–Berlin research group later concluded that this scientific infrastructure helped normalize doping by providing institutional legitimacy and technical cover.
International pressures reinforced the pattern. As West German federations compared their results to those of the GDR, many adopted a tacit acceptance of pharmacological “support.” Coaches who resisted found little institutional backing; others embraced the emerging medical logic of “restorative” substances. Because West Germany lacked a centralized directive, it also left behind fewer paper trails. The 2013 BISp report notes that missing or incomplete records make full reconstruction impossible, but the available documents are clear: doping in the Federal Republic was neither marginal nor accidental—it was woven into the fabric of high-performance sport.³
Eberhard Gienger’s Admission
Eberhard Gienger’s 2006 admission did not describe a sustained doping regime so much as a single episode shaped by the ambiguities of its era. In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, he recalled that after a serious postoperative setback—his leg circumference shrinking six centimeters overnight—he received “an anabolic steroid for about eight days,” a treatment he described as restorative rather than enhancing.⁴ In a follow-up statement to SID (the Sport-Informations-Dienst, Germany’s main sports news agency), he emphasized timing: “The intake dates to a time before 1976, the year international sport began sanctioning these substances. Anabolics were banned in competition back then, but in training, not at all.”⁵ For Gienger, then a CDU member of parliament (the Christlich Demokratische Union, Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union) and soon to be DOSB Vice President for Elite Sport (the Deutscher Olympischer Sportbund, Germany’s national Olympic committee), the episode belonged to a medical past in which the rules were unsettled and testing barely existed.
The regulatory landscape was more nuanced than Gienger described. The minutes from the IOC General Session in 1967 declared anabolic steroids to be “doping from the Olympic viewpoint.” Morally and medically, they were thought of as prohibited—appended to meeting minutes with warnings about jaundice, cardiovascular damage, and stunted growth—but they were not yet banned in the sense that mattered most: inclusion on the enforceable testing list. The IOC left steroids off that list entirely because no reliable assay existed for testing. Thus, throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, anti-doping policy contained a fundamental contradiction: steroids were condemned in principle but unenforceable in practice. Only after the development of radioimmunoassay and gas-chromatography/mass-spectrometry techniques did the IOC formally add anabolic steroids to its prohibited list in May 1975.⁶ At the 1976 Montreal Games, eight athletes tested positive and were sanctioned.⁷
A regulatory gap, however, is only part of the story. The other part lies in how physicians operated within that gap—and here, Gienger’s account points directly to the figure who shaped his medical care. Gienger’s steroids came from Freiburg orthopedist Armin Klümper, one of the most influential—and later notorious—figures in West German sports medicine. Gienger had long defended him; in 1997, he joined other former athletes in signing a newspaper advertisement praising Klümper against what they portrayed as public envy.⁸ But in 2006, he offered a more candid description: “Professor Klümper was a doctor who prescribed very generously. Over time, I realized I couldn’t possibly take all the medication he gave me. I would carry it back to the pharmacy. Quite an arsenal would accumulate if you didn’t do that.”⁹ Eventually, he said, he stopped taking everything home—“only a part of them, those I thought would be enough.” Klümper’s medical empire would soon become infamous; in 1987, one of his patients, heptathlete Birgit Dressel, died after ingesting more than 120 medications simultaneously.¹⁰
While Gienger believed he had a medical reason to take steroids, not all experts agreed. Heinz Birnesser, former Olympic doctor and then head of Sports Orthopedics and Traumatology at the University Hospital Freiburg, rejected such justifications outright: “Administering anabolic steroids was always medical nonsense in high-performance sport because it disrupts hormone metabolism.”¹¹ His critique cut against both Gienger’s recollection and the broader medical culture that made such treatments possible, underscoring the central question raised by Gienger’s admission: when detection was impossible, rules were fragmented, and physicians wielded enormous authority, who determined where legitimate treatment ended and doping began?
The Burden Athletes Were Never Meant to Carry
Comparatively, Gienger’s episode seems almost quaint. His steroid use lasted scarcely more than a week, occurred in a regulatory gray zone before the IOC formally added anabolic steroids to its enforceable banned list, and was framed as therapeutic recovery rather than engineered advantage. In a landscape now shaped by the memory of state-sponsored doping programs and industrial-scale pharmacology, his story feels small.
But his admission contains a quieter and more troubling detail—one easy to overlook amid the timelines and testing protocols. “I couldn’t possibly take all the medication he gave me,” he said of Armin Klümper. He described returning handfuls of drugs to the pharmacy, keeping only the ones he thought “would be enough.”12 The image is jarring not just because it implies misconduct, but because of what it reveals: an elite athlete standing alone in front of a mountain of medication, forced to make choices he never should have had to make.
It is tempting to treat his story as an aberration, a relic of an era when rules were vague and oversight was weak. But the same dynamic persists today—often involving substances that are perfectly legal. Even if Gienger’s example is extreme, it highlights a recurring reality: athletes are still routinely asked to navigate medical decisions they are not trained to make. How many ibuprofen tablets before training is too many? How many Toradol injections before competition cross the line from pain management to coerced risk? At what point does “getting through it” become something closer to harm?
These questions extend far beyond the outdated pharmacology of the 1970s. They reach into the daily routines of modern sport, where the substances may be legal, the prescriptions documented, and the intentions framed as therapeutic—yet the burden of determining what is acceptable still falls, too often, on the athlete. To be sure, today’s athletes tend to be far more informed than their predecessors, yet even today, as athlete-welfare scholars repeatedly note, competitors—no matter how experienced—operate within medical and sporting hierarchies in which expertise, authority, and risk are unevenly distributed.¹³ No amount of experience can compensate for a structure that routinely asks athletes to judge medical risks that remain contested even among specialists.
Which leaves us with an uncomfortable question—one that echoes across generations, even as substances, regulations, and terminology have changed. So, who will ensure today’s athletes no longer have to decide for themselves what “enough” really is?
Notes
“West Germany Cultivated ‘Culture of Doping,’ Report Says,” ESPN, August 5, 2013; “Systematic Doping of West German Athletes Revealed,” The Guardian, August 5, 2013.
Bundesinstitut für Sportwissenschaft (BISp), Doping in Deutschland von 1950 bis heute (2013); “Culture of Doping Revealed,” France 24, August 5, 2013.
BISp, Doping in Deutschland (2013); Jens Weinreich, “Doping in Deutschland: Die ersten Berichte zum Forschungsprojekt,” 2013.
See John Hoberman, Mortal Engines: The Science of Performance and the Dehumanization of Sport (New York: Free Press, 1992), esp. 113–42, on how medical authority in elite sport can eclipse athlete autonomy; Ivan Waddington and Andy Smith, An Introduction to Drugs in Sport: Addicted to Winning? (London: Routledge, 2009), 77–98, on the asymmetrical power relationships between athletes and team doctors; and Dominic Malcolm, “The Social Construction of Medical Knowledge in Sport,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 41, no. 3–4 (2006): 279–97, which shows that athletes rarely grasp the full implications of the treatments they receive.
When the German Democratic Republic collapsed in 1990, thousands of coaches, doctors, trainers, and officials from its elite sports system entered a unified Germany that was still trying to understand what, exactly, the GDR had been. Their reputations now depended on how their pasts were interpreted—by newspapers, by athletic federations, by former teammates and rivals, and sometimes by courts. Some sought to defend themselves through interviews. Others tried to fight damaging statements in court. Still others discovered that defending themselves was complicated by missing documents, conflicting testimony, or shifting expectations in a country still learning to read its own history.
Three figures from GDR gymnastics—Ellen Berger, Klaus Köste, and Gudrun Fröhner—each confronted the same problem: how to assert their own account of the past in a new Germany where the rules, the evidence, and even the moral categories were changing under their feet. Their cases did not follow the same path, nor did they end in the same place. But all three illustrate how difficult—and sometimes impossible—it was to clear one’s name in the 1990s and beyond.
In December 1991, a Swiss magazine profiled a new coach at a gleaming gymnastics center in Liestal. Dieter Hofmann, they wrote, was a “coaching legend”—his East German athletes had won 52 Olympic, World, and European Championship medals. Now he was in Switzerland, “baking smaller rolls,” teaching part-time at a vocational school. The profile mentioned, briefly, that some had blocked his appointment to lead unified Germany’s team because of his past. But it went no further.
Over the next decade, two sets of articles would tell a fuller story. The first, released in 1993, documented Hofmann’s work as Stasi informant “Rose”—reporting on colleagues, providing a safe house for covert operations, and derailing careers to demonstrate loyalty to the East German state. The second, revealed in 2003, showed his role overseeing athletes during secret experiments with psychotropic drugs, including an incident where a gymnast lost control and had to be carried from the hall. Together, they painted a portrait of a man embedded in two overlapping systems of control: one focused on surveillance and political compliance, the other on pharmaceutical performance enhancement. Both required absolute secrecy. Both treated athletes as instruments of state policy rather than individuals with rights of their own.
Across two decades, in the same city, two East German girls lived out almost identical stories.
In the 1960s, Christiane Fröhlich was a sturdy child with quick reflexes and the kind of discipline coaches called turnerisch veranlagt—born for gymnastics. By seven, she was training five days a week; by sixteen, she was broken. Her coaches pried her knees backward to force flexibility, held a lighter under her calves when she could no longer lift her legs, and starved her until her vision went black. When she finally retired, her body was permanently damaged—spine fused with metal, nerves shot, walking possible only with crutches.
Two decades later, Antje Wilkenloh, the last East German champion, followed the same path through the same city. She, too, was chosen young, molded by repetition, and told to ignore pain. By thirteen, she was training up to six hours a day, her childhood disappearing into drills and conditioning. Fear of the coaches kept her silent as injuries accumulated: swollen fingers, a broken nose from the uneven bars, operations on her elbow, toe, ankle, and knee. Like many girls around her, she took painkillers before practice because she knew what training would demand.
Despite the difference in years, their experiences map onto each other with striking precision: early talent, escalating injuries, pressure to perform, and an adult world that treated their pain as routine. Both entered the system healthy and hopeful; both left it with bodies that would shape the rest of their lives.
Their stories, told here through two contemporaneous Der Spiegel profiles—one published in 1994, the other in 1995—show what remained after the routines ended and the state itself was gone.
In November 1981, Ralf-Peter Hemmann stood in a packed Moscow arena, preparing for his second vault in the apparatus finals of the World Championships. His first had been flawless—a handspring front with a half twist that stuck to the mat as if pulled by a magnet. The judges awarded him a perfect 10. Now came his Tsukahara. He landed it cleanly. Score: 9.95. The twenty-two-year-old auto mechanic from Leipzig was the world champion.
“After the 10, I still wasn’t sure,” he told reporters afterward, beaming. “But then when the second vault went so well…” He didn’t finish the sentence. He was being called to the podium, where thousands of East German tourists in the sold-out hall cheered for their new champion. It was the kind of victory that makes careers, the kind that gets remembered in record books. The days before had been the hardest, Hemmann said—sleepless with nerves. But in the competition itself, he’d been completely calm.
Then, without warning, he disappeared.
Not literally—Hemmann was still alive. But his gymnastics career ended abruptly in the spring of 1982, with no explanation, no farewell interview, no public acknowledgment of what had happened. One day, he was preparing for a competition in the Netherlands. The next, a club official told him his competitive career was over, effective immediately. The press never called again.
For years, people whispered theories while the official story was buried in Stasi files that wouldn’t surface until after reunification: Hemmann had tested positive for anabolic steroids at that same Moscow World Championship where he’d won gold. The Soviets had caught him, covered it up, and allegedly used the secret as leverage against East German sports officials. Rather than face an international scandal, those officials made Hemmann himself disappear—forced into retirement with his title mysteriously intact.
Thirty years later, Hemmann still didn’t have answers. His case raises troubling questions about how Cold War sports politics may have enabled cover-ups at the highest levels. Rumors of the positive test circulated among judges even during the competition itself. Yet the positive test result was never published, and the International Gymnastics Federation never stripped him of his medal. We may never know for certain why.
Here’s a translation of Sandra Schmidt’s article on Hemmann’s case.
Olga Karaseva won Olympic gold in 1968, became world champion in 1970, and won medals on every event at the 1969 European Championships—taking silver in the all-around and gold on floor. Her career blazed briefly but brilliantly, embodying the elegance that made Soviet gymnastics compulsory viewing in those years. But by twenty-three, she was finished competing and felt, as she puts it, that “no one needed me anymore.”
In this 1990 conversation with sports writer Gennady Semar, Karaseva examines what the Soviet system did to athletes: how it created champions and then abandoned them, how it corroded the moral foundations that once made sport meaningful. She speaks with unusual candor about the collapse of purpose after competition ends, the loss of expertise as former athletes drift into bureaucratic roles, and the absence of any social safety net once the applause stops. Yet she’s not bitter. She counts herself fortunate—her coaches were “people of high human qualities,” and she escaped both the coercive “stick” of brutal training and what she calls the “chemicalization” of sport, a process she describes as “the destruction of the soul” that ruins both health and integrity.
For Karaseva, the crisis isn’t only institutional or pharmacological—it’s spiritual. Athletes, she insists, must be understood not as expendable performers but as whole people whose cultural development, imagination, and artistry are inseparable from their physical achievements. To save sport, she argues, means recognizing athletes as creators, not gladiators.
Note: Olga Karaseva passed away at the end of October at the age of 77.
In this 1990 interview, Yuri Titov — the long-serving president of the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) — speaks not of glamour or privilege but of long hours in meeting rooms, piles of documents, and the constant struggle to keep the sport fair. Early injustices in his own career, he recalls, convinced him that “athletes must be led by athletes.” As FIG president, he turned that conviction into policy: revising the federation’s statutes to curb presidential power, creating twelve commissions to share decision-making, and championing more objective judging through mathematical analysis and a standardized six-judge system. He even proposed sanctioning entire federations for corruption on the competition floor. Balancing the competing demands of his country, the FIG, and its member organizations was never easy — especially in a political culture where, as Titov recalls with wry humor, a senior Soviet sports official once warned him that if he didn’t “work for the benefit of the Soviet Union,” he might “fall ill for a long time.” Yet Titov managed to navigate those pressures and the politics of world gymnastics for two decades.
Larisa Latynina has never been content to rest on her legend. The nine-time Olympic champion—whose name still defines an era of Soviet gymnastics—has lived many lives: prodigy, national icon, iron-willed head coach, and, later, the quiet architect behind Moscow’s next generation of stars. When Nadia Comăneci enchanted the world in 1976, it was Latynina who paid the price at home—forced to step down as head coach despite the fact that the Soviet women’s team had never lost a single Olympic or World Championship title under her leadership. In this interview from 1990, she reflects on the complexities of leadership, the stubbornness of talent, and the moral weight of guiding the sport she once ruled. Latynina speaks candidly about the fierce personalities she nurtured—Korbut, Tourischeva, Kim—and about one of her later instincts that proved prophetic: championing a young Svetlana Boginskaya when few others saw what she did. Her story is one of brilliance tempered by conviction—and of a woman who, even after the spotlight dimmed, never stopped shaping the stage.
