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"They Killed Heidi": The Center for American History's Steven Ungerleider Collection Chronicles East German Sports Doping
August 8, 2008
By Teresa Acosta
As a schoolgirl at the Polytechnical School Ernst Thälmann in East Germany between 1972 and 1978, Heidi Krieger exhibited athletic ability in "the throwing disciplines."
Summer Olympics, Montreal, Canada. By Wally McNamee. Wally McNamee Photographic Archive, CAH; e_wm_0282. © Wally McNamee/Center for American History.
Of her initiation into sports, Krieger recalled, "We were introduced to sports in a rather playful manner." A few years later, she attended the Child and Youth Sports Academy, where the playfulness of sports gave way to a serious training schedule in her specialty, the shot put. In 1984, Krieger was bound for the Los Angeles Olympics as a member of East Germany's Olympic Team, but did not compete because East Germany, along with the Soviet Union and Bulgaria, withdrew from the games. Two years later, barely into her twenties, Krieger won the European women's shot put championship. In 1990, when her country collapsed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an operation on her left hip due to injuries resulting from a taxing training regimen ended Krieger's competitive sports career.
But Krieger's hip injuries were not the most devastating legacy of her participation in East Germany's sports program. She was one of possibly 10,000 young East German athletes who had received anabolic steroids from their coaches and the country's top sports medicine doctors. These substances were meant to enhance sports performance, but also posed dire medical and legal outcomes. Krieger is one of more than 200 East German athletes, more than 50 coaches, and over 30 doctors who provided depositions in the investigation and subsequent trials in the East Germany anabolic steroids use scandal. Their words are documented in the Dr. Steven Ungerleider GDR Collection at the Center for American History. Measuring six linear feet, the Ungerleider Collection covers thirty-four years with revelations of misconduct among East German sports and medical officials.
"The archive that Steven donated may be the only one in existence that so completely records a country's use of steroids in an effort to win sports competitions," said Brenda Gunn, associate director for Research and Collections at the Center. "These highly relevant materials can be reexamined in light of today's headlines on continued drug doping among top athletes."
The Ungerleider Collection record containing Krieger's 1997 deposition does not list the athlete's first name as Heidi. In testimony to German authorities investigating "uM" (unterstützende Mittel), literally "supplementary substances," the former athlete testified as Andreas Krieger, a male. The impact of the steroids on the former Heidi Krieger had been devastating, producing male physical characteristics, including increased facial and body hair and a deep voice. Krieger had subsequently undergone a sex-change operation, convinced that the impact of the steroids made the operation necessary. Years later in an interview with the New York Times, Andreas Krieger accused the East German coaches of robbing his identity. "They killed Heidi," Andreas declared.
Dr. Steven Ungerleider studied at The University of Texas at Austin, where he was also a student gymnast. Now a psychologist, Ungerleider has served on the United States Olympic Committee Sport Psychology Registry and as a consultant to colleges, the Olympics, and professional sports organizations. "Steven collected these materials in preparation for writing his book, Faust's Gold: Inside the East German Doping Machine, and placed them in our hands so that scholars and students can investigate them for their insights into this serious medical and ethical issue," Gunn added.
Beginning in 1966, the year after Krieger was born, East Germany began its quest to claim an unquestioned major place in world-class sports competition. Within six years of implementing the program, East Germans took 20 gold medals at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. In 1976, a full decade into the anabolic steroids use, East German athletes won 40 gold medals at the Montreal Olympics, including 11 of 13 women's swimming events.
"Recent revelations of the continued use of steroids among high school athletes in this country, and extending to the best athletes around the world, make the Ungerleider Collection an invaluable resource," said Dr. Don Carleton, executive director of the Center. "It provides historians with in-depth primary source material of how a society engaged in systemic, harmful, and illegal efforts to prove its athletic superiority." He added, "This collection highlights in great detail what the principals knew about steroids, and is of tremendous value to those seeking to understand the challenges in ensuring ethical behavior in sports competition."
The Steven Ungerleider Collection is also important to the study of pharmacology and the consequences of prolonged steroid use by humans. Werner Franke, the biologist who disclosed the doping scandal, has called the use of steroids by the East Germans "one of the largest pharmacological experiments in history."
The plague of anabolic steroids use has also affected top American athletes. Recently, Marion Jones had to return all five of the medals she won at the 2000 Sydney Olympics to the International Olympic Committee. During the July 2008 Tour de France, cyclists Riccardo Ricco of Italy and Moises Dueñas of Spain were forced from the race after their use of performance-enhancing drugs was revealed.
With the Summer 2008 Olympics Games in Beijing underway, the Steven Ungerleider Collection documents are timely sources that divulge how the lives and reputations of individual athletes, all sports fields, and a nation can be inextricably changed by the use of anabolic steroids.
To learn more about the Ungerlighter collection, visit http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/utcah/00139/cah-00139.html
For more information, contact: Erin Purdy, Associate Director for Communications, the Center for American History, 512-495-4692.