East v West - Germany's drug-fuelled Cold War for medals

"These are all harmless drugs. All athletes take them. It's really nothing special."
That was what German heptathlete Birgit Dressel, who finished ninth in the 1984 Olympic Games, once told her mother.
Sadly, those words couldn't have been further from the truth. On 8 April 1987, after taking medication to help with a bad back, Dressel's body went into allergic-toxic shock, leading to rapid organ failure.
After two days of agony in Mainz hospital, she died at the age of 26.
Her autopsy revealed traces of more than 100 drugs in her system, including anabolic steroids that she had been taking for years, while her medical history showed she had been injected with at least 40 different substances throughout her career, with one practitioner alone administering 400 injections.
During her final years, she became heavily reliant on prescription drugs to compete and live pain-free. Her tortuous training regime had pushed her body to the brink, and by the time of her death, she was experiencing hip pain, lateral bending of the spinal column, damage to the discs and fusion of the spinal vertebrae, displacement of the pelvis, degeneration of both kneecaps and sunken arches in her feet.
To combat the pain, she was reportedly taking nine pills a day, as well as additional drugs administered by three separate doctors.
Dressel's demise was a harrowing example of how far humans will go to keep up, but her story had much broader implications.
After the reunification of Germany in 1990, a treasure trove of documents held by the then-defunct East German secret police, the Stasi, revealed what many had suspected for decades: East Germany had conducted a state-sponsored, systematic doping operation that led to spectacular sporting success.
As the sordid details were gradually revealed, Western European nations appeared vindicated.
Allegations of East Germany doping, along with other Soviet satellite states, had increased dramatically throughout the 1980s. Here was confirmation the other side had been cheating all along.
However, the narrative was not quite so simple. The division between 'clean' and 'dirty' athletes was not as well-defined as the line that had cut Germany in half for nearly 50 years.
Dressel, born in Bremen and living in Mainz, was not from East Germany but from the West.
While they would take decades to emerge, West German sport had its own secrets.…

www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/articles/crlrn9re3z5o