East German coaches are too slow to admit their guilt

IT'S a decade since Jurgen Grobler, the architect of British rowing success, admitted his involvement in the reviled culture of state sponsored doping that long infected East German sport.

TRAGIC TALE: Andreas Krieger - an East German shot-putter who took so many male hormones she decided to have a sex change

Since then Grobler - loyally backed by his employers at the Amateur Rowing Association - has masterminded the successful delivery of scores of medals at world and Olympic level.

He admitted past wrongdoing with a contrite and believable mea culpa and got on with the job. As a result, the sins of his past are now rightly a footnote to the greater history he has gone on to achieve without the slightest trace of suspicion.

So what's taken long jump coach Rainer Pottel, discus coach Gerhard Boetcher, javelin coach Maria Ritschel, shot put coach Klaus Schneider and heptathlon coach Klaus Baarck so long?

The five, all influential figures in East Germany's athletics coaching structure, today signed a German Olympic Sports Federation declaration admitting to past doping offences.

But they insisted that since the reunification of the two Germanys in 1990 they had not committed any doping offences.

"We are very affected by, and extremely regretful if, athletes may have damaged their health through the use of drugs," the coaches said.

An estimated 9,000 athletes were on East German doping programmes between 1972 and 1989.

And the strategy certainly worked, in the Olympic Games between 1972 to 1988, despite a boycott of Los Angeles in 1984, East Germany won a staggering 384 medals.

In some cases athletes - often only children - were tricked into taking banned substances, coaches were also encouraged to spy on their charges and make reports to the Staatssicherheitsdienst or Stasi, East Germany's reviled and feared secret police.

Twenty years on and German officials are still investigating the doping past in both east and west up to reunification, although many former East German athletes have been officially recognised as doping victims and received compensation.

This long and drawn out process has only caused further pain to the estimated 800 athletes who developed serious ailments - from heart problems to cancer.

Few in authority emerge with credit from these tawdry tales, although Professor Werner Franke - who along with wife Brigitte - has probed hundreds of thousands of files with forensic attention to detail and zeal for the truth is an honourable exception to the rule.

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