by Herbie Sykes
I was summoned to Berlin, but the general secretary of the federation told me that it made no difference. They couldn’t help me, and there was no chance of me ever going back to the sport club. I qualified for the national ‘B’ team, but I knew I’d never be able to compete in international races. I tried again in 1966, but it’s impossible for an amateur to beat guys who are training every day. So that was the end of it; I stopped racing at the end of the season and got on with my life.
The point is that I left cycling, but it never left me. Even today when I see somebody cycling the feeling is still there.
DIETER
In 1967 the format of the Tour de France was changed. Previously it had been run along trade team lines, and as a German it seemed that I’d never get to ride it. Now they reverted back to national teams and I finally had my chance. I was a domestique for Hennes Junkermann, the best German rider. I had no ambitions beyond helping him as best I could, and getting back to Paris.
The Tour was much longer back then. It was 4,800 kilometres,5 more than twice the distance of the Peace Race. We had the best bikes, but they were nothing like the ones they use today. I rode over the Aubisque, Mont Ventoux and Galibier on a steel bike with 46x24, where today they use carbon bikes weighing almost nothing and 39x27.
I was in decent shape when I arrived, and I only had one really bad stage, the second. We lost Kunde and Oldenburg that day, but somehow I made it round.
Junkermann told me to start Ventoux slowly, so that’s what I did. The heat was incredible, but to be honest I felt reasonably good that day. I remember one of the British guys – Hoban, I think it was, or Denson – with a bottle of red wine. He said, ‘This wine is the exclusive property of the British team!’
I was climbing reasonably well, and I was behind Simpson when he started zigzagging across the road. I watched him fall, and I saw them pick him up. As I rode past I looked in his eyes and you could see he was in a terrible state. I said to myself, ‘There’s no way he’s making it to Carpentras’.
There was doping in professional cycling, and they say it had a hand in what happened to Simpson. For my part I just took whatever they put in the water bottle. I didn’t ask questions, and nor did anybody else. You were given your bidon, you rode for 160–180 kilometres, and then there was a feed and you got another one. It was sort of assumed that you wouldn’t get to Paris otherwise, so you just got on with it. Sorry if that’s not what you want to hear, but that’s about as much as I know.
Anyway, six of the German team didn’t make it back to Paris, but four of us did. I was fifty-second on GC, but I think I did reasonably well considering it was my first Tour. I’d weighed seventy-two kilograms when we started, and sixty-seven when I got home. Had I been riding for myself I’d probably have placed quite a bit higher, but that was academic to me.
So in answer to your question, the Tour was the realisation of the impossible dream. It gave me some of the greatest moments of my life, and some of the saddest. I wouldn’t say that it justified the defection in itself, but none of the other GDR riders will ever know what it feels like to ride into Paris.
The Peace Race was huge, yes, but the Tour was the Tour. Aside from my family it’s probably the most valuable thing I have.
MANFRED
Wiedemann rode the Tour de France? Really? In 1967? I never knew that.
Dieter Wiedemann?
Are you sure?
Did he finish it?
RAINER
There was nothing in the local paper about him riding the Tour de France, absolutely not. They would never publish something like that. He was a class enemy.
DIETER
And that was pretty much it. They told us they were shutting Torpedo down at the end of the season. I had some meetings with Batavus, but I turned it down. I desperately wanted to do another Tour de France but they were only prepared to pay us for eight months of the year. So for me to continue would have meant Sylvia going back to work, and I didn’t want that.
DIETER
So my cycling career finished when I was twenty-six years old, and I’ll never know how good I could have been. I was never a champion, but I think I could have been a reasonable GC rider at the Tour. With time I could maybe have made the top ten or fifteen.
I got a job instead, and with the overtime I earned we were actually better off. Instead of 400 marks a month for eight months I was earning about 500 for twelve.
I carried on training at first, but after a while it started to seem a bit pointless. Later I got heavily into cross-country skiing. We’d go to the Dolomites and I’d do sixty-five-kilometre races, marathons. That was brutal stuff, but I loved it. I guess that when all’s said and done I’m just a crazy person.
SYLVIA
In some respects his career had put everything on hold. He’d come in the summer of 1964, moved to Schweinfurt straight away, and we hadn’t lived together until we married the following autumn. As a professional cyclist he’d always been on the road, so we’d never really built the foundations of a life together.
I wanted children, but I hadn’t wanted an absent father and nor had he wanted to be one.
DIETER
Our first daughter, Nicole, was born in 1969, and Nina and Alexandra came along in 1971. My dad was a pensioner by then, so there was no reason for him not to come. We’d known they wouldn’t allow my mum and brother to come to the baptism, but they refused him a travel permit as well.
RAINER
The thing is that we felt German. We weren’t envious of the west as such, because Flöha was our home. Our family was here, and our life was here. I think people just resented the fact that we couldn’t go and see for ourselves. We knew we’d never be able to visit the west, though. We’d no relatives over there, so it was pointless even trying.
NEUES DEUTSCHLAND
ORGAN DES ZENTRALKOMITEES DER SOZIALISTISCHEN EINHEITSPARTEI DEUTSCHLANDS
The Volkskammer voted unanimously to ratify the ‘Law on the contract between the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany on issues of transport of 26 May 1972’. This is the first treaty between the GDR and the FRG, as highlighted by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Otto Winzer, in the explanatory memorandum. […] Furthermore, the deputies accepted the ‘Law regarding issues of nationality.’ […]
The Minister for Foreign Affairs informed the deputies that it was an initiative of the government of the GDR which finally led to the agreement on traffic. This first treaty between the GDR and the FRG is a major step on the road to normal, good neighborly relations between the GDR and the FRG. He hailed the agreement as a real contribution to pan-European security and cooperation, and underlined its binding in international law. […]
Reprinted from ‘GDR initiative resulted in legal international regulation’, 17 October 1972
DIETER
By 1972 Sylvia and I were happy, and we were a real family. Then in October they signed an amnesty treaty. It meant that former GDR citizens who had defected – people like me – were deregistered. The defection was therefore no longer classified as a criminal act, so I had the same status as everyone else.
In principle I was able to travel back without facing charges. I was undecided about whether to risk it at first, but the need to go back and reunite the family was stronger than the fear of what might happen. I made arrangements for Sylvia and the girls to be taken care of in the event that something bad happened to me, and we decided to go.
1 ‘Torpedo’ was the brand name of the bicycle hubs manufactured by Fichtel & Sachs.
2 Axel Peschel won the 1968 Peace Race.
3 A GDR track rider named Jürgen Kissner also defected during Olympic qualification, in Cologne. Four years later the IOC recognised the GDR’s national Olympic committee, so each of the German states fielded a team in Mexico. Kissner rode the team pursuit for his adopted country, and they qualified for the final.
They easily defeated the Danes, but a member of the GDR delegation issued an
appeal because Kissner had ‘pushed’ one of his team-mates. The FRG admitted that there had been contact, but replays showed that it had been no more than a light, involuntary touch. It had made no difference whatsoever to the outcome of the race, but the FRG were stripped of gold anyway.
4 The Bundesnachrichtendienst was the West German intelligence service. It’s widely believed that the majority of their ‘informants’ were double agents working for the Stasi, particularly in the 1960s. They have no record of having visited Dieter Wiedemann.
5 The penultimate stage alone was 359 kilometres. The longest stage of the 2014 Tour was 237 kilometres.
THE THIRD LIFE OF DIETER WIEDEMANN
(and the Fourth)
DIETER
We appealed, and eventually they granted us a permit. It was 22 December, and our intention was to stay for ten days. My mum and dad were finally going to meet Nicole, Alex and Nina.
We set off very early because I was worried about what might happen at the border, but in the event they let me through just like everybody else. Given that it was Christmas I’d thought that there would be a lot of traffic, but we arrived quite early.
We decided it would be best if I left Sylvia and the girls in the car and went in first. That way I’d have a little time alone with my mum and dad. It had been eight years, and it made sense to do it that way.
When I got there my mum was still cleaning, and the first thing she did was chastise me for arriving too early. My dad was genuinely happy to see me, and he wanted to have a party because we were reunited after all those years. I knew straight away that it would be extremely difficult to make things all right with my mum, though.
She was jealous of Sylvia, and she was angry with me.
SYLVIA
We had wanted to unify the family, but there was tension immediately. They were angry with him, and angry with me. We’d spend hours sitting round talking, talking, talking … We’d be up until two o’clock in the morning, and everything would come out. It was hard for them to accept what he’d done to them, and it was very hard for them to accept me because I was the reason he’d left. We were trying our best to work everything out, but it was just terrible. Deep down I always knew it was broken with them, you know?
* A municipality on the Baltic coast.
* Lötzsch is Wiedemann’s cousin.
RAINER
When he came back he and I became friends again. At the class reunions he’d never talk about himself, though, or about having ridden the Tour de France. That’s just the way he was.
NICOLE, ALEX AND NINA
Those trips to the east were a bit strange. We always used to look forward to seeing our auntie and uncle, the grandparents and the rabbits, but nobody seemed to have any fun.
We had quite a good standard of living here. We had a bedroom of our own, a car, holidays. There was colour in our life, you know? The problem with GDR was that there just wasn’t any. Everything was grey.
The yoghurt. The yoghurt was strange. The food was always really bad, and the pollution was terrible. Of course as a kid you don’t understand that, but you understand that your breathing is different. You could taste the air there.
They burned brown coal, and the smell was awful. It made your clothes smell really bad.
RAINER
Everybody watched western TV, even though it was technically illegal. The problem was that Flöha is in a valley, so there was no reception. I set up a group, we got about 500 families to pay ten marks each, and we organised everything. We dug channels, cabled the town, got a helicopter and managed to get the antenna installed. We wanted a different perspective, and we were interested in politics. What you did was specify that it was for ‘international’ TV, as opposed to ‘western’ TV.
Prior to that I’d often walked to the station with the mayor, and we’d chatted about this and that. After the business with the antenna he never spoke to me again. He just completely blanked me.
DIETER
When you visited the GDR you had to deposit money for each day you were staying, and they gave you eastern marks in exchange. The rate was 1:1, which was ridiculous, but the upshot was that if I went for two weeks I gave them about 1,000 western Deutschmarks and they gave me about 200 back. Of course that was the whole point; the GDR was using it as a mechanism to get foreign currency.
The way it worked was that you had to spend the money you’d exchanged on entering. Things were much cheaper, but there wasn’t much that you wanted to buy. It was also forbidden to export eastern marks or eastern products. You’d have wanted to buy things like Meissen porcelain, but they didn’t want westerners going over and exploiting the fact that prices were subsidised. So ultimately it was just easier to leave the money with my mum and dad.
Equally, GDR visitors to the west were only allowed to take a minuscule amount of money. They wanted to limit their spending power, and the result was that the FRG government gave all GDR visitors welcome money, 100 marks.
One time we were on our way home, queuing in the exclusion zone at the border as usual. It was always extremely stressful, a dreadful experience for me, Sylvia and the kids. The guards were invariably pretty unsavoury people, so you just kept your mouth shut and hoped they wouldn’t single you out.
You had to fill in a document declaring how many western marks you had in your wallet, and hand it in to them. I did that but as we got close to the crossing itself – I think we were the fourth car or something – one of the guards came up and said, ‘Pull over to the side.’ So I did and he asked for all of our documents. He took them off and then he came back and said, ‘I know who you are and I know what you did.’ I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about – it happened sixteen years ago and there’s been an amnesty for eight!’ Anyway, we had to follow him into this big garage, a grey concrete block with no windows.
We had to wake the twins and remove everything from the car, and then they set about taking it to pieces. They were rough with the car, and with the contents. There was nothing, but I’d bought a pair of shoes while I was there and hadn’t declared them. Everybody did it, but they’d decided that they were going to make me pay. I’d already declared that I had seventy western marks because that was what I needed to fill the tank. He therefore gave me a fine of 120 marks, knowing full well that I couldn’t pay it. I said, ‘You know I don’t have the money, so what am I supposed to do?’ and he said, ‘Well, look around you, you’re surrounded by your wealthy western friends! Look at all these Mercedes and BMW’s! It looks like you’re going to have to ask one of them to lend you the money, because otherwise you’re going to be spending the night in a cell.’
I therefore had to ask a complete stranger to lend me money. I had no ID because they’d taken it, and no way of proving that I was an honest person. I had to find somebody to lend me the money, and all I was able to give him as security was my word. Eventually I found someone, but the whole thing took three or four hours. It was the most degrading thing that ever happened to me, which of course was the whole point of the exercise.
Sylvia had had enough. She never went again, and the kids never went again. I only ever set foot in the GDR once more, a school reunion in 1985. It just wasn’t worth it.
NICOLE, ALEX AND NINA
He never discussed his cycling career, his GDR life or the defection, not ever. Nobody knew about that.
We had a happy childhood. Everything was built around the family, around being together and staying together. So our mum didn’t work, and we always had breakfast together. On Sunday we’d be off cycling together, or hiking, and holidays were usually built around hiking, skiing or swimming. We had wonderful family holidays in Austria, Italy, on the North Sea and in Denmark.
We had a lot of exchange students to stay with us, kids from other countries. Our parents were both very open-minded like that.
SYLVIA
People in the GDR weren’t living in poverty like they had been before. The standard of living wasn’t as hi
gh as in the west, but nor was it like Russia. There was no unemployment, and the state provided everybody with a place to live and enough money to live on. What they didn’t have were the brands that you could get in the west, and so of course they were even more sought-after there.
By the time Dieter’s mum reached pensionable age there was a thaw in relations between the two governments, and she started to visit here. She’d drag me around the shops for hours and hours, trying to get the best price for the things they wanted.
You remember the angora rabbits Dieter told you about at the beginning? Well, his mum used to send us the wool, and I would sell it to a textile factory nearby. The money would go into a separate bank account, and when they needed something I would get it for them using the wool money. Dieter’s brother and sister-in-law liked to have western brands, and it was a way for them to have the things they couldn’t get. So things like coffee, shower gel, decent quality tights for Eberhard’s wife, cutlery.
