Aside from political sniping, the central theme of the Pravda column was underscored in the question that Dyakov and Petrusenko said was constantly asked of the Soviet coaches in Rome: What is the secret of your success? “And our answer was our sports are for the masses, the people. We don’t distinguish between important and nonimportant sports events. The country doesn’t restrict financial means for sports establishments, stadiums, and the physical education of our young people. So that is our secret…It takes a lot of work from organizers and coaches to lead your team to victory. For example, Americans didn’t win a single medal in gymnastics—the sport that is very good for the overall health and development of teenagers. The president of the IOC, Avery Brundage, pointed to this reason during his speech to the American Club of Rome. There are 800,000 gymnasts in Russia, he said, and it would be hard to find 800 in the USA.”
Leaving aside the larger controversy over the state subsidization of athletics in the USSR and other Communist countries, the cold truth was that if gymnastics were not included, the Soviets would have had no reason to boast. More medals were awarded in gymnastics than any Olympic sport outside track and field, and the Soviets grabbed twenty-six, including ten gold medals, to a goose egg for the Americans. Without gymnastics, the U.S. could have claimed bragging rights to the overall medal count. Even though the men’s and women’s teams performed better in Rome than they had in previous Games, the shutout during the heat of the cold war represented a psychological bottoming out for U.S. gymnastic teams, who from that point began a long, slow rise toward the highest rungs, highlighted by Mary Lou Retton’s all-around championship at Los Angeles in 1984 and a team gold medal in Atlanta in 1996.
But if Rome marked a motivational turning point for American gymnastics, there was also a deeper context. The concern that Brundage expressed during his speech at the American Club of Rome about the “soft life” in the United States, while easily mocked, had enough truth in it—and enough cold war ramifications—that the federal government soon became more invested in the Olympics and more involved in the physical fitness of the general population. Before the Olympics, the Eisenhower administration argued that it was not necessary to keep pace with the Soviets in ancillary interests such as sports. Science, space, mathematics, languages, military, yes, but not athletics. But immediately after the Olympics, the President’s Committee on Information Activities Abroad was instructed to look further into the subject and reached the conclusion that “some Soviet sporting victories have had certain propaganda benefits” that needed to be counteracted. Although Eisenhower had created a national committee on physical fitness as early as 1956, it was Ike’s successor, President Kennedy, who within six months after the Rome Olympics turned physical fitness into his personal crusade, naming Charles (Bud) Wilkinson, the former great football coach at the University of Oklahoma, a special consultant to the president and instructing his cabinet to “make it clearly understood that the promotion of sports participation and physical fitness is a basic and continuing policy of the United States.”
Even before taking office, as president-elect, Kennedy wrote an article for the December 26, 1960, issue of Sports Illustrated that borrowed from Brundage in its message and title—“The Soft American.” Kennedy began with an Olympian theme, reciting the history and mythology of the Games of ancient Greece 2,500 years ago. “The knowledge that the physical well-being of the citizen is an important foundation for the vigor and vitality of all the activities of the nation is as old as Western civilization itself,” he wrote. “But it is a knowledge which today, in America, we are in danger of forgetting.” Almost five years had passed since a landmark study showed that American children fared far worse in strength and flexibility tests than their European counterparts, Kennedy said, yet over the ensuing time there had been much talk but no change in the results. This “growing softness,” he added, was a threat to national security and to “America’s realization of its full potential as a nation.” Soon enough, hundreds of thousands of elementary and junior high students across America were being tested for push-ups, sit-ups, chin-ups, cone-to-cone indoor sprints, and rope climbing as gym teachers attempted to answer the softness charge first sounded by Brundage and echoed by the new president.
From a divided nation that quickly would become a greater concern for President Kennedy, the officials and athletes of Germany left Rome with appropriately divided feelings. On their way out of the city, journalists for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung conducted an exit interview with Willi Daume, president of the German Sports Union and member of the IOC. The newspaper’s sportswriters had already declared that the Germans were “the real surprise” of the Rome Games. They asked Daume whether he agreed, and whether he expected to see a combined German team again in Tokyo in 1964. “Our athletes were great winners, and when they had to be, great losers too,” he said. “People spoke about a so-called third power. Well, Germany as a third power after Russia and the U.S. won’t be a popular notion. But for us it is still a reason for joy to be the third power in terms of sports performance.”
His answer then turned political. What pleased him most, Daume said, was that a majority of what he called the “classical Olympic medals” were won “by athletes whose home countries do not see the Olympic victory as a state act and whose victory is not the result of state breeding.” Without defining what he meant by classical medals (presumably, it excluded gymnastics), he went on to claim that East German athletes would have been less successful had they not interacted in Rome with their freedom-loving western teammates. “So the relationship between team members was good on a sports companions’ level, often even very warm. The joint successes contributed to this, naturally. The political bondage of the other side was quickly overcome by human contact. And I think that the East German athletes also felt that their good performances were not achieved due to the training according to Eastern principles but also because they were carried by the German mutuality and commonality in Rome.” But unlike Brundage, who claimed a larger symbolism for a German team that transcended politics, Daume said it was nothing more than a fleeting merger for sports and should not be interpreted further. (That sentiment seemed to be shared by the political leaders of West Germany, including Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Interior Minister Gerhard Schroder, who in their congratulatory telegrams made no mention of the unified nature of the German team.)
“As the overall German team was closely watched, and looked at in astonishment, especially in international circles, the term of the ‘victory of sports over politics’ came up again. This is nonsense,” Daume said. “Sports cannot gain victories over politics just as arts cannot defeat sciences. We are happy that the mission, which wasn’t easy, could be accomplished. And in both parts of our home country, people will be happy about that, too—but that’s all. And I am not able to say how such a complex task will be solved in 1964.” Four years was a long time, Daume said, full of political uncertainties.
THE SEPARATION of the combined team was a physical reality the day after the Olympics ended. While athletes from the West flew back to Bonn and Frankfurt or traveled on to other cities on the track circuit, Ingrid Kraemer and her teammates from East Germany spent an extra day in Italy, visiting Naples, before flying back to East Berlin on Tuesday. They arrived in four chartered Lufthansa jets at Schoenefeld airfield in the early afternoon of September 13 and were led through the Soviet zone in an elaborate parade, weaving past Adlergestell to the Karlshorter Landstrasse, past Stalinallee and Lenin-allee and Marx-Engelsplatz to the Haus der Ministerien. It was then, as Kraemer rode through the city in an open convertible, that she realized that her two gold medals in Rome had transformed her into a state hero. “There were people everywhere, cheering for me,” she recalled later. “This proved the enthusiasm which people felt about my performance. And I was very proud then.” Government posters with her picture on them were everywhere: “Mit Ingrid Kraemers Siegeswillen koennen wir den Plan erfullen.” With Ingrid K
raemer’s will for victory, we can fulfill the plan.
After her return, Kraemer was in constant demand for official functions and factory visits throughout the GDR. She never felt relaxed at the banquets but enjoyed the visits with workers, where she took pains to explain her “strong feelings of gratefulness” for the way the socialist state organized her training and made it so that she and her family did not have financial concerns. Over the months and years to come, she would look back on Rome with wistfulness as the world changed around her. The Berlin border closing during the Olympics had gone largely unnoticed by German athletes in Rome, but months later it took on an unavoidable physical reality when the Berlin Wall went up. Kraemer called the construction of the wall “a huge surprise…It was very cruel for many, especially the finality of it. We were all shocked, as nothing had hinted to its erection before it happened.” The wall, and the cold war tensions that followed, made a sham of Avery Brundage’s insistence that the Germans bring another unified team to the Olympics in 1964. West German sports officials refused to have anything to do with their East German counterparts after the wall went up, and fielded a combined team in Tokyo in name only, barely able to “maintain the facade of being unified,” in the words of historian Heather L. Dichter.
There were no scenes at the Tokyo Games comparable to the day in Rome when East German official Manfred Ewald brought flowers to a West German woman swimmer who had won a silver medal. In fact, Olympic photographers in Tokyo could not even lure athletes from East and West to pose shaking hands.
If Brundage, busting with pride as the Germans marched into Rome’s Stadio Olimpico for the 1960 Opening Ceremony, thought the combined team he saw below him was a triumph of sports over politics, a bold manifestation of his Olympic Movement, events later showed that he had been deceived by what was merely a transitional opportunity in a world where sports and politics were becoming inseparable. By 1968 any pretense of one German team would end altogether; East Germany was on its own at Mexico City, beginning a two-decade period when it developed a national policy of winning by strengthening the human body with pharmaceuticals.
In the aftermath of Rome, Ingrid Kraemer had expressed shock at the role of drugs in the death of Danish cyclist Knud Enemark Jensen. “It seemed unbelievable to us that athletes would take that stuff which could apparently even be fatal,” she said later. “The reaction to the death of the Dane was that we all assured ourselves that we would never take such things.” But not for long. It was in the run-up to Tokyo that Kraemer noticed a marked change in her teammates. Her trainers said that muscle-building drugs would be counterproductive for divers, but not for other athletes. “We divers wondered about our fellow swimming athletes,” she said. “The women suddenly got deeper voices and broader shoulders. Their bodies changed.”
The mastermind of the East German athletic drug culture was none other than Manfred Ewald, who had led the Eastern delegation in Rome as deputy chief of mission of the combined German team. Upon his return from the 1960 Olympics, Ewald emerged as the most powerful figure at the nexus of sports and politics in East Germany as head of the GDR’s sports ministry and member of the State Central Committee. In partnership with Manfred Hoeppner, his medical director, he began a program of strengthening East German athletes by putting them on a daily regimen of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. It was a massive effort, involving as many as ten thousand athletes over two decades, but there was a special concentration on young female swimmers. Many of them were started on hormone-altering drugs at the early ages of eleven and thirteen, being fed as many as thirty pills a day. In the great majority of cases, the girls were not told what they were taking and certainly were not informed of the adverse health effects. Most of them were told they were being given vitamins. According to East German records, the Stasi state police used another euphemism for the drugs: they were called “supporting means.”
Ingrid Kraemer started noticing the deeper voices and broader shoulders of her teammates by 1964, but it took another decade before the full effect of the East German doping program became apparent to the world. At the 1972 Olympics in Munich, the East Germans for the first time accumulated more gold medals than the West Germans, despite a much smaller population. By the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, East German women swimmers were so dominant that they won eleven of thirteen possible gold medals. Despite the Olympic drug-testing procedures that began in 1968 and intensified in the 1970s, and despite the obvious physical changes in the East German women, it could not be proven that they had cheated. Ewald and Hoeppner had set up pharmaceutical labs that concentrated on finding ways to avoid detection.
It was not until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the two Germanys were reunified, and investigators could examine the meticulous records kept by East German officials that the full measure of the drug program was revealed. By then, many of the girls who had been drugged were adult females suffering various adverse consequences. Some had ovarian cysts, others liver dysfunction; some had babies born blind or with clubfeet. One woman, Heidi Krieger, a shot-putter who had been fed testosterone pills since she was sixteen, felt her body and sensibility become so much like a man’s that she underwent a sex-change operation. While the scientific effects of steroids were disputed then, as they would be thereafter, Ewald and Hoeppner were eventually taken to court on criminal charges for their abuse of hundreds of young women. During the testimony, one of the East German doctors, Ulrich Suender, stated the obvious, that the drugs were administered for a political purpose because “sport had a political function in the struggle between systems.” To the dismay of many of his victims, Ewald, though found guilty in July 2000, received a light sentence, twenty-two months probation. He died two years later.
The reunification of Germany was not a fortuitous occasion for Ingrid Kraemer. Just as she was shocked by the erection of the Wall, she was also shocked by what happened to her after its fall. She felt that the West became obsessed with demonizing the sports system of the GDR, which she believed had strong benefits as well as obvious faults. She had liked the fact that in East Germany anyone who was talented was given opportunities regardless of their financial situation. It was, she said, based on her own experience, “a wonderful system in finding the most talented children, boosting and supporting them.” When the Wall fell, she was working as a diving trainer, but she immediately lost her job, as did all but one of seventeen trainers in the East, she said. Without the same level of state support, the money was not there to sustain them. Some went to foreign countries and established successful teams abroad. Kraemer stayed in Dresden. She was forty-seven, depressed, and angry. Eventually she found a job as a teller in a bank.
A FLEET of Tupolev Tu-104s carried the Soviet Olympic team back to Moscow. Long jumper Igor Ter-Ovanesyan, weight lifter Yuri Vlasov, and their teammates reached Sheremetyevo Airport late on the evening of September 14. Nikita Khrushchev was still aboard the Baltika sailing across the Atlantic, not to arrive in New York Harbor for another five days, but the homecoming of the Olympic champions temporarily overshadowed the Soviet premier’s historic voyage to the United Nations. Hundreds of people filled the arrival lounge as the athletes deplaned. Vera Krepkina, who was defeated by Wilma Rudolph in the 100-meter dash but won a gold medal in the women’s long jump, spoke first for her teammates. “We are stepping on Moscow soil again—that is my first joy. My second joy is the victory over the American track-and-field team. And my third joy is that I got the gold medal.”
The next day a public reception was held for the Soviet team at Lenin Stadium. Two years earlier, the huge stadium had hosted the first dual track meet between the USSR and the U.S., but it had taken a bit of manipulation of the scoring system for the Soviets to claim victory. This time, coming back from Rome, there was no doubt. “Here they are coming out,” wrote a columnist for Pravda, describing the scene as though he were announcing it live. “Boris Shakhlin is at the head of the group, carrying the flag, the national red flag. [Shakhli
n starred for the men’s gymnastics team, winning a remarkable four gold medals for individual all-around, vault, parallel bars, and pommel horse.] The team of athletes is marching around the stadium, and in the center of the soccer field—the grass center—are delegations of gymnastic cheerleaders performing in honor of the athletes. [A smattering of Brundage’s famous eight hundred thousand Soviet gymnasts, no doubt.] The athletes are lining up in front of the podium, where they are greeted by the secretary of the Central Committee of Komsomol [the youth brigade of the Communist Party]. Others who give speeches include the famous seamstress Serafima Kotova, secretary of the Moscow Communist Party, and the poet Lev Oshanin. Yuri Vlasov also gives a speech. He thanks the central committee for its constant care and emphasis on physical education. He reassures everyone that the Soviet athletes and the twenty-five million members of sports organizations and clubs will continue to work hard to represent their country in the future.”
Rome 1960 Page 40
