Documents about East Germany's doping at the 1976 Montreal Olympics found.

"After injecting athletes with performance-boosting drugs at the Montreal Olympics, East German officials dumped the leftover serum and syringes in the St. Lawrence River, newly uncovered documents indicate.

East Germany startled the world at the 1976 Games by capturing 40 gold medals, second only to the powerhouse Soviet Union.


A chance discovery in the Berlin archives of the notorious Stasi, the East German secret police, led University of Waterloo history professor Gary Bruce to a 95-page file on the spy service's operations at the Montreal Games.

A Stasi officer's final report on the Games contains an apparently none-too-subtle reference to the drug program under the subheading Destruction of the Rest of the Special Medicine, noting: "About 10 suitcases of medical packaging, needles, tubular instruments, etc. were sunk in the St. Lawrence River."


Bruce said eight of the report's nine pages were missing -- likely destroyed in a massive Stasi purge of highly sensitive files at the end of the Cold War. But he has no doubts about the memo's subject matter.


The documents make it clear that Stasi chief Erich Mielke saw the Games as a means to improve East Germany's standing in the world by ensuring all went well on the athletic field and that nothing went wrong away from it.

He put the fabled Markus Wolf, head of the Stasi's foreign espionage wing, in charge of Operation Finale, a tightly controlled effort to monitor East German athletes in the years leading up to the Games as well as during the 16-day sporting festival.


Many athletes had no idea the little blue pills they took contained anabolic steroids. Several later suffered serious health effects including cancer, cysts and liver problems, and female athletes delivered babies with birth defects."

No comments:

Post a Comment