Athletics: Under the microscope

Investigation: German federation may remove track benchmarks of the old East regime as a drug-tainted past catches up with the nation

Their winning time, 42.20sec, survives today as a record in the unified Germany, where the national record book lists the best club performance in relay events alongside the best by national teams. Not that Geipel takes any pride in the record's longevity. Quite the opposite.

"It is a poisoned record, a false benchmark," Frau Geipel told The Independent on Sunday yesterday. It is one of 22 questionable marks set by athletes from the DDR regime that the German athletics federation, the Deutscher Leichtathletik-Verband, are considering striking from the record book of the unified country.

Last week the DLV appointed a "fact-finding commission" to determine whether proof could be found of doping having directly influenced any national record performance. Although the governing body diplomatically stressed that all records were to be examined - those achieved by athletes in the West and in the East - it is clear that the primary focus is on the standards set by the representatives of the DDR.

The investigation was prompted by a letter Geipel wrote to the DLV on 28 July, asking for her name - or that of Ines Schmitt, as she was known in her days as a sprinter and long jumper - to be removed from the record book. The reason, she stated, was the systematic doping administered by the Staats-sicherheitsdienst (the ruthless East German secret police force more popularly known as the Stasi) not so much to oil as turbo-charge the DDR's national track- and-field machine.

Now 45 and living in Berlin, Geipel is forging a burgeoning career as a bold, campaigning authoress in the wider Germany. Last year she caused a stir with the publication of Für Heute Reicht's - Amok in Erfurt ("That's enough for today - massacre in Erfurt"), a controversial exploration of Germany's "Columbine" case, the high-school tragedy in 2002, in which the student Robert Steinhauser killed 15 people before turning his gun on himself.

In her time as an athlete, Geipel spent six years as a member of the DDR national squad. She was based at a training centre in Jena, where the Jenapharm pharmaceutical company manufactured their own range of anabolic steroids, to be fed - in calculated doses - to the country's running, jumping and throwing élite. Coaches were instructed to tell athletes that the blue pills they were asked to ingest were simply vitamins. They were, in fact, Oral-Turinabol, Jenapharm's trademark anabolic steroid.

"I was completely naïve," Geipel reflected. "There was never any specification about the substances that I was given. When I was in the DDR system I couldn't take any responsibility for myself or for my body. The system was a conspiracy. The athletes weren't told anything about what was happening.

"The DDR's programme of forced doping is a matter of public fact now, and for that reason I want the right to my own responsibility. The record that I was involved in must be removed. I want young athletes coming into the sport to have a fair chance. They cannot match these records because they were set by athletes on drugs."

Four of the old East German records continue to be unmatched on a global scale. Marita Koch's 400m time, 47.60sec, has been untouchable in the world record books for 20 years, since the World Cup meeting in Canberra in October 1985. Now 48 and running a sports shop in Rostock, Koch refuses to acknowledge any taint. "At the World Championships in Helsinki in 1983 I had to go to dope testing three times and always I was clean," she said earlier this month. "The same applies to my career overall. I was a mature and responsible athlete."

In an extensive examination of Stasi files for their revelatory 1991 book, Doping-Dokumente, Brigitte Berendonk and Werner Franke uncovered a list of annual dosages of Oral-Turinabol administered to Koch. They also unearthed a letter from Koch to Jenapharm, complaining that Wöckel was given stronger doses of steroids because her uncle was president of the pharmaceutical company.

Like Koch, Wöckel is not as keen as Geipel to go on the record. "It was such a long time ago," she said. "I've got other tasks now." She is employed as director of youth by the Deutcher Leichtathletik-Verband.

As a quadruple Olympic champion, a winner in the 200m and the 4 x 100m relay at the Games of 1976 and 1980, Wöckel has a golden reputation to lose by openly confronting the tainted past of the DDR. Geipel was selected for the Olympic squad of 1984 but never made the trip because of the East German boycott of the Los Angeles Games. She publicly exorcised her doping demons - and those of the DDR - in the book Verlorene Spiele ("Lost Games") in 2001.

She has also championed the cause of the East German athletes who have been physically damaged by the doping system - such as the former Heidi Krieger, who was fed such massive doses of hormones that she underwent a sex-change operation. Now living as Andreas Krieger, the European women's shot-put champion of 1986 is one of 160 sportsmen and women fighting a case for compensation against Jenapharm.

Geipel herself has kept out of the courts. "I don't want to be a victim my entire life," she said. "I want the act of giving back the record to be the line drawn under my sports career. I want to do get on with my life."

TROUBLED TIMES: The marks set to go?

MEN'S 400m
44.33sec, Thomas Schönlebe, World Championships, Rome 1987.

The bespectacled Schönlebe was an unlikely winner of the 400m world title in the Stadio Olimpico. His time stands as a European record, ahead of a queue of four Britons: Iwan Thomas (44.36), Roger Black (44.37), Mark Richardson (44.37) and David Grindley (44.47).

WOMEN'S 400m
47.60sec, Marita Koch, World Cup, Canberra 1985.

Koch's time has stood unchallenged as a world record since the 1985 World Cup. No athlete has managed to get within 1.25sec of it in the present millennium.

WOMEN'S 4 x 100m RELAY
41.37sec, East German national team - Silke Gladisch, Sabine Rieger, Ingrid Auerswald, Marlies Göhr - Canberra 1985.

Another world record that has stood since the 1985 World Cup, achieved with help of Ines Geipel's club colleagues: Auerswald, an Olympic 100m bronze medallist, and Göhr, a world record holder and world champion at 100m. The German club record set in 1984 by Geipel and the Jena team, 42.20sec, also survives as a world best time by a club quartet, though Geipel wants it removed.

WOMEN'S LONG JUMP
7.48m, Heike Drechsler, Neubrandenburg, 1988.

The multi-talented Drechsler is also co-holder of the German and European 200m records with Marita Koch (both 21.71sec). Stasi files record her reporting on the behaviour of team-mates, under the code-name Springen (Jump). They also list drug doses administered to her. When Drechsler described a passage in a book stating that she had been fed steroids as "a lie", she was successfully sued by the author; she was ordered to pay £7,500 and to issue a public apology. In August she was honoured with a Fair Play Award by the International Association of Athletics Federations.