Did Waldemar Cierpinski cheat to win the Gold Medal in the 1976 and 1980 Olympic Marathons?

ALL east german, iron curtain athletes were on a large cocktail of drugs as documented by various athletes and coaches under the regime.

Russian sports moving forward believes that EVERYONE is doping at the top level and that testing was a joke, hence playing lip service to WADA, thinking it was kind of a dirty trick to have the russians overly tested as a type of sports warfare move, more than any kind of ethical thing.

the east german cocktail plus epo was behind the chinese woman's program, guided by an east german coach. that cocktail was the world's best to this day. you will have women 4 minute milers on that sauce.

Because nobody provided any source about the GDR blood doping program even less so about Waldemar Cierpinski's involvement (nor even a good circumstantial case beyond "Eastern bloc countries were evil"), apparently such a program didn't exist nor did Cierpinski blood dope.

I can provide a a few sources about historians debunking the existence of the program with a few sources showing they had some interest in the issue by the mid/late 1980s.

I don't know if you have noticed it, but your arguments tend to get lost in the emotional Tourette-quality fluff that constitutes 50-80 % of your posts.

I'd actually be interested, and it would help your case, if you could state point-by-point, what you think about testosterone and performance or about the doping use patterns of Waldemar Cierpinski, and I'll give a rebuttal on each points.

Well if someone cheated with roids in 74 and 75, then of course he should have gotten a ban for some years, definitely for 76. So no gold then.

Whether or not he cheated after 76, or whether or not he would have gotten back into shape after a hypothetical 2 year ban in 76/77, is not known. But given that he stayed (naturally) in the East German system, I bet he doped between 76 and 80 also.

If the reason Cierpinski stopped doping in 1975 was because it wasn't making him faster why would he have continued doing so between '76 and '80?

HRE - I was going by Aragon's statement that "Cierpinski didn't drop out of the semi-mandatory steroid program due to ethical reasons but because of health issues", not because the drugs didn't make him faster. Was Aragon wrong?

If he was right, I suppose the system tried to optimize the doping so it wouldn't negatively affect his health.

One of the main arguments for banning some PEDs is that they carry significant risks to users' health. The system may well have tried to find other PEDs for him to use that supposedly did not impact his health negatively. But are we assuming that search was successful? If so, is it because we've found corroborating information or are we just assuming that because doping was such a part of the DDR system that everyone had to be on something even if we have no idea what it was. This is actually a big reason I'd like to see that list that so many people cite as proof that Cierpinski was doped.

And if he did in fact stop doping because it was negatively impacting his health this in itself is very interesting. Some years ago I had a chat with a woman who had been one of the top 800 runners in the DDR. I cannot recall her name. She wasn't a superstar or anything. She was quite bitter about the DDR sports establishment mostly because there was no regard for the consequences of doping to the health of doped athletes. If Cierpinski was able to stop doping because he thought his health was being compromised how he managed to stop could be an interesting story.

Likely the doctors, coaches and runners knew the evident that male endurance running wasn't remotely e.g. like female shot put, where the performance boost was like 20-30 % with the higher doses.

The expected boost in males in endurance running was and is likely barely above zero and almost impossible even to measure or to differentiate from normal y-o-y progress in performance or from intraindividual performance variance. Any negative effect on training motivation due to health issues likely negated any expected benefit that was on paper. Ergo those, who found roids beneficial, used them, and those, who didn't, didn't.

And perhaps many users found some real of imaginary boost.

There is nothing in the records on whether drugs made Cierpinski faster or not nor what Cierpinski himself thought about the benefit he saw while being treated with them. We only know that the doctor claimed that he didn't want to take them, because of unpleasant health issues.

Unlike the article on the Soviet blood doping program, which is available in English, Michael Kalinski's paper Empfehlungen zum Einsatz von anabolen Steroiden im Sport aus der ehemaligen Sowjetunion - Daten aus einem geheimen Dokument on the Soviet anabolic steroid research from the early in 1970s is available in German only, freely as a PDF file if you google the title.

As I recalled, there were a more than one cohorts which had a boost in performance and Vo2Max after steroid use, but - unfortunately - some of the data is unavailable and there is little data on the initial performance level of the subjects. Unlike with blood doping research, when N.I. Volkov had national level cohorts of runners and swimmers, there is no similar research with steroids.

One of the reasons I question stories of doped distance runners from before 1980 or so is because I wonder what they would have taken. The PEDs we always heard about were steroids and basically none of us believed steroids could help distance runners get faster because we believed they bulked you up and added weight. We believed that steroids would absolutely improve performances in the throws and quite possibly the sprints but distance events...no way.

The idea that steroids or drugs like them actually could help endurance athletes by building up muscles and speeding recovery which allows more hard sessions than would normally be possible caught on much later. It is possible that there were people who knew better and were using or prescribing steroids for distance training earlier. There were people who suspected Kuts but that was only suspicion.

If it had come out in 1976 that Cierpinski had been given steroids in 1974-75 it would be interesting to see what the reaction of distance runners would have been. I think a lot of us would have thought doing so did nothing to make him faster and wondered why.

Even as far back as the 60's ( think at least 68). Distance runners took steroids not to bulk up as per common belief at the time but they found they could recover quicker from strenuous workouts.

When one looks at the anecdotes, the somewhat prevalent use, possible mechanism(s) and the scientific research, the confluence of evidence points of towards some possible benefit. But the boost is likely so unreliable and modest that there is and was a huge overlap between athletes, who took steroids, and those, who didn't:

- There is just by a magnitude less endurance athletes, who have known to have taken steroids vs. other athletes, ergo likely the consensus view about the benefit was ambiguous at best. I don't know about any endurance runners, who admitted or otherwise we know having taken steroids in the 1960s, when they were quite readily available. IIRC, some Dutch cyclists used steroids for the 1968 Mexico City Olympics under the supervision of their team doctors.

- None of the few male endurance athletes, who used steroids, said that the benefit was enormous even if they felt some modest benefit in mood and muscle recovery. A few felt steroids had a detrimental effect.

This thread makes me think that nobody here has read Shorter's "My Marathon" biography. He reproduces what are purportedly the East German "records" in question within that book.

I haven't seen the material in the book, only Frank Shorter making references to it. It is noteworthy that Thomas Hunt, who wrote that Waldemar Cierpinski was in the 14.25 program, but ended his steroid use in c:a 1975, is employed at the University of Texas, which holds copies of the GDR files provided by Werner Frank and Brigitte Berendonk.

Dr. Hunt also wrote the research guide to the material.

Thom Hunt is a doctor!?!?

Which ones did and how do you know that? It may have happened but no one I knew who ran in that era believed steroids would be of any help. If there were some who thought otherwise and used them I'd be very interested in knowing. But just tossing out a sentence like this one is pointless.

Leonard Hilton