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

Don't hold your breath waiting for any reasonable answer. In eyes of many, this thread is only about whose "team" one is. Illustrative that this reasonable and neutral request by me didn't elicit any response nor facts but only some you are not in our team, we don't care about facts :'( :'( - style thumbs down:

"I'd be interested to know what is the basis for Your allegations about Waldemar Cierpinski having blood doped in 1976 and 1980?
Would appreciate a lot if You could provide a source about him or about the existence of the GDR blood doping program."

I don't know how anyone would not be interested in facts about this issue.

From Frank Shorter's My Marathon: Reflections on a Gold Medal Life

"I couldn't have done it without those darn 'roids" Leonard Hilton said. Pre and I looked at each other and shrugged.

Leonard Hilton may have needed his anabolics...

An interesting anecdote, but does the full paragraph put that incident to have taken place in 1968 or in 1974?

1972 OT

Or he might have been joking. But thanks for an answer.

It seems that we've reached a time when some people are sort of hostile towards facts because the facts contradict what they believe. I long ago decided that the "Is X doping" discussions are usually really about much you like or dislike X.

Yes, three cohorts, and they even have VO2max numbers for one cohort (Table 2, VO2max increase from 3249 to 3660 ml/min after 30 days with a total of 4x 50 mg retabolil).

They also mention an increase in Hb concentration of 13% after 450 mg nerobol in 30 days.

Data are from 1972 or even earlier though.

Well you only got three down votes, not to worry. I voted up.

However I think you were wrong: HRE did get a reasonable answer. Actually two.

I want to jump into the discussion of Cierpinski, because I have a fascination with all the doping and culture of communist east Germany, and have watched absolutely everything I can get my hands on. (Most of which is in German.)

First, the consensus of people who were raised in the system of the sports schools and training groups of east germany — everyone‘s story is slightly different, but — most athletes talk about being given pills in a pill cup, and sure, some of them probably were vitamins, but the athletes weren‘t allowed informed consent. Just pills, shoved in their hand, or placed on their tray at breakfast, without a lot of questioning allowed. There is no doubt in my mind that cierpinski had to swallow a pile of pills in the morning, just like everyone, and also that to this day, he probably doesn‘t know precisely what he took and how that impacted his performance.

I‘ve heard athletes say in interviews that the first time they were given pills, they wanted to know what they were taking, and the first line they were told was, Take the pills, they‘re good for you. And if the athlete pressed further, they were often told that they were taking vitamins to help their bones stay strong, and to recover from hard workouts. When an athlete crossed the line into protocols that were not considered legal, I don‘t believe they were asked first if they wanted to cheat. They trained the way their trainers dictated, end of story.

In a sport like distance running, it is hard to know how much cierpinski would have been aware of. I‘ve watched dozens of interviews with athletes who say they were absolutely convinced that they weren‘t doped, and then later, they start to piece things together, that they WERE doped.

In sports like swimming or shot put or running, the athletes sometimes say that it became really obvious to them that they were having unnatural gains in performance and unnatural changes in their body. But in running, I don‘t know what cierpinski might have known then, and I don‘t know what cierpinski knows now.

My understanding of the training dorms and trainings groups, is that each state in east germany had one dorm where their athletes lived and trained and got treatments. So, when i picture cierpinski, I picture that in his dorm, there were maybe the speed skaters, and maybe also a bunch of swimmers, and maybe six other sports — who knows. But, each state had its groups of doctors, its group of trainers, and cierpinski lived and trained in the sports complex of the state he was from. (I forget which state he was from).

In any event, if you picture cierpinski training practically solo, I think that misses the fact that each state had an absurdly well-developed and well-funded infrastructure for sports. For example, at some point in East German sports, they built an underground facility to simulate training at altitude, where they could regulate how much oxygen was in their air.

From what all the former athletes of east germany say, they also weren‘t given any choice when the doctors wanted to stick needles in them or hook them up to machines. So, if the doctors said they needed to take a muscle biopsy, the needle went into the athlete’s thigh, and that was that. If an athlete was hooked up to a machine that ran their blood under infrared light, and then back into their body, that was also done without discussion or consent. The doctors and scientists did stuff to athletes that had not been tested on humans, or pre-tested on animals.

So, yes, I believe cierpinski as well, was given treatments and supplements without even the slightest hint of informed consent. I would suspect he did get anabolic steroids in some amount, over time, in somewhat the correct doses for his sport, because the (east) germans had some of their best minds trying to hone in on how to dope successfully. But beyond anabolics, blood doping was in their arsenal, and it has been fairly well established that they were willing to use outright stimulants to get their athletes to handle a training load that they couldn‘t have handled without stimulants.

As to how east germany was able to produce a marathon gold without really any prior success in distance running: I‘ve seen a super creepy video documenting how amateur distance runners were taken as guinea pigs for the protocols that were eventually used on cierpinski. Like, the amateur runners were experimented on — gosh, I have to find that video — and the after-effects weren‘t necessarily pretty, so the amateur athletes are kinda under the impression that bad crap was done to them, to get the formula down for cierpinski.

But, yes, I think Shorter is ABSOLUTELY right to believe that Cierpinski had unfair advantages due to a highly refined state sporsored sports program.

Many athletes who were successful under the East German system cling to the idea that they won their medals fair and square — I guess they feel they worked damn hard and paid a really high price, and don‘t want their accomplishments to be disregarded.

But it‘s 100% clear at this point that they were not on a level playing field with any clean athlete.

Yeah, but only partly wrong about HRE, because the answer had nothing to do about steroid use in the 1960s. Still waiting for your go-to-guy GDR blood doping specialist Jeff to reveal his sources about Cierpinski.

About the Soviet paper (I brought up voluntarily). Yeah, the cohorts had a boost in Vo2Max. Too bad that the material is somewhat fragmentary and the guys were far-far from elite level athletes. There is a tendency for performance boost, but similar studies in the west with endurance athletes later gave more ambiguous results.

I wonder if he meant anabolic steroids or corticosteroids.

Yeah, I never saw the documentary, but Hajo Seppelt had one a few years ago about the GDR recreational runners treated with steroids in the mid-1970s. One Hans Albrecht Kühne recalled some serious bodily injuries and was compensated for these later.

Interestingly it was under the supervision of Dr. Hermann Bühl, who later claimed that Waldemar Cierpinski left the steroid program around 1975 because of he felt the 'roids had negative effect on health.

One should question how big of an effect the alleged sophisticated steroid program even had for those who took part in it. Even with sharp focus on sport to boost their public image, GDR with its population of some 16-17 million, didn't produce dozens and dozens of elite level endurance runners going sub 13:30 or sub 28:00, but it was mainly Baumgartl and Cierpinski with a few other fairly good ones. In many years, they didn't have a single athlete in the top 30 or 50 in some distances.

I remember Eckhard Lesse winning the silver medal in the '74 European Championship, doing well at Fukuoka one year and having a best of 2:12:03. I thought he was a medal threat for Montreal but am pretty sure he wasn't there. Aside from Lesse and Cierpinski I can't recall any real successful East German long distance runners and the only really good mid distance males I can recall are Manfred Mutochowski and Jurgen May, the latter eventually defecting to and running for West Germany. Another reason I'd love to see that Stassi list is to see May, Lesse, etc., are on it.

Hansjörg Kunze and Werner Schildhauer EC and WC medal level runners with very good PBs, and there were some 3.35-3.40ish 1500m and 1.45-ish 800m runners, but there were years, when their best athletes had difficulty to run sub 13.30 (5k) or even sub-28.30 (10k).

Yeah, I agree about Munich basketball in 1972, that was pretty egregious. I don’t want to turn this into ‘we good/they bad’ though. There’s a lot of corruption in international sporting and plenty of blame for the US.

The states behind the iron curtain were especially egregious though

@HRE - unless you can read German, you will not see his name in a context that will convince you.

Werner Franke wrote a book about it with his wife who was a former thrower. He is widely regarded as a credible source, so I have accepted his take. IIRC, the implication was that many of the subjects had no idea that they were being doped, so the monstrous unfairness of it all just is a gift that keeps giving. There were numerous documentaries about this in the mid 90s.

That’s why I believe anyone who has participated in doping should fully come clean because some of these people had it done against their will and paid a steep price. The old “I smoked but didn’t inhale” defense shouldn’t fly or the ‘I tried it but didn’t finish the bottle’ canard.

From a discussion that I had with Shorter, Hilton was using methandienone, an anabolic steroid.

Straub also beat Ovett in the Moscow 1500.

I actually can read a bit of German. It's an effort but I can do it. Is there a link? It's not so much a matter of being convinced or not about Cierpinski as it is about finding out if this thing that so many people have cited as their reason for forming the opinion they have is a real thing.