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

And Jens-Peter Herold, the bronze medallist at Soul, ran a 3:49.22 mile in 1988, only some three seconds slower than then current WR.

A sports obsessed country of 16-17 million people certainly had a pool of athletes to produce more-or-less doping fueled good mid- and long-distance runners.

Everything I’ve come across is behind a paywall.

Start here, maybe you can find a pdf. My understanding is that code numbers were used and Cierpinski’s number was definitely there.

Cierpinski is not in Doping Dokumente.

Is there a summary of what's in that book? I'm not going to pay $45 unless I know it's going to have what I'm looking for.

Not his name, but his number, comrade

The copies of the material are located at the University of Texas, donated mostly by Franke & Ungerleider:

Late Steven Ungerleider wrote a book on this material, and another affiliate of the institution, Thomas Hunt, who wrote the study guide to the material, coauthored a paper based (partly) on this material.

Two key points:

- There is nothing about blood doping in Ungerleider's book.

- In the article by Hunt et al, there is a reference to Waldemar Cierpinski dropping out of the steroid program due to medical issues around 1975. At least Hunt didn't find anything in the files contradicting this.

"Donated by Franke and Berendonk*" of course.

Every sane person would be interested to see any evidence about the GDR blood doping program or solid material about "62" aka Cierpinski using steroids after 1975. Maybe Werner Franke found a list with years and doses like in the case of Koch, Dreschler et al. Presuming such material exists.

It is up to the neutral LRC readers to decide if the thumbs down folks in neutral posts like these are either "you are against my team!"- cry babies or people, who have a weird obsession in wanting to have the past medals tainted.

@HRE - there have been numerous summaries - is an example. Unless I’m misunderstanding you, you seem to be moving the bar around a bit. If you simply so a google search of Werner Franke and Waldemar Cierpinski, you will find numerous summaries.

latimes.com

Question Is, Should Drug-Tainted Records Stand?

https://www.latimes.com/staff/lisa-dillman

Track: As Jones challenges 300-meter time, confusion again arises over marks set by East Germans.

Link:www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-a...

@Aragon - respectfully, you seem to be responding to arguments that are primarily occurring in your head. The original question was “Did Waldemar Cierpinski cheat?” The answer seems to be a pretty resounding yes. Whether or not he stopped in 1975, he still obtained the benefit of illicit substances. Actually, this scenario would be more damning to me than if he was unknowingly doped through 1976, or 80, or throughout his career. More likely, his regimen was changed. I find it hard to believe that an 8:32 steepler and 13:36 5K guy was capable of standing up the GDR sports machine by himself. I think you pretty much shut up and do what you’re told.

I'm not sure if I'm moving a bar or not.I have done searches for Franke and Cierpinski and never found that actual Stassi list. I probably could have phrased my question about the book more clearly and asked if there is an actual copy of the Stassi list in it? If there is I might well order it but won't if not.

His number is not in my edition.

The original question wasn't "Did Waldemar Cierpinski cheat?" but instead "Did Waldemar Cierpinski cheat to win the Gold Medal in the 1976 and 1980 Olympic Marathons?", a more exact question.

It is one question if Cierpinski benefited (potentially) from steroids at the time he was using them or whether Cierpinski was more generally a cheat and dishonest when using steroids for a brief period of time apparently having no objections from ethical viewpoint against steroids.

It is totally another question whether he used steroids in 1976 or 1980 or whether he benefited from his earlier use from 1974 or 1975 later in his career. If his treatment ended several months and up to a year before the 1976 OG, he likely got no boost, because the boost male endurance runners get from steroids is modest, uncertain and debatable to begin with. Therefore any residual benefit he had still in 1976 from his earlier treatment would be essentially gone.

Dr. Thomas Hunt coauthored the Cierpinski article in 2011, some thirteen years after Werner Franke made his records relating to Cierpinski available to Frank Shorter. Apparently Hunt saw nothing in Franke's comments nor in the records in the vaults of his University contradicting the claim that Cierpinski used steroids only for a brief time ~1975.

The available record is "more likely" than any armchair speculation, and if you can prove Cierpinski used steroids in 1976 or 1980, I'll change my opinion.

Well he did cheat in 1975 (minimum), so he is a cheater. Whether or not his doping was essential for him to win Gold in '76, is an academic question with no sure answer.

But yes - I would love to see which drugs and methods were used in the DDR. Hard to imagine they used only steroids and amphetamines.

@HRE: Stasi (for Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS)), not Stassi.

If you browse through the detailed study guide on the Franke & Berendonk file, you will notice the total absence of interest in male endurance running even when it is impossible to gather from the title "reports" what are in these files. Even the famed report on improvements after steroid administration makes no reference to male runners.

We do know the details of the GDR program in a greater detail than many other programs. It just looks as if there was barely any interest in male endurance runners, and how to improve their performance except random references to what is the optimal steroid dosage (no mention of what performance boost they had) and hypoxic training.

Summa summarum: there isn't possibly much more to see despite how "hard to imagine" it is.

I’m not sure what exactly you’re trying to accomplish here. It’s almost like a lawyer attempting to convince a jury of reasonable doubt. But there’s no tribunal here, just a handful of people who care about the sport in a way that few people do.

The reason to read the book by Beredonk (actually mostly written by Franke) is to get information on the actual files that contain the data. As HRE and you seem to indicate, they do not appear to be readily available digitally. The only place you’d likely find them in is a special collections section of a library or a specialized repository.

Beredonk’s book is mostly focused on events that were relevant to her as a discus thrower. So the fact that her book (once again, largely authored by Franke) does not contain information about male endurance athletes is not surprising.

Make of it what you will, but I am satisfied that Cierpinski was part of the GDR doping machine, but I don’t really bear him ill will because I don’t know the degree to which he could give informed consent to it.

Even as a gold medalist, I don’t believe there’s any chance he would be able to go his own way on this, let alone before 1976. I know too many people who lived in the GDR and have told me what their lives were like. Some of them were pretty prominent academics and they describe a very prescribed life.

What I am trying to accomplish is to give some sort of an answer to the title of this thread. Hope you are for this goal too.

My far from settled answer that Cierpinski likely didn't cheat to win in 1976 or 1980 is based on 1) available material about Waldemar Cierpinski and about the GDR doping program, 2) on what academics "in-the-know" have concluded about the archival material relating to both and 3) on how big of a benefit steroids can give to male endurance athletes meaning in this context that less there is to gain, less obsession GDR had to force male endurance runners to take then.

If I were trying to "convince a jury", why would I bring up any material showing that steroids can benefit endurance athletes? I brought up the Soviet studies totally voluntarily. Unlike many academic reviewers, I also do think steroids tend to benefit even male endurance endurance athletes.

Fair enough. But to say ‘steroids benefit XYZ athlete(s)’ is hardly controversial. There isn’t a type of training in our sport that someone couldn’t be helped with corticosteroids, anabolic agents, or even drugs like SARMS.

What you said is a little bit like ‘drugs are helpful in fighting disease.’ Ok, then what drugs, what disease, etc?

It should've been self-explanatory from the context (1970s) and from the colloquial use of the terms that "steroids" referred to were anabolic-androgenic steroids (ie. AAS).

To say that anabolic steroids benefit athletes isn't controversial. Maybe the position is inaccurate, but also it isn't controversial to say that they do not benefit endurance athletes, because there is next-to-no peer reviewed data to support this, quite to the contrary, most controlled experiments haven't shown much of a benefit.

Hartgens and Kuipers, 2004 (review):
"Although AAS administration may affect erythropoiesis and blood haemoglobin concentrations, no effect on endurance performance was observed. Little data about the effects of AAS on metabolic responses during exercise training and recovery are available and, therefore, do not allow firm conclusions."

There is at least one later experiment from 2006 with famed anti-doping specialist Y.O. Schumacher as one of the authors:
"In the present study, no effect of multiple oral doses of AAS on endurance performance or bioserum recovery markers was found."

Some data to show a performance boost can be extrapolated from murkier studies or papers that don't address the performance at all and from anecdotes of which not all are positive.

I missed it out completely, but your reference has also the following paragraphs, which pretty much solves the riddle whether there is a detailed annual Cierpinski "doping calendar" with dosages (Franke & Berendonk quote many of these in their book, e.g. Koch, Grabbe, Dreschler) or a single vague reference to Cierpinski being in the program:

"In 1994, federal prosecutors publicly disclosed copies of Stasi archives, which had been secured in the Ministry of State Security Headquarters in Leipzig. The files include the State Theme Plan 14.25 and names of high-ranking Stasi Generals, as well as a document that identified a Stasi collaborator with the code name “Willi,” who was actually Waldemar Cierpinski.
Dr. Franke was astonished with the mountain of evidence in front of him, including a file dated June 24, 1974, that listed Waldemar Cierpinski as athlete #62. “This file is [one] that should choke the IOC with embarrassment. This is a chronicle of phony champions hoisted on the rostrum of world fame by the Communist drug-lords of the fallen state of East Germany,” Franke states in a UK Mail newspaper article by Malcolm Folley, published in 1998."

Ergo the Hunt timeline is totally consistent -- the much touted evidence spread mainly by Frank Shorter is evidence of Cierpinski being in the program in 1974 in the files from that year. If he dropped out a year two later is another matter, but the timeline is totally consistent in Thomas Hunt being right about the matter.

To many of us who grew up in the 1970's and were part of the "running boom" that started after Frank Shorter's gold medal in the '72 Munich Oly Marathon he was our hero. That an upstart from the GDR "won" the 1976 Montreal Oly Marathon is abhorrent. We don't want to believe it or accept it. Shorter WON his gold. Don Kardong should have a bronze medal for his collection. Do the right thing, IOC and strip Cierpinski of his 1976 gold medal.