Sitting in a small cheaply furnished lounge of the Buch Clinic in what was once East Berlin, Dr Birgit Heukrodt looks like many former top athletes. Strikingly tall and slim with shoulder-length blond hair, her broad powerful shoulders are a visible vestige of her swimming days.
The shock comes when the 34-year-old general surgeon relates how she came through the ranks of East Germany's unparalleled sporting machine. Speaking in the baritone voice resulting from years of steroid use, she tells a classic story of socialist achievement with a macabre twist. How the youthful days of privilege and success have come back to haunt her with a legacy of health worries and emotional turmoil.
Between 1980 and 1984, as Birgit Meineke, she was the fastest freestyle swimmer in the world. Three-time world champion, six-time European champion, with a string of relay world records, she was an icon in the German Democratic Republic, one of the country's much touted "ambassadors in tracksuits."
As a member of that cherished elite she also received the best in medical and, unbeknownst to her, chemical support. Oral-Turinabol (OT), an East German-manufactured anabolic steroid, packed the power behind the tiny nation's sporting punch for over two decades. It was the mainstay of "State Plan 14.25," the secret policy directing the pharmacological development of sport nationwide. Doctors passed the little pink and blue pills on to coaches, who doled them out in daily rations of vitamins.
How Birgit came to swimming was no accident. Already in the 1960s East Germany had a system in place to stream children into its growing sports cartel. Talent scouts systematically sought out children whose physical characteristics showed promise for one sport or another.
"When I was in second grade people came to our school and announced that all children who knew how to swim should report to a certain place at a certain time," Birgit recalls. "I told my parents I wanted to go. When I got there they took one look at my parents, and I was accepted. I couldn't swim very well, but my parents are both very athletic and tall, so I met the requirements."
The children were measured and weighed and sent to training centres to learn basic swimming skills, gradually increasing the training load to daily workouts. In fourth grade she was selected to attend the local sport school, one of many such state-sponsored institutions reserved for the country's elite.
Birgit's memories of the sport school are positive. Mingling with young athletes from many different sports, she had the luxury of small classes and better nutrition than normal schoolchildren.
Soon sport took precedence over school. As not all of the children could withstand the long days and ever-escalating physical workload, the drop-out rate was high. When training camps started in seventh grade, the demands on the athletes' time and energy were enormous. Despite several years of private tutoring, Birgit needed 15 years to finish school.
Four times a year the swimmers were sent to Leipzig where they were subjected to extensive performance testing at the Research Institute for Physical Culture and Sport. "We had to swim in the flume with awful gas masks," says Birgit, referring to a top secret 3x5 metres tank in which athletes could be observed as they swam against an adjustable current. "It was terrible," she grimaces.
But despite the often extreme nature of the testing, Birgit and her team-mates never refused a single exercise. "We didn't really have any chance to," she says with a sigh. "They were things that were done and we just accepted them. I think you can only understand that when you've grown up in the GDR."
By the time she was 12, Birgit was receiving pills after workouts. "I always assumed they were vitamins," she says, noting she recognised some of them. She's not sure when the blue pills became part of the assortment. Later on she also received testosterone injections passed off as "vitamin cocktails."
Providing urine for Doping Control before major competitions was part of the routine. "We were told we could have accidentally taken something in a cold medication, and that the tests were for our own protection," she says. In reality such internal tests were the key to the system's success. Any athlete whose urine still showed traces of drugs was not allowed to travel; this way the GDR avoided having athletes test positive at international competitions.
By the time she was 15, people remarked that Birgit's voice had deepened. "I didn't notice it myself," she says. Her parents, who fully supported her career, maintain they never noticed it either even though they saw her every day.
"It was those who saw me less often that mentioned it to me," she continues. "I asked my coach about it and he told me it was from the humidity in the swimming hall and our frequent colds."
Despite other physical changes, the athletes never spoke between themselves about what was happening. "It was simply understood that we weren't to talk about it," Birgit says with a shrug. The subject was taboo.
Questions of any kind were discouraged. Birgit remembers complaining to the National Swim Team doctor, Dr Lothar Kipke, about the severe bouts of acne she was experiencing before big competitions. He smirked at her, `You girls don't get enough sex." Such comments left a lasting impression, but like everything else, Birgit kept them to herself.
After all, there were many reasons to play along with the system. As a world champion athlete Birgit was a distinguished person in East German society. She was a multiple recipient of the Order of Merit of the Fatherland, one of the highest distinctions one could have in the GDR.
"We had a lot of attention from the press," she remembers. "and we were allowed to travel, which was practically impossible for normal citizens."
There were also material advantages. At 20, Birgit was given her own apartment and a Wartburg car, something for which one usually had to wait 15 years. Special prizes of up to 15,000 East German marks were awarded for record performances, "peanuts compared to what athletes earn today," she says, "but a substantial sum in the GDR."
When Birgit retired at 20, most things returned to normal; the acne cleared up and her periods became regular. Only the voice changes were irreversible.
The wake-up call came in 1993 when a bout of jaundice revealed hepatitis C and a liver tumour the size of a tennis ball. "That was hard," she concedes. For the first time she thought seriously about doping and what consequences it may have.
Despite the well documented evidence linking such benign tumours with steroid use, Birgit minimises the connection, "It's gotten smaller," she says, adding nonchalantly that such tumours occur often in young women. "It could be brought on by the Pill," she says, "by the anabolics, or by the fact that I was subjected to a combination of the two."
"The hepatitis is actually more frightening," she continues. "One never knows how it might develop or influence the tumour. That's the big question."
Interestingly, Birgit feels no nostalgia for the glory days. "Absolutely none," she says flatly. "It has no meaning anymore because that period of my life is over. My medals are all in a drawer in the basement and if someone asks me I'll talk about it, but otherwise I never think about it."
No doubt learning that her coach, Rolf Glaeser, had knowingly kept her in the dark about the drugs was the thread that unravelled her past. Glaeser, whom she considered an "ersatz father," was convicted of bodily harm in August for having fed steroids to Birgit and her teammates. Their relationship, once very close, has been "quieter" since.
As a physician, Birgit's clinical detachment from her own physical reality serves a fundamental denial. Torn between her defence of a memorable time and the necessary questions that her profession imposes, she has chosen pragmatic acceptance as the way to make things bearable. Her conversation betrays disappointment, anger, and an outright refusal to be labelled a victim.
Yet in the next breath she reveals that she does live with a nebulous fear of the future. "I am afraid," she admits, "I also want to live to be 70 and be a grandmother and all the rest, but I don't know if I will."
