A big secret

WHEN I was at university, a mate and I once sat and discussed our neighbour's new girlfriend. I thought she was quite pretty, and said so. "Get away," my mate replied. "She looks like an East German shot putter."

When East Germany dissolved in 1990, we were both six years old. When they entered their last Olympics, we were four. But we both knew what he meant.

East German women shot putters had legs like hippos, hands like bin lids, and - worst of all - hair like an East German.

Tonight's programme, The Great Olympic Drug Scandal: Revealed, tells us why - and it isn't pretty. Although you probably guessed that.

In the 1980 Olympics, East Germany - with a population of around 15 million - won 47 gold medals.

That's more than the UK, population 60 million, has got in total s i n c e 1976.

But, according to tonight's narrator: "the success masked a deep secret". Now, I'm no expert, but was it such a secret? A small country beats the whole of Western Europe, and its female athletes spoke like Barry White and looked like Geoff Capes. I reckon the secret was out.

The East German authorities wanted to prove their society superior to their capitalist neighbours. And what better place to do it, the narrator asks, than the Olympics? I reckon they should have forgot the Olympics, and started at the supermarket.

Athletes interviewed explain how they loved competing in Italy, because of the exotic food available. Like bananas, they say, and oranges. Hardly caviar and truffles, is it.

Just imagine if East Germany had put effort into fruit, rather than sport. Dresden would have been the pineapple-growing capital of the world and the apples would be the size of footballs. But, on the downside, the eight-foot bananas would have been hairy.

The documentary is fascinating, as it features interviews with athletes and doctors from the time. There are also reconstructions of the training camps, although I'm not sure how they recruited the extras. "Wanted: female actors. Must be at least 5ft10ins and butch. Beard optional, but preferred."

Female swimmers from the time tell how they put ten to 15 kilograms on in a few months. Their bodies grew heavier, yet they swam faster. One swimmer, interviewed here, won three gold medals aged 15. A year later, a gynaecologist told her to give up competitive sport unless she wanted to be infertile and disabled.

The girl's mother marched to the swimming pool, we are told, confronted the coach, and screamed: "I am rescuing my daughter!

I am rescuing her from your clutches!" I'm not sure about the translation - sounds a bit dramatic to me - but you take the point. The girls were being sacrificed in a Cold War propaganda battle.

The damaged athletes, and their ailments, keep coming. Enlarged legs, enlarged hands, deeper voices, hairy backs. Pubic hair that reached the naval. Cancer.

Heidi Krieger, the 1986 European women's shot-put champion, is shown at home. He is now called Andreas. He decided on surgery after she was taunted in the street. Bizarrely, he has married another East German ex-athlete.

She remains female, but only just.

The swimmer whose mother saved her from the coach's clutches ends the show with a somber reminder. "I am angry," she says.

"The system did not give me the chance to see if I could have been successful without steroids."

So when Britain limps home with three gold medals in next year's Olympics, remember it could be worse. We could get 47.

Channel Four's offering at 9pm, You're Not Splitting Up My Family, is equally sad. It's about twins from County Durham who lost their mother in a car crash, and then lost their father when he became violent, and they were taken into care.

Aged 22, the lads still struggle to get their lives together. Their dad doesn't want them, it seems and neither does their grandmother.

You may want to weep.

Tomorrow, I might ask to review Balamory, or something.