The East German Olympic Training System - Frank Shuman (1977)

 

The East German Olympic Training System – Frank Shuman (1977)

Strength & Health June-July 1977

With the Olympics starting in a couple weeks I figured it'll be fun to look back at some all-time bad takes on past Olympic performances.  At least one photo in the feature was a Bruce Klemens heater that I didn't see him get credit for.  Do yourself a favor and go check out his flickr account:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/bklemens/albums/72157669291356315/

Bruce is still showing up to US Nationals and taking photos.  

The 1976 Olympics in Montreal were filled with many surprises by the emergence of East Germany as an Olympic power might have been the biggest surprise of all. And yet, it did not come as a surprise to anyone following international competitions, for they knew that the East Germans had developed an all-encompassing training system for their athletes in all sports.

This year, however, for the first time, some of the secrets have been revealed to the West. The German Democratic Republic (East Germany) invited a group of Western journalists to visit their sports facilities around the country and to investigate, somewhat, their training programs.

Much of the information in this article is based on the report of one of these journalists, Craig B. Whitney, to the New York Times.

Although the East Germans won more gold medals (40) than any other country except the USSR, they are already laying the groundwork for their assault on the XXII Olympiad in Moscow in 1980.

Their system which also produced 25 silver and 25 bronze medals in Montreal is comprised of teams of doctors, coaches and athletes. There are 21 sports clubs around the country and 19 specialized sports schools, which arrange their curriculum hours to fit around the student-athletes’ needs.

The Sports and Gymnastics Club in East Berlin is one of the largest in the country and it has over 600 athletes training there for three and four hours a day under 32 professional coaches. The budget is over $500,000 and the training facilities include gyms for soccer, handball, basketball and gymnastics. There are also special weightlifting rooms, boxing rings, an indoor ice-skating rink, and swimming pools with diving boards made in Sparks, Nevada.

Since East Germany is a relatively small country (population 17 million), it can be assumed that the sports clubs and specialized schools are within easy distance of all their athletes. This isn’t really true, of course. The clubs and schools are open only to those athletes with promise. Ulrike Richter, the 18-year old backstroke champion, for example, was “discovered” by a “scout” when she was six years old and she was put in a special boarding school in East Berlin even though her family live 100 miles away.

Unfortunately, this is the rule and not the exception. Most of the East German athletes have been in serious and supervised training since their early, formative years.

The United States can loo with envy upon the results of other systems but there will surely be no one clamoring for us to emulate these systems and “imprison” our young and potential champion athletes.

On the other hand, the East German athletes do not consider themselves imprisoned. They seem genuinely concerned with strengthening the international reputation of the German Democratic Republic and this is why the long-isolated East German regime is willing to spend so much money on it.

In addition to the clubs and sports schools, the army is another organization entrusted with turning out athletes. They are able to offer outstanding facilities for training and their soldier-athletes are often promoted in the ranks according to how they’ve progressed in competition.

The system itself, however, is built upon a foundation of national sports. Physical education classes of two to three hours a week, for example, are compulsory for every East German schoolchild, beginning with the first grade. The coaches in these schools, then, act as “talent scouts” and they appear to know what they’re looking for as most schools send five or six students a year to the special sports schools. There is some room for dissent, though, and a student who is picked for one of the sports schools can refuse to attend.

As stated, however, attending these schools and belonging to the clubs or the army is a privilege open only to superior athletes. Anyone who has any ambition as far as the Olympics are concerned will join because there are simply no other ways to attain the Olympic standards. There is no such thing in East Germany as training on one’s own in neighborhood gyms.

How does the government pay for its programs and facilities? We in the United States have seen all sorts of fundraising events but it is doubtful if we would accept the East German way. They encourage workers to spend an extra shift at the factory and then to donate those wages to the sports programs. A sports official in Leipzig says “The majority do it voluntarily, but of course those who don’t volunteer, go along with the others anyway.”

And it takes a lot of extra shifts to pay for the East German program and facilities. In addition to the half-million dollar budget in East Berlin, the little town of Wunschendorf has a budget of at least $160,000 a year for its programs.

The East German Gymnastics and Sports Federation has 2.66 million members and there is an elite sports club in Zella-Mehlis specializing in skiing, skating and wrestling. In Halle, in a modern building along the Saale river, there is a sports medicine office (wink wink, cough cough) specializing in swimming. In Leipzig, there is the German Sports Institute, which has produced more than 7,000 trained coaches and athletes.

There is a special department of sports medicine at the Institute with a staff of 85, and research there is believed to be the most advanced in its field in the entire world. The Leipzig Research Center is equipped with all sorts of complex medical equipment and swimmers train there with masks on so that doctors can study their metabolic rates. Dr. Alois Marder, who was graduated from the Institute and worked at the swimming club in Halle with Kornelia Ender, fled to West Germany two years ago. He is the one who provided the first information about the East German swim training.

According to him, the tests made on the swimmers involve blood samples taken in the first, second, fifth and 10^th minutes of a workout, so that the buildup of lactic acid in the blood- and thus the level of physical exhaustion – can be monitored at every stage.

This method is used to predict the maximum performance attainable by an athlete. Dr. Marder said that he took a sample of blood from Kornelia Ender’s earlobe in 1973 and he knew she could swim the 100-meter freestyle in 56 seconds. That is exactly what she did last summer in Montreal! Dr. Marder explained at the West German Sports Institute in Cologne, where he is now trying to do the same kind of research, that the lactic acid level is the key.

“Lactic acid builds up in the bloodstream as the muscles work hard,” he said. “It builds up to a certain level and then exhaustion sets in. If you measure the levels in a swimmer’s bloodstream at a constant speed after one, two, five and 10 minutes, you can draw a line on a graph and predict accurately how fast he can swim – and then train him to that level.”

Some athletes’ metabolism, he claims, make it impossible for them to work their bodies as hard as Miss Ender could. The athletes who can work as hard are the ones who care given such intensive training. And is it all worthwhile? Well, maybe not by American standards. Living in a free enterprise system, our athletes are pressed with the need of making a living. Such a thing is not a factor in East Germany.

The athletes who do succeed make nowhere near the money and get nowhere near the benefits our professional athletes receive but neither do they go wanting. After her spectacular performance of winning one silver and four gold medals in Montreal, Miss Ender received a government-sponsored vacation trip to Cuba along with her fiancé, Roland Matthes, the backstroke swimmer. They will also be assured of an apartment and maybe a new car without the standard eight-year wait. Miss Ender will probably receive another important benefit. She wants to study medicine – a coveted field in East Germany – and her plans will probably not be disappointed, although no one else contemplating a career in medicine can be so sure.

“I gave the state quite a lot with my four gold medals,” said Miss Ender, “and now I’d like to make a contribution to society as a pediatrician, perhaps, or in some other field of medicine.” (Not so surprisingly, in 1977 she was banned from the East German team as she refused to take PEDs as prescribed by the team doctors.)

She is right when she says she gave the state quite a lot. After all, she was discovered by a coach in her hometown of Bitterfeld when she was only eight years old. When she was 11, she was sent to the sports school and club in Halle. Probably because of her fantastic performance in Montreal, Miss Ender received more attention from the Western journalists. It was pointed out that she is a big woman – broader in the shoulders than most men her age – and the question of steroid usage was raised.

Professor Kurt Tittel, head of the division of sports medicine at the German Sports Institute in Leipzig said, “We have developed our athletes without recourse to anabolics.” Eberhard Schramm, head of swimming department at Leipzig said that the ideal training regimen for athletes should include gymnastics, isometrics, games and weightlifting.

“Weights are quite effective” he said, “but only up to about 40 percent of the maximum a swimmer can lift. We want to build endurance and flexibility, not maximum strength.”

Ski jumpers and skaters also work with weights but they do it differently. They use heavy weights so as to prepare their muscles for the bursts of maximum strength required in their particular sport.

Weightlifters, on the other hand, use a variety of calisthenics and gymnastics-type exercises to increase their flexibility. The GDR Weightlifting Federation is a strong, independent body with five full-time administrators and two part-time secretaries as well as two paid national and five paid regional coaches. There are 7,500 registered lifters in East Germany compared  to just a little over 2,000 for the United States. Their athletes also participate in far more international competitions a year than ours. They hose four major international events and they send teams to about 12 others. Actually, international travel is one of the big incentives of the East German system. Athletes and government officials are the only ones who are allowed to travel to capitalistic countries and, it seems, everyone wants to be among those fortunate few who are allowed outside the closely-watched borders.

Although there were no defections in Montreal and all the East German athletes professed a sincere desire to boost  the international reputation of their government, security of the entire sports organization is extremely tight. Representatives of the FDJ (Free German Youth) and the KEPD (German Communist Party of Unity) are present at all trainings and competitions to exercise their supervisory function. The President of the Weightlifting Federation of the GDR himself is a political appointee and has no experience in weightlifting.

The top lifters are well0-known throughout the country and are treated as national heroes. Even minor weightlifting events are attended by huge crowds, whose interest is aroused by detailed reports about the progress of the sport in the daily press. International weightlifting events are given direct TV coverage throughout the evening hours for as many days as the competition lasts.

East German citizens are extremely proud of the accomplishments of all their athletes. But for Dr. Marder and others in the West there is doubt about the ideals of amateurism and international brotherhood that were revived with the Olympic Games in 1896.

“Is this really sport?” wondered Dr. Marder. “You in the West will have to decide that because someday you won’t be able to compete with those people fairly if you insist on being amateurs while they put computers, medicine and a whole society to work turning out champions.”

The choice is ours… and that is appropriate because our system of government is based on choice. Hopefully we will decide to improve our system of training by following the recommendations of the recent Presidential Committee on the Olympics and seek the support of private industry an the American public as well as the Federal Government. 

Enjoy your lifting!