Posted on 07/03/2016 7:22:22 AM PDT by Berlin_Freeper
But they don't do that in the playoffs!
However no-one had expected such shattering revelations about not only the injections given to West Germany’s Wunder von Bern heroes but a systematic, 20-year doping programme across all Olympic sports.
Such a programme was run, according to Doping in Germany from 1950 to today* with the knowledge of not only senior politicians but sports officials and doctors. Their work was funded with taxpayers’ money by the Interior Ministry.
A draft summary of the investigation was completed last year and the final version had been kept under wraps since April this year. Frustration at the ‘freeze’ over concerns of data protection issues and legal action, led to it being leaked last week to the Suddeutsche Zeitung.
Initially the programme sought to disprove performance-enhancing qualities of anabolic steroids, testosterone and oestrogen. When the converse became obvious, such substances were issued to competitors including athletes and rowers.
The extent was not comparable with developments in East Germany – seven of whose track-and-field records stand to this day – but serious and widespread enough.
One witness told researchers of a conversation before the 1972 Munich Olympics when a senior sports ministry official said: “One thing matters above all else: medals.”
As for football, the report alludes to stimulants administered to players in club football in the late 1940s, before West Germany re-entered international competition.
In 1954 West German footballers preparing for the World Cup finals accepted injections of, they were told, vitamin concoctions. Within months of their sensational World Cup victory over runaway favourites Hungary (Das Wunder von Bern), many of the players had been taken seriously ill; jaundice was the common diagnosis.
The players had all been dosed with the same shared needle and syringe.
Only a minority, among them Alfred Pfaff – later captain of Eintracht Frankfurt’s legendary 1960 European Cup finalists – refused the jabs. Winger Richard Herrmann died of cirrhosis aged 39, just eight years later.
These injections, according to the Humboldt report, were not ‘mere’ vitamins but the methamphetamine Pervitin.
This was the so-called ‘Panzer chocolate’ or ‘fighter chocolate’ which was issued to combatants in the Axis and Allied forces during the Second World War. It was still widely available in Germany years later because more than 35m doses had been manufactured in the early 1940s.
Read more at http://www.worldsoccer.com/columnists/keir-radnedge/west-germanys-culture-of-doping-kept-under-wraps-341986#gIw51o0VWQCG5w4j.99
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