SNo more dealing with GDR doping! Did we miss something? Where is it still being processed? In this respect, the requirement is obsolete, but interesting nonetheless. Because the author of this message in the regional newspaper “Nordkurier” is Henner Misersky, the anti-doping fighter who is also highly praised at this point. At least that’s his story over the past 30 years: as a trainer, he refused to hand out material to athletes even before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Misersky was therefore inducted into the German Sports Hall of Fame in 2012. Just because of his attitude. A novelty. At the time it was unimaginable that the Thuringian would answer the question about funding doping investigations with money like this: “For the former GDR, whose complete delegitimization was politically desired, that no longer makes sense.” For the “old Federal Republic rather yes”.
A completely different language
Welcome to the cliché: The populist suggestion that the East’s top Olympic sport was flattened by the West with an anti-doping club is one of the evergreens of East German nostalgia. It is true that the Stasi files described the state-ordered state doping used in almost all sports in great detail with horse and rider and all acts of violence, while dopers from the West were up to mischief in “bases” but documented almost nothing. It is also true that the association worked very well in top-level sport. At least with a view to taking over dopers and their knowledge.
Misersky was outraged by this friendly takeover: as a relentless criminal hunter from the Thuringian Forest. In 2018, he accused the FAZ of “blatant historical misrepresentation” because in a text about a German discus thrower there was nothing about the “doping past” of her trainer Dieter Kollark. Meanwhile, Kollark seems like an ally of sorts. Misersky no longer talks about dopers: “It is clear to me that Dieter Kollark is not on any list of perpetrators, and that no athlete accused him of being a doping offender during interrogations by the public prosecutor.”
Doped athletes used to use this rhetorical trick to answer the question of whether they had ever taken banned substances, something like this: “I haven’t had a positive test.” Loosely translated: Nobody caught me. That’s how you get around the truth. Kollark, according to the Stasi files about the informer alias IM Alexander, was involved as a trainer in the doping concept. That has been known for a long time. Misersky’s furor was justified.
Today he is not only blind in that eye. For biological reasons alone, research into perpetrators seems to have become secondary. However, it is not too late to take intensive care of athletes who were poisoned and are now suffering from sometimes terrible consequences. They often don’t even know what they’ve been given. This is because there was initially silence for decades, while few, like Misersky, opened their mouths.
The fact that he now speaks a completely different language is no proof of the truth, at most a compelling reminder to push ahead with the work-up. This is not about delegitimizing the GDR. The focus must be on people who should be turned into machines and paid for their enjoyment of sport with their health.
