The forgotten fight - GDR doping victim Andreas Wornowski

Andreas Wornowski had the feeling that something was not right at the latest in 1993, four years after the political change in the GDR : "A doctor in the Bundeswehr hospital asked me directly about performance-enhancing drugs . My response was a shrug. I did not allow this thought, never gave it any further thought, ignored it."

Today, the 54-year-old former boxer has suffered from severe health problems for over 40 years, in pain day and night – starting with his crippled left hand, his punching hand. This is compounded by severe depression. The former East German competitive athlete realizes that these are the consequences of the East German forced doping regime . He begins to work through his past.

At thirteen, he went to the GDR cadre school

Wornowski's path to elite sports began relatively late, at the age of eleven. With talent, discipline, and dedicated training, he became district champion in his age group in Magdeburg just one year later. At thirteen, he enrolled at the Berlin Children's and Youth Sports School, an elite sports boarding school where the GDR groomed its future medalists. Wornowski lived at the boarding school until he came of age, only being allowed to return home every four weeks.

His mother, a nurse by profession, was initially strictly against boxing : she considered the sport too brutal. But her father and the district council of his hometown persuaded her. Looking back, Wornowski understands his mother's concern: boxing meant consenting to bodily harm. If the force of the blows was then increased with medication, it culminated in a veritable "battle with bodily material"—as Wornowski puts it—with "steamhammer" blows to the head.

Boxing in the GDR junior national team

He describes the time he experiences from now on as "a kind of extreme training camp," in which the children and adolescents were forced to give their all by means of performance-enhancing, pain-relieving, and disinhibiting drugs, and under massive psychological and physical pressure to perform. Anyone who couldn't stand up to this or asked uncomfortable questions about pills or injections was expelled: In the 8th grade, there were 21 young people, in the 10th grade, only four.

Wornowski quickly enjoyed success and made it into the GDR junior national team.

The triumph - and its price

Starting in 1986, Wornowski regularly received various medications, blue and black-and-red capsules officially labeled "vitamins and immune-boosting agents." Today, Wornowski is convinced that these were the anabolic steroid Oral-Turanibol, the anabolic steroid Mestanolone, the steroid test substance 646, and psychotropic drugs used to increase aggression.

These were demonstrably administered to Wornowski's entire training group during experimental training treatments under the direction of Hans Gürtler. Gürtler was a leading East German sports physician and co-responsible for the state doping program, which, from 1974, ran under the name "State Plan Topic 14.25."

Wornowski's sporting heyday began: At 16, he became the GDR youth light heavyweight champion and won international tournaments. He became a representative of the GDR, a "diplomat in a tracksuit," as it was called back then. A Stasi memo from that time attests to Wornowski: "He sets the performance level of the GDR in his age and weight class." The decisions in his fights were often decided by knockout in the first round. "For over a year, no one stood still," says the former boxer.

But alongside his fame, his physical decline grew. Wornowski's pain increased, and his injuries piled up: a shattered nose, stitched eyelids, and knocked-out teeth.

Training at 90 degrees in the sauna

Added to this was the relentless training, with up to four two-hour sessions per day. Under normal circumstances, this would be beyond the endurance limit. "I couldn't really go on, but I kept going anyway. Today I would say: brutal conditions," Wornowski recalls.

He pushed pain away—"I was someone," he says. Taking up to 20 painkillers a day was not uncommon for him. To reduce his weight before a competition, he often had to do his pad training—punching special pads held by a trainer with a boxing glove—in a 90-degree sauna.

At the German University of Physical Culture and Sport in Leipzig, he was even forced to faint on a treadmill to test his performance limits. Only a belt prevented him from falling.

Politically motivated career end

Wornowski's sporting career ended abruptly at the age of 19, in the spring of 1989, more than six months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Officially, this was due to his health problems, primarily his eye condition. Wornowski believes he knows another reason: he had refused to become a member of the East German state party, the SED.

What he had left was a profession he had never learned: car mechanic. Wornowski had never seen the inside of a car repair shop; the Stasi had submitted his completed exam paper to him. Officially, like all competitive athletes in the GDR, he was considered an amateur, because there was no official professional sport in the socialist state.

Aid laws for doping victims have expired

After German reunification, it wasn't until 1997 that a few court cases brought the full extent of East German state doping to light. In response, several aid laws for doping victims were passed in 2002 and later. These laws provided approximately 2,000 victims, including Wornowski, with one-time payments of €10,500 each.

These laws have since expired. The current recognition procedures are complicated and involve high hurdles. The Doping Victims' Aid Association estimates that around 15,000 people are affected.

Medical records disappeared

Wornowski is fighting for a monthly pension due to his health problems. His application was rejected; proving damage caused by East German doping is difficult. His entire medical record has disappeared. He has filed a lawsuit.

"This is a huge tragedy. The real problem for those affected is that their health records are gone and that they are in a situation that will probably not be resolved even with the amendment [amendment or revision of an existing law with a new one - editor's note]," explains Wornowski's lawyer, Ingo Klee.

Change in the law raises hope

In addition, it still happens that former officials and doctors of the GDR sports system hold key positions, points out Michael Lehner, chairman of the Doping Victims' Aid Association. "It must be clear to everyone that this at least prevents belief in objectivity from developing."

In Wornowski's case, the head of the medical services of the state of Brandenburg wrote the negative medical opinion. The expert worked in the sports medicine service of the GDR in the late 1980s. The institution was responsible for the practical implementation of forced doping. The doctor in question denies any involvement in doping practices.

Lehner is relying on a new legal provision that would reverse the burden of proof: For certain typical illnesses, doping would be assumed to be the cause. However, this is by no means automatic, warns Wornowski's lawyer, Klee: The social security offices could still question the resulting damage, for example, by citing a family history.

"It's not just the lack of evidence, the health problems, the financial difficulties—it's disgusting and almost unbearable," says Wornowski. Today, he and his wife live a secluded life in a house in the woods. Some of his former training buddies are already dead. "And at every funeral, everyone has the same thought: Who knows what they gave us back then?"