Giving anabolic steroids to a teenage girl does a whole lot more than help her win a gold medal – it can change her body forever.
Exhibit A: East German shotput champion Heidi Krieger, who was so masculinized by the drugs her coaches gave her that she later chose to become a man, undergoing a sex-change operations to become Andreas Krieger.
“I still say today that they killed Heidi,” Kreiger told the BBC in a recent interview. “It’s difficult to say whether I would be Heidi today or not but I could have decided on my own… I was thrown out of my gender.”
Kreiger was among thousands of young athletes injured by an East German government plan to dominate Olympic sports through chemistry. In most cases they were told the pills and shots were vitamins and natural supplements.
Their enormous physiques and aggressive behavior inspired the International Olympic Committee’s first drug testing programs in the 1970s. The IOC has been playing catch-up ever since.
Krieger’s ordeal began at SC Dynamo, an East Berlin sports club where one of the doctors was Bernd Pansold, later convicted of overseeing a program to dope young, female swimmers. Pansold, the Daily News has learned, works now for Austrian energy drink company Red Bull, leading a training facility on the eastern outskirts of Salzburg in Thalgau. Among the athletes exposed to him there is American Olympic star Lindsey Vonn.
Female victims who were teenagers in the East German system later testified that their pubic hair spread onto their chests. Their voices deepened and their menstruation cycles fell out of rhythm.
Doses of testosterone and its related compounds are particularly harmful to girls during puberty, when a delicate balance of hormones shapes a woman’s reproductive system.
Clitoris hypertrophy, an enlargement of female genetalia, is one documented consequence.
That is to say nothing of the long-term damage steroids can do to the liver as the organ tries to clear the substances from a person’s bloodstream, or to the heart, as levels of LDL cholesterol spike.
According to Steven Ungerleider, author of “Faust’s Gold,” a book about the East German doping machine, the doctors involved in the programs were fully aware of the disastrous affects of the drugs they supplied.
“In spite of this knowledge, the doctors and trainers continued dispensing drugs because they believed that without the use of anabolic steroids there would be no medals or successes in international competitions,” Ungerleider writes.
“They also recognized that athletic successes were a prerequisite for financial bonuses, promotions, awards, and other preferential treatment.”
