Athletics has been the only sport I have followed since I was a kid. Like many who grew up in the Coe-Ovett-Cram era I have strong memories of evenings watching Grand Prix events from Oslo, Brussels and Zurich, or European, World and Olympic championships sprawling over weeks in the summer. We even used to go to Crystal Palace to see the shocking speed these runners reached in real life, which never really translates to TV.
One of the strongest memories is of the invincible success of female 'Eastern Bloc' athletes. It seemed pointless Britain entering the likes of Cathy Cook or Kirsty Wade into events when the Soviets, the Czechs, the Romanians, and above all, the East Germans, appeared to have such a crushing stranglehold over the proceedings. Here's Marita Koch, the quintessential East German sprinter, setting the world record for the 400 metres of 47:60 in Canberra in 1985.
This record still stands, and as one of the commenters on YouTube notes, no runner has come within a second of this record for more than fifteen years.
Also running in that race was Jarmila Kratochvílová from Czechoslovakia, who still holds the 800 metre world record with an incredible 1:53.28, set in 1983. To give you some context, only two runners have got under 1:55 since the eighties. In this clip she's running the second fastest 400 metres of all time – the record Koch was breaking in the above clip.
The Soviet Union produced a number of phenomenal middle distance runners in this era too, the most enduring being Tatyana Kazankina who won gold in the 800 and 1,500 metres at the Montreal Olympics in 1976 and a further gold in front of her home crowd at the Moscow games of 1980. Her 1,500 metres world record of 3:52 was set in Zurich in 1980.
The athletics doping programmes of the seventies and eighties are still talked of with a sense of disbelief. Yet both sport and art were politicised during the Cold War. Frances Stonor Saunders wrote a brilliant book on the CIA's cultural Cold War,
Who Paid the Piper. Similar tactics were employed by the 'Eastern Bloc' (
and, who knows, by the CIA too– thanks, inner conspiracy nut). Although drug tests were primitive in this period, records were found and published by Brigitte Berendonk and Werner Franke after the fall of the wall showing that Marita Koch had been part of a highly organised programme of GDR state-funded steroid use. Her team-mate, Olympic gold medalist long-jumper and sprinter Heike Drechsler, had an even more extraordinary story. Franke and Berendonk asserted that Drechsler was a Stasi agent, spying on her team-mates for the secret police. Drechsler family friend Heinz Bergner was a Stasi officer who opened a file on an informant called Jump for the Seoul Olympics of 1988. Drechsler has always denied the Stasi connection, and also of being involved in any GDR doping programme, and successfully sued the authors when they suggested it. In 2007 she was elected to the International Olympic Committee. Soviet runner Kazankina's career came to an abrupt end when she refused to take a drug test in September 1984 and was banned. Nothing has ever been proved against Kratochvílová.
As a coda to this story of Cold War athletics, Kazankina's 1,500 world record stood for a decade, until a generation of Chinese athletes emerged from nowhere on the international stage and swept aside all women's track middle and long distance records in 1993. Their coach Ma Junren was later disgraced, partly for seeing a great number of his athletes fail drug tests for the Sydney Olympics, and more worryingly because his 'training techniques' included physical violence against his runners. Here's a Chinese 1-2 from the 1993 Stuttgart World Championships, where China scooped the 1,500, 3,000 and 10,000 metres.
So many mysteries surround these amazing runs. The athletes involved have shown no desire to do any straight talking about their performances, the scientists and training teams have kept quiet, and the whole period from the seventies to the eighties is being lost to history. It's a shame, as it will only lead the uneducated like me or the angry commentators on YouTube to make uninformed guesses at what seems like a case of chemically-enhanced battery farming gone out of control.
