Playing foreign policy games: States, drugs and other Olympian vices

Abstract

The modern Olympic Games, like their ancient precedents, have been targeted by international powers flexing their foreign policy muscle. Covert efforts to capture the attention of a world audience, while purporting to demonstrate the values of a sound social or economic policy, are well documented. Sport carries undeniable prestige and politicians have been quick to recognize the potential. Association with sporting icons is not a new political ploy. Being photographed with Olympic champions, World Cup winners and record breakers is a less than subtle tactic. But when a nation's sporting youth make consistent statements on the international stage the world takes notice. One such well-documented platform from which elements of foreign policy were presented in the guise of a respectable festival' of sport was the apparent Nazi Party influence on the 1936 Berlin Olympics.1 However the case study highlighted in this essay is the coordinated, clandestine use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport by the Government of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). East German physicians, scientists and coaches collaborated in systematic drug administration to selected athletes, under the sanction of the GDR Ministry for State Security (Stasi). An extraordinary programme of experimentation emerged, in which athletes were prescribed high dose potent medicines without concern for moral or ethical principles.2 Under the pretence of research, thousands of subjects' were implicated in one of the largest pharmacological experiments in history … running for more than three decades.3 The consequences of this era in East German sport and politics were profound and far-reaching. Young, female athletes to whom excessive doses of anabolic androgenic steroids had been administered, suffered long-term, life-threatening consequences. It was not until the unification of Germany in 1989 that official Stasi documents were made public.4 The world of clinical medicine and sport science still reels from the revelations. In this contemporary human experiment, government policy, measured in gold medals, gave scant regard to human suffering and permanent disability.