I’m excited about the potential in Thomas Bach’s words for my long-suffering team-mates and generations of athletes from around the world who missed out through illegal drug use.
He is the first IOC president to praise anyone campaigning for recognition of those generations of athletes, mostly women, for fighting the inequalities of doping and the “wrongs” of the biggest heist in the history of sport.
Cheating has sadly always been part of competitive sport but nothing quite tops the systematic doping of an estimated 15,000 athletes — all those in my sport, swimming, underage and many as young as 12 and 13 when their abuse with anabolic steroids began.
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I welcome Bach’s encouraging words but as ever on the long trail of asking for genuine equality, fair play and justice, I won’t be holding my breath. The proof in the pudding will be whether the IOC president will now throw open the door he’s unlocked, let the light in and finally start to heal the harm of half a century of injustice in Olympic sport.
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Recognition would mean the world to athletes like my Olympic team-mates Kathy Smallwood and Ann Osgerby. They should have been household names in Britain, celebrated for their achievements. Instead, neither got the medals they deserved in Moscow or the chance to capitalise on their excellence in sport.
The consequences included a loss of inspiration that the medals they missed out on would have provided for the next wave of young women. Compare Moscow in 1980, when I was Britain’s only individual female medallist at the Games, to the ripple effect of female success in many sports in Britain today.
Michelle Ford and I won medals in Moscow, and we were fortunate that our best events were the 400m medley and 800m freestyle, in which explosive power is less of a factor in racing with muscled, testosterone-fuelled females.
Since the IOC ignored my 1990s appeal for justice and recognition for all athletes with a note expressing its intention to deter future challenges, the door has remained firmly shut despite flowery language along the way.
I recall a personal conversation with François Carrard, the top IOC lawyer, in which he said: “But two of the people in those races didn’t have drug tests.” Well, I certainly did and no systematic drug-taking programme from our era has ever surfaced barring one: the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
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“You have to have evidence,” Carrard said. Absolutely. Like a ton of irrefutable evidence out of an extinct nation that made a state secret of systematically doping its athletes with numerous dangerous and illegal substances. Official papers proved that the state’s secret police, the Stasi, even ran covert operations at the Olympic Games themselves.
From the moment the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, scores of documents were available to Bach in his native language. I encourage Mr Bach, a 1976 Olympic team fencing champion for West Germany, to follow through on his words and join us in fighting the good fight he now praises.
It’s time to embrace the long-overdue recognition and reconciliation process we at Female Athletes for Integrity and Resolution (Fair) are requesting, with support from international federations. It’s time to take responsibility for your own jurisdiction, without any need for legal threats or talk of statutes of limitation. Fact (and I love a fact): the IOC-accredited laboratory was used as a factory for cheats. No one has ever been called to account.
Every single coach and swimmer in major competition at the time knew they were cheating; we just didn’t know how they were getting away with it.
The IOC has told The Times that it’s all been dealt with by German authorities. Not exactly. Millions in compensation for loss of health have been paid out. We victims of the victims have had nothing, neither money nor basic recognition. The trials, time limits and lenient sentences meant that many of the guilty got off lightly or even scot-free.
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And besides, none of that was in the jurisdiction of the IOC, which until now has turned a blind eye to what is in its gift: to correct the big lie that remains the official record of the three hugely affected Olympic Games.
I joined my fellow former swimmers Wendy Boglioli, of the US, and Michelle, of Australia, in establishing Fair at a time when sports organisations are yet again failing to deliver fair play for women.
We don’t want the GDR athletes to have their medals removed but we do want those who lost out to be recognised officially, free from the shadow of cheating. We can’t change what happened on the day. Those precious moments are lost for ever. But we do want the records corrected to recognise the truth and the status of women who finished fourth, fifth and sixth and were dismissed in a sentence as “plucky Brits who weren’t quite up to it”. Coaches and parents have also had to live with that glaring injustice.
Every time the Olympics come around, we’re reminded that we were “not good enough” as the statistics of the GDR fraud are trotted out to reinforce the lie. I hear my own colleagues at the BBC talk about “the last gold for Britain” being half a century ago, without any recognition of the truth about the 1976, 1980 and 1988 Games. It hurts, every time.
My team-mates from 1980 would have won six medals they never got, including two golds for Osgerby, whose achievements are largely unknown even in swim circles these days, as knowledge passes with each generation.
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It’s tragic. Never acknowledged as champions; never able to access opportunities that flow from Olympic success; never able to sit children and grandchildren on their knees and tell them about that magical day “I won an Olympic medal” because fourth behind three athletes on steroids doesn’t have quite the same inspirational vibe.
The vast majority of those affected are women yet when it came to one American man, Jim Thorpe, the IOC revisited the case (of him potentially violating amateurism rules) three times over a century. In 2022, 69 years after his death, he was reinstated as the sole gold medal winner of two events in 1912.
It would be good if Bach could make sure more of us don’t die before the IOC does the right thing, starting with engagement with the female athletes who have endured the consequences of unfair play for decades.
I think most people don’t appreciate the impact of injustice on people’s lives. They think this is just sport but injustice is always debilitating. Think of the scandals of the Post Office and NHS blood screening, which is an issue related to my own mother’s death several years ago.
The GDR doping era resulted in the premature death of athletes too. In all such cases, each one different, the cover-up becomes worse than the crime as time goes by.
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As Bach suggests, it’s time to back the athletes, clean sport, right the wrongs and finally send the right message that cheating will not be rewarded — ever!
