Petra Schneider was not sure at first whether or not to help Sharron Davies’s marketing campaign to get promoted to Olympic gold when the pair met within the former’s house city. That the ladies had been reunited 18 years on from the East German’s seminal victory over the Briton meant she felt the injustice was too far gone for it to be price addressing.
However then she listened to Davies politely press her case, highlighting the frustration of dropping to a swimmer who was subjected to systemic doping, and her thoughts was modified. ‘It’s a very long time in the past, but when it implies that a lot to you, then I’ll help you,’ Schneider stated of Davies’s try to influence the Worldwide Olympic Committee (IOC) to revise the file books.
Davies met Schneider in a Chemnitz resort in 1998 for a Channel 4 documentary entitled Tainted Gold. In it, Davies visits an deserted swimming pool that embodied the fast decline of the previous East Germany and is taken to an archive housing Stasi paperwork which element the drug-taking programme imposed on its athletes.
Requested by the documentary-makers about this coaching regime, Schneider recounted how she joined an elite group aged simply 14 and was instructed to take blue capsules, which had been later revealed to be the steroid Oral Turinabol.
Inside a yr her time for the 400 metres medley — the occasion wherein she beat Davies into second place — had dropped by 17 seconds, a unprecedented 5 per cent enchancment.
The Mail on Sunday is campaigning to see Sharron Davies be recognised as Olympic champion
Davies (above) was robbed of an Olympic gold medal by East Germany drug cheats in 1980
Petra Schneider (above) gained the 400 metres medley in 1980 after being a part of systematic drug doping
However whereas her performances dramatically improved, she additionally started to develop bodily unwanted side effects, together with a disrupted menstrual cycle, elevated physique hair and deep voice.
As early as 1978, she had come to suspect that the capsules contained one thing ‘forbidden’, however felt she had no alternative aside from to stay with the staff. ‘Even then I requested myself, “Is it price it, despite the fact that it’s making you sick?”’ she stated. ‘However we thought success would show us proper.
‘At this time I see it otherwise, however I used to be caught within the system. I had no different alternative. In any other case I might have stopped.’ By the point of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, she was a world file holder at simply 17, the identical age as Davies. Schneider was instructed to take 4 capsules each day, however medical doctors ensured she went into the Video games with the banned substance out of her system.
‘They calculated precisely how lengthy the physique takes to interrupt it down,’ she stated on TV. ‘Then three or 4 weeks earlier than the competitors, they stopped giving it to us, so our our bodies may course of it. And we’d arrive clear.’
Schneider defeated Davies by greater than 10 seconds, an enormous hole in elite competitors. Inside 4 years, nevertheless, Schneider was retired, having picked up a virus that led to the muscle mass round her coronary heart changing into infected.
It will show to be the primary of a litany of well being points. ‘I’ve had fixed issues,’ added Schneider, who was married with a baby by then. ‘And I ponder now the place it’s all going to finish. I’m nonetheless very younger. I’ve received a household and it worries me.’
Schneider, by means of her husband, declined to talk to Mail Sport this month — simply as she has completed with different media requests to interview her of late.
Little doubt she is wounded by the conflicting response to her position. In Germany, she was branded a traitor after testifying to investigations about what went on behind the Iron Curtain. But, because the documentary portrayed, she was additionally delicate to options that she was complicit within the dishonest.
‘You musn’t neglect what it was like for the East German swimmers,’ she instructed Davies, by way of a translator, earlier than asking her former opponent what she would have completed in Schneider’s place.
Davies responded: ‘If I used to be an East German swimmer and I had been her, I might have completed precisely what she did. I don’t condemn them in any respect.’
Schneider’s help supplied an essential plank to the case that Davies and the documentary staff introduced to Francois Garrard, then the director normal of the IOC, once they met on the ruling physique’s headquarters in Lausanne.
In a non-public dialog with Davies, Garrard indicated that the IOC was open to the concept of selling her to gold and recommended that she ask the British Olympic Affiliation to petition the IOC.
Davies (proper) beforehand met Schneider in a Chemnitz resort in 1998 for a Channel 4 documentary entitled Tainted Gold
Petra Schneider (proper) admitted in a beforehand televised assembly with Davies that she had been instructed to take blue capsules that turned out to be steroid Oral Turinabol
Mail Sport have additionally recommended that the IOC recognise the struggling of the East German athletes
The BOA tried and failed, prompting Mail Sport to choose up the baton once more 25 years on. Our marketing campaign is asking the IOC to set an essential precedent by selling Davies and different opponents crushed by East Germans to their rightful medals.
Now we have additionally recommended that the IOC recognise the struggling of the East German athletes, permitting them to maintain their medals — the medals ought to be shared, we advise — and staging a reconciliation course of with the athletes they defeated.
Ideally, it might happen on the Paris 2024 Video games, probably granting Schneider the chance for an additional, extra significant reunion with Davies.
‘We had a pleasant afternoon with lots of concord,’ she stated of that filmed encounter in a subsequent interview, revealed within the e book Accused: Baby Doping. ‘She invited me to England. I might like to drive over, however by some means I don’t have the arrogance.’
