Against the Tide
- Page 4
Schubert made a plea, and a promise. “He told me something I thought was so corny then [but which] made sense to me: ‘I don’t want you to be known in history as the one who quit.’ So I decided to swim. He decided then he would keep the press completely away from me.”
Babashoff winces as she remembers the sense of impending doom among the American swimmers before the 1976 Montreal Olympics. She had tried to cheer up those who were lamenting the prospect of facing the powerhouse East Germans. “It was so odd to me—by then everyone should have been happy—it’s the Olympics! But they were in our heads.”
The East Germans also were in their locker room. “We actually started screaming when we heard these deep voices,” she recalls. “We thought they were guys and that we were in a unisex locker room. Then we turned the corner and there they were, the East German swimmers. Only now it’s like they’d become guys. Really scary stuff. Very weird.”
Diver Greg Louganis says he heard variations of Babashoff’s account: “I do remember [1976 gold-medal diver] Jennifer Chandler being afraid to go into the women’s locker room, thinking she heard men’s voices in there. And it was the East German women’s swim team.”
Still just 19, Babashoff recalls being surrounded on that fateful day as she boarded a bus back to the Olympic Village. “All of the media thought it was going to be East Germany versus me, because they thought I actually had a chance to beat them. So there are tons of reporters there, everybody pushing microphones like it’s Britney Spears today, and they’re asking me, ‘What do you think of the East German swimmers?’ ”
“Well,” Babashoff said, “they’re extremely hairy and have deep voices like men.” That, she says, is when “the you-know-what hit the fan.”
Babashoff’s public criticism got the world talking about the biggest state-sponsored doping program ever known, as well as the transformations that were taking place among the East German athletes. Those troubling and ultimately tragic changes were chronicled in “Doping for Gold,” a documentary film aired last spring as part of the PBS series “Secrets of the Dead.”
After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, many athletes—including Kornelia Ender, Barbara Krause, and Carola Nitschke—came forward to describe their unwitting participation in the state doping program. Petra Thümer, who twice outswam Babashoff for gold in 1976, defiantly claims that unwitting participants in the program should not be considered cheaters. A German court later found East German officials responsible for what it cited as “systematic and overall doping in competitive sports.” Suspended jail sentences and minimal fines were doled out. The East German government set up a $2.18 million fund for any affected athlete who wanted to file a claim to help cover their medical bills. By the March 2003 deadline, nearly 200 affected athletes had filed claims.
“Thank God that wall came down,” Babashoff says. “That was the proof.”