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Subject: t-and-f: NYTimes.com Article: East German Steroids Toll: They Killed Heidi
Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2004 06:56:33 -0800
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MAGDEBURG, Germany, Jan. 20 - Andreas Krieger opened a
shopping bag in his living room and spilled out his past:
track and field uniforms, a scrapbook and athlete
credentials from the former East Germany.
The photos on the credentials looked familiar, but the face
was fuller and softer, the hair covering the ears and
draping down the neck. This was Heidi Krieger, the 1986
European women's shot-put champion, perhaps the most
extreme example of the effects of an insidious,
state-sponsored system of doping in East Germany.
The taking of pills and injections of anabolic steroids
created virile features and heightened confusion about an
already uncertain sexual identity, Krieger said,
influencing a decision to have a sex-change operation in
1997 and to become known legally as Andreas.
"They killed Heidi," Krieger said.
More than 14 years
after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and more than three
years after criminal trials resulted in convictions of East
Germany's top sports official and sports doctor, Krieger
and a number of other athletes are still trying to resolve
legal, medical and psychological issues related to the
secretive doping program that was known by the Orwellian
euphemism of "supporting means." Many of the athletes were
minors at the time and say they were given
performance-enhancing drugs without their knowledge.
Karen König, a retired swimmer, filed a civil lawsuit
against the German Olympic Committee, contending that it
inherited more than $2.5 million in assets from East
Germany upon reunification in 1990 and thus bears
responsibility to assist the former East German athletes.
She is seeking $12,500 in a test case, and as many as 140
former East German athletes, including Krieger, are
deciding whether to file similar complaints. Last month, a
state court in Frankfurt ruled that König's case could
proceed. Indications are that the case could be settled out
of court, according to German news reports.
Jens Steinigen, König's lawyer, said in a telephone
interview that he was also exploring the possibility of
suing the pharmaceutical company VEB Jenapharm, formerly
state-run and now a subsidiary of the Schering AG Group.
According to evidence in the criminal trials of the late
1990's, Jenapharm produced the steroid Oral-Turinabol that
was given to East German athletes.
"We won't be able to make these wrongs undone, but the
athletes can still use the money for medicine or therapy,"
Steinigen said.
As Krieger sees it, no amount of money could restore his
health, which he considers harmed by steroid use and
secondary effects. He experiences such intense discomfort
in his hips and thighs, from lifting massive amounts of
weight while on performance-enhancing drugs, that he can no
longer sleep on his side. Only the mildest physical
exertion is tolerable. Long unemployed, he now works two
days a week as a clerk for a real estate agent.
On Tuesday, the same day that President Bush called for an
end to steroid abuse in American sports in his State of the
Union address, Krieger again told his own story, feeling
compelled to shed more light on one of the darkest chapters
in the history of performance-enhancing drugs.
As many as 10,000 East German athletes were involved in a
state-sponsored attempt to build a country of 16 million
into a sports power rivaling the United States and the
Soviet Union, recent trials and documents of the East
German secret police have revealed.
An estimated 500 to 2,000 former East German athletes are
believed to be experiencing significant health problems
associated with steroids, including liver tumors, heart
disease, testicular and breast cancer, gynecological
problems, infertility, depression and eating disorders.
Some female athletes have reported miscarriages and have
had children born with deformities like club feet.
In 2002, two years after the criminal trials ended, the
German government established a compensation fund of $2.5
million for the doping victims, with a maximum payout of
$12,500. Only 311 athletes, however, made claims - Krieger
among them - by the deadline of March 31, 2003, according
to Birgit Boese, a board member of Doping Victim Aid, an
assistance group.
Some athletes were unaware of the fund, while others were
embarrassed, afraid of losing their jobs, unable to gain
full access to their medical files or unsuccessful in
convincing doctors that their ailments were directly
related to steroid use, Boese said.
"There was a lot of denial and still is," Boese said of the
athletes. "Many have never, or only now, understood that
they were abused by people they trusted."
Some of the most outspoken have faced harassment and
threats. Ines Geipel, a retired East German sprinter who
chronicled the doping system in a book, "Lost Games," said
she had been confronted at readings in 2001 by former East
German officials. As recently as Jan. 18, she said, an
anonymous phone caller told her, "You know there is not
much time left for you."
Neither she nor Krieger has been deterred.
"People should
know what happened, what side effects can be generated,"
Krieger said, speaking through an interpreter inside a
concrete-block apartment building left from the Communist
days in Magdeburg, a 90-minute train ride west of Berlin.
As Andreas, he has a goatee, wide shoulders and a narrow
waist, and is handsome in a Three Musketeers kind of way.
Told this, his wife, Ute Krause, said, "D'Artagnan," and he
gestured as if sword fighting, saying "en garde" to an
imaginary foe.
When discussing the effects of doping, Andreas became
serious and animated, sometimes emotional, smoking
cigarettes and nervously rubbing his palms. When he was
Heidi Krieger, scratching of the hands became a compulsive
act and sometimes drew blood.
Though Krieger said he was happy, his life remains
complicated. At 38, he is married to Krause, 41, a former
East German swimmer. They met in Berlin at the criminal
trials. Before Ute and Andreas were wed, he explained to
her teenage daughter, Katja, that he, too, was once a girl.
Katja accepted his explanation and her mother and Andreas
married in May 2002.
Theirs began as a desperate kind of love. Ute and Andreas
were former elite athletes, damaged by steroids, betrayed
by coaches and officials they trusted and eager to testify
against them. Both were once given to thoughts of suicide.
They leaned on each other for information and support
during the trials. Both had come to believe their
drug-fueled performances were no longer legitimate.
Andreas's gold medal from the 1986 European championships,
now part of a trophy designed as a steroid molecule, is
given as an annual award to Germans involved in anti-doping
efforts. Ute keeps a framed certificate of her 1978 world
rankings in the backstroke in a symbolic location, over the
toilet.
He is glad that he became a man, Krieger said, explaining
that Heidi felt out of place and longed in some vague way
to be a boy. What makes Krieger angry, Krause said, is a
belief that the steroids essentially made the decision for
Heidi, leaving her unable to sort out her sexual identity
on her own.
"They pushed her out of her sex," said Geipel, the former
sprinter and writer who is a friend of Krieger's.
A Teenager's Torment
In 1979, at age 14, Heidi Krieger
began attending the Sports School for Children and Youth in
Berlin. It was affiliated with the powerful sports club
Dynamo, which was sponsored by the Stasi, the East German
secret police.
At 16, Heidi began to receive round blue pills wrapped in
foil. This was the steroid Oral-Turinabol, but coaches
typically called them vitamins that would increase strength
and help the athletes endure the stress of training. In
Heidi's case, the Oral-Turinabol was given in tandem with
birth control pills.
Six months later, Heidi's clothes no longer fit and she
felt "like the Michelin Man or a stuffed goose," Krieger
said. By the time she was 18, she weighed 220 pounds, had a
deep voice, increased body and facial hair and appeared
mannish. On the streets of Berlin, Krieger said, Heidi was
derisively called a homosexual or a pimp. Once on a
commuter train, in the presence of her mother, she was
called a drag queen. She went home, removed her skirt and
never wore one again.
At the airport in Vienna, where Heidi had gone for a track
meet, a flight attendant gave her directions to the men's
bathroom. Even later, as she considered a sex-change
operation, Krieger said, a psychologist asked, "So you want
to change from a man to a woman?"
The insults stung, but Heidi kept taking the blue pills.
She had wild mood swings, from depression to aggression to
euphoria. Once, she swiped at a boxer who had taunted her.
When she stopped taking the birth control pills, her
breasts began to hurt severely. She felt out of place at
the sports school and in her own body, but the shot-put was
a way to measure up, to fit in. By 1986, she had become the
European champion.
"The only thing I could do was sports," Krieger said. "I
got to travel, I received recognition. I got the feeling
that I belonged. That's what I wanted, to belong. From my
point of view, I deserved it. I had worked hard. To
question whether these were hormones I was being given, I
didn't ask or suspect."
Clearly, though, the steroids had a profound effect on her
performances. And Heidi received drugs in large doses. As a
16-year-old, she put the shot just over 46 feet. Three
years later, she pushed beyond 65 feet 6 inches. Trainers
and doctors referred to her as Hormone Heidi.
According to medical research records uncovered by Brigitte
Berendonk, a onetime West German Olympian, and her husband,
Dr. Werner Franke, a molecular biologist from Heidelberg,
Heidi Krieger received 2,590 milligrams of Oral-Turinabol
in 1986, the year she won the European championship.
"That's about 1,000 milligrams more than Ben Johnson got in
1988," Franke said in a telephone interview, referring to
the Canadian sprinter who was stripped of his gold medal at
the Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, after testing
positive for the steroid stanozolol.
After the Fall
Eventually, Heidi's powerful muscles and strenuous workouts
began to overwhelm her joints and skeletal system.
Retrieving a training log from June 1988, Krieger displayed
a regimen indicating that Heidi lifted more than 100 tons
of weights in a two-week period. Such physical strain took
a toll on her knees, hips and back, and by 1991, her career
ended.
That same year, Berendonk's seminal book about East German
doping, "From Research to Cheat," appeared. But even after
Heidi's mother showed her the book, which detailed Heidi's
steroid dosage, she did not want to believe that her
performances had been achieved through doping rather than
simply by skill and determination.
"Even then, I was in denial," Krieger said.
Retired,
unemployed, the social safety net of her country no longer
available to soften her fall after reunification, Heidi
began to experience a deepening sense of dislocation,
despair and ambiguity about her sexual identity. She never
had a relationship with a man. She did have relationships
with two women, but did not consider herself a lesbian,
Krieger said.
By 1994, Heidi grew so depressed one day that she filled
her tub with water and sat inside with a razor blade,
intending to slit her wrists, seeing the blood flow in her
mind, Krieger said. At that moment, Heidi's dog, a shepherd
named Rex, nuzzled her arm, signaling it was time for a
walk.
"The dog nudged me with that cold nose and it was like a
shock, like I woke up from a dream," Krieger said.
In 1995, Heidi met a transsexual and began considering a
sex-change operation, Krieger said. Two years later, she
had her breasts removed and underwent a hysterectomy and
other surgical procedures to begin the process of becoming
a man known as Andreas.
Eventually, Andreas accepted that Heidi's athletic
performances had been fraudulent. This left him feeling sad
and angry, Krieger said. Heidi had trusted her coaches and
trainers as if they were surrogate parents. But the
officials gave her drugs that pushed her in a certain
direction, Krieger said, denying her the most important
decision she could make.
"I didn't have control," Krieger said. "I couldn't find out
for myself which sex I wanted to be."
By May 30, 2000, Andreas was ready to confront in a Berlin
courtroom the former East Germany's top sports official,
Manfred Ewald, and the top sports doctor, Manfred Höppner.
As described in the book "Faust's Gold," (St. Martin's
Press, 2001) written by an American psychologist, Dr.
Steven Ungerleider, Andreas had a dramatic encounter with
the presiding judge.
First, Andreas presented a wrinkled photograph of himself
as Heidi. Then he said of the East German officials, "They
just used me like a machine."
He described hating his body, and spoke of a mind "crazy
with panic," filled with thoughts of suicide. He told of
the sex-change procedure, and in a moment of brutal
poignancy, said of his mother, "She says no matter who I
am, boy or girl, she will always love me."
Ewald and Höppner were both convicted of accessory to the
intentional bodily harm of athletes and were given
probation. Upon testifying, Andreas said he lost his fear
of the two men. And he got some confirmation of his beliefs
from the verdicts.
"The words used in court were that the giving of relatively
high doses of Oral-Turinabol to a girl around puberty has
significantly contributed to development into
transsexuality," said Franke, the molecular biologist whose
research into the East German doping system formed the
basis of the criminal prosecutions.
Although the complex decision to have a sex change could
not precisely be connected to steroids, the psychologist
Ungerleider said, "Emotional fallout from high levels of
testosterone can make people unsure who they are."
Facing Life Today
In a twist to his story, Andreas
Krieger is again receiving hormones every three weeks, this
time as therapeutic injections to maintain his maleness.
The hormones are more benign versions of the testosterone
derivatives that East German officials fed him. He still
feels depression near the end of each hormonal cycle, and
he worries that he is at a higher risk of cancer.
Still, Andreas said, "It's better than I had before."
In
Krause, his wife, and her daughter, Katja, he has a renewed
sense of family and belonging. And Ute understands what
Andreas experienced as an athlete in a way that does not
need words. As a swimmer, she had her own problems,
developing bulimia in an attempt to stem weight gain from
steroids. She struggled with bulimia for 20 years, she
said, and once tried to kill herself by swallowing sleeping
pills and vodka.
"Since we have been together, she has not thrown up,"
Andreas said.
Ute manages a pair of nursing homes as Andreas struggles to
find a job in graphic design in a region with high
unemployment. When they watch sports, it is with a certain
skepticism about doping. Now, when he sees a woman throw
the shot more than 65 feet, Andreas said, "I know this is
not only from drinking water."
He is adamant that athletes caught using drugs should be
treated as criminals and banned permanently from sports.
And he considers it hypocritical for other countries to
hire coaches from the former East Germany. Through it all,
Andreas keeps Heidi close, memories pressed between the
pages of a scrapbook.
"I have to accept that Heidi is part of my history,"
Andreas said. "The more open I am, the less problems I
have. Less than if I try to deny her."
Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2004 06:56:33 -0800
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MAGDEBURG, Germany, Jan. 20 - Andreas Krieger opened a
shopping bag in his living room and spilled out his past:
track and field uniforms, a scrapbook and athlete
credentials from the former East Germany.
The photos on the credentials looked familiar, but the face
was fuller and softer, the hair covering the ears and
draping down the neck. This was Heidi Krieger, the 1986
European women's shot-put champion, perhaps the most
extreme example of the effects of an insidious,
state-sponsored system of doping in East Germany.
The taking of pills and injections of anabolic steroids
created virile features and heightened confusion about an
already uncertain sexual identity, Krieger said,
influencing a decision to have a sex-change operation in
1997 and to become known legally as Andreas.
"They killed Heidi," Krieger said.
More than 14 years
after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and more than three
years after criminal trials resulted in convictions of East
Germany's top sports official and sports doctor, Krieger
and a number of other athletes are still trying to resolve
legal, medical and psychological issues related to the
secretive doping program that was known by the Orwellian
euphemism of "supporting means." Many of the athletes were
minors at the time and say they were given
performance-enhancing drugs without their knowledge.
Karen König, a retired swimmer, filed a civil lawsuit
against the German Olympic Committee, contending that it
inherited more than $2.5 million in assets from East
Germany upon reunification in 1990 and thus bears
responsibility to assist the former East German athletes.
She is seeking $12,500 in a test case, and as many as 140
former East German athletes, including Krieger, are
deciding whether to file similar complaints. Last month, a
state court in Frankfurt ruled that König's case could
proceed. Indications are that the case could be settled out
of court, according to German news reports.
Jens Steinigen, König's lawyer, said in a telephone
interview that he was also exploring the possibility of
suing the pharmaceutical company VEB Jenapharm, formerly
state-run and now a subsidiary of the Schering AG Group.
According to evidence in the criminal trials of the late
1990's, Jenapharm produced the steroid Oral-Turinabol that
was given to East German athletes.
"We won't be able to make these wrongs undone, but the
athletes can still use the money for medicine or therapy,"
Steinigen said.
As Krieger sees it, no amount of money could restore his
health, which he considers harmed by steroid use and
secondary effects. He experiences such intense discomfort
in his hips and thighs, from lifting massive amounts of
weight while on performance-enhancing drugs, that he can no
longer sleep on his side. Only the mildest physical
exertion is tolerable. Long unemployed, he now works two
days a week as a clerk for a real estate agent.
On Tuesday, the same day that President Bush called for an
end to steroid abuse in American sports in his State of the
Union address, Krieger again told his own story, feeling
compelled to shed more light on one of the darkest chapters
in the history of performance-enhancing drugs.
As many as 10,000 East German athletes were involved in a
state-sponsored attempt to build a country of 16 million
into a sports power rivaling the United States and the
Soviet Union, recent trials and documents of the East
German secret police have revealed.
An estimated 500 to 2,000 former East German athletes are
believed to be experiencing significant health problems
associated with steroids, including liver tumors, heart
disease, testicular and breast cancer, gynecological
problems, infertility, depression and eating disorders.
Some female athletes have reported miscarriages and have
had children born with deformities like club feet.
In 2002, two years after the criminal trials ended, the
German government established a compensation fund of $2.5
million for the doping victims, with a maximum payout of
$12,500. Only 311 athletes, however, made claims - Krieger
among them - by the deadline of March 31, 2003, according
to Birgit Boese, a board member of Doping Victim Aid, an
assistance group.
Some athletes were unaware of the fund, while others were
embarrassed, afraid of losing their jobs, unable to gain
full access to their medical files or unsuccessful in
convincing doctors that their ailments were directly
related to steroid use, Boese said.
"There was a lot of denial and still is," Boese said of the
athletes. "Many have never, or only now, understood that
they were abused by people they trusted."
Some of the most outspoken have faced harassment and
threats. Ines Geipel, a retired East German sprinter who
chronicled the doping system in a book, "Lost Games," said
she had been confronted at readings in 2001 by former East
German officials. As recently as Jan. 18, she said, an
anonymous phone caller told her, "You know there is not
much time left for you."
Neither she nor Krieger has been deterred.
"People should
know what happened, what side effects can be generated,"
Krieger said, speaking through an interpreter inside a
concrete-block apartment building left from the Communist
days in Magdeburg, a 90-minute train ride west of Berlin.
As Andreas, he has a goatee, wide shoulders and a narrow
waist, and is handsome in a Three Musketeers kind of way.
Told this, his wife, Ute Krause, said, "D'Artagnan," and he
gestured as if sword fighting, saying "en garde" to an
imaginary foe.
When discussing the effects of doping, Andreas became
serious and animated, sometimes emotional, smoking
cigarettes and nervously rubbing his palms. When he was
Heidi Krieger, scratching of the hands became a compulsive
act and sometimes drew blood.
Though Krieger said he was happy, his life remains
complicated. At 38, he is married to Krause, 41, a former
East German swimmer. They met in Berlin at the criminal
trials. Before Ute and Andreas were wed, he explained to
her teenage daughter, Katja, that he, too, was once a girl.
Katja accepted his explanation and her mother and Andreas
married in May 2002.
Theirs began as a desperate kind of love. Ute and Andreas
were former elite athletes, damaged by steroids, betrayed
by coaches and officials they trusted and eager to testify
against them. Both were once given to thoughts of suicide.
They leaned on each other for information and support
during the trials. Both had come to believe their
drug-fueled performances were no longer legitimate.
Andreas's gold medal from the 1986 European championships,
now part of a trophy designed as a steroid molecule, is
given as an annual award to Germans involved in anti-doping
efforts. Ute keeps a framed certificate of her 1978 world
rankings in the backstroke in a symbolic location, over the
toilet.
He is glad that he became a man, Krieger said, explaining
that Heidi felt out of place and longed in some vague way
to be a boy. What makes Krieger angry, Krause said, is a
belief that the steroids essentially made the decision for
Heidi, leaving her unable to sort out her sexual identity
on her own.
"They pushed her out of her sex," said Geipel, the former
sprinter and writer who is a friend of Krieger's.
A Teenager's Torment
In 1979, at age 14, Heidi Krieger
began attending the Sports School for Children and Youth in
Berlin. It was affiliated with the powerful sports club
Dynamo, which was sponsored by the Stasi, the East German
secret police.
At 16, Heidi began to receive round blue pills wrapped in
foil. This was the steroid Oral-Turinabol, but coaches
typically called them vitamins that would increase strength
and help the athletes endure the stress of training. In
Heidi's case, the Oral-Turinabol was given in tandem with
birth control pills.
Six months later, Heidi's clothes no longer fit and she
felt "like the Michelin Man or a stuffed goose," Krieger
said. By the time she was 18, she weighed 220 pounds, had a
deep voice, increased body and facial hair and appeared
mannish. On the streets of Berlin, Krieger said, Heidi was
derisively called a homosexual or a pimp. Once on a
commuter train, in the presence of her mother, she was
called a drag queen. She went home, removed her skirt and
never wore one again.
At the airport in Vienna, where Heidi had gone for a track
meet, a flight attendant gave her directions to the men's
bathroom. Even later, as she considered a sex-change
operation, Krieger said, a psychologist asked, "So you want
to change from a man to a woman?"
The insults stung, but Heidi kept taking the blue pills.
She had wild mood swings, from depression to aggression to
euphoria. Once, she swiped at a boxer who had taunted her.
When she stopped taking the birth control pills, her
breasts began to hurt severely. She felt out of place at
the sports school and in her own body, but the shot-put was
a way to measure up, to fit in. By 1986, she had become the
European champion.
"The only thing I could do was sports," Krieger said. "I
got to travel, I received recognition. I got the feeling
that I belonged. That's what I wanted, to belong. From my
point of view, I deserved it. I had worked hard. To
question whether these were hormones I was being given, I
didn't ask or suspect."
Clearly, though, the steroids had a profound effect on her
performances. And Heidi received drugs in large doses. As a
16-year-old, she put the shot just over 46 feet. Three
years later, she pushed beyond 65 feet 6 inches. Trainers
and doctors referred to her as Hormone Heidi.
According to medical research records uncovered by Brigitte
Berendonk, a onetime West German Olympian, and her husband,
Dr. Werner Franke, a molecular biologist from Heidelberg,
Heidi Krieger received 2,590 milligrams of Oral-Turinabol
in 1986, the year she won the European championship.
"That's about 1,000 milligrams more than Ben Johnson got in
1988," Franke said in a telephone interview, referring to
the Canadian sprinter who was stripped of his gold medal at
the Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, after testing
positive for the steroid stanozolol.
After the Fall
Eventually, Heidi's powerful muscles and strenuous workouts
began to overwhelm her joints and skeletal system.
Retrieving a training log from June 1988, Krieger displayed
a regimen indicating that Heidi lifted more than 100 tons
of weights in a two-week period. Such physical strain took
a toll on her knees, hips and back, and by 1991, her career
ended.
That same year, Berendonk's seminal book about East German
doping, "From Research to Cheat," appeared. But even after
Heidi's mother showed her the book, which detailed Heidi's
steroid dosage, she did not want to believe that her
performances had been achieved through doping rather than
simply by skill and determination.
"Even then, I was in denial," Krieger said.
Retired,
unemployed, the social safety net of her country no longer
available to soften her fall after reunification, Heidi
began to experience a deepening sense of dislocation,
despair and ambiguity about her sexual identity. She never
had a relationship with a man. She did have relationships
with two women, but did not consider herself a lesbian,
Krieger said.
By 1994, Heidi grew so depressed one day that she filled
her tub with water and sat inside with a razor blade,
intending to slit her wrists, seeing the blood flow in her
mind, Krieger said. At that moment, Heidi's dog, a shepherd
named Rex, nuzzled her arm, signaling it was time for a
walk.
"The dog nudged me with that cold nose and it was like a
shock, like I woke up from a dream," Krieger said.
In 1995, Heidi met a transsexual and began considering a
sex-change operation, Krieger said. Two years later, she
had her breasts removed and underwent a hysterectomy and
other surgical procedures to begin the process of becoming
a man known as Andreas.
Eventually, Andreas accepted that Heidi's athletic
performances had been fraudulent. This left him feeling sad
and angry, Krieger said. Heidi had trusted her coaches and
trainers as if they were surrogate parents. But the
officials gave her drugs that pushed her in a certain
direction, Krieger said, denying her the most important
decision she could make.
"I didn't have control," Krieger said. "I couldn't find out
for myself which sex I wanted to be."
By May 30, 2000, Andreas was ready to confront in a Berlin
courtroom the former East Germany's top sports official,
Manfred Ewald, and the top sports doctor, Manfred Höppner.
As described in the book "Faust's Gold," (St. Martin's
Press, 2001) written by an American psychologist, Dr.
Steven Ungerleider, Andreas had a dramatic encounter with
the presiding judge.
First, Andreas presented a wrinkled photograph of himself
as Heidi. Then he said of the East German officials, "They
just used me like a machine."
He described hating his body, and spoke of a mind "crazy
with panic," filled with thoughts of suicide. He told of
the sex-change procedure, and in a moment of brutal
poignancy, said of his mother, "She says no matter who I
am, boy or girl, she will always love me."
Ewald and Höppner were both convicted of accessory to the
intentional bodily harm of athletes and were given
probation. Upon testifying, Andreas said he lost his fear
of the two men. And he got some confirmation of his beliefs
from the verdicts.
"The words used in court were that the giving of relatively
high doses of Oral-Turinabol to a girl around puberty has
significantly contributed to development into
transsexuality," said Franke, the molecular biologist whose
research into the East German doping system formed the
basis of the criminal prosecutions.
Although the complex decision to have a sex change could
not precisely be connected to steroids, the psychologist
Ungerleider said, "Emotional fallout from high levels of
testosterone can make people unsure who they are."
Facing Life Today
In a twist to his story, Andreas
Krieger is again receiving hormones every three weeks, this
time as therapeutic injections to maintain his maleness.
The hormones are more benign versions of the testosterone
derivatives that East German officials fed him. He still
feels depression near the end of each hormonal cycle, and
he worries that he is at a higher risk of cancer.
Still, Andreas said, "It's better than I had before."
In
Krause, his wife, and her daughter, Katja, he has a renewed
sense of family and belonging. And Ute understands what
Andreas experienced as an athlete in a way that does not
need words. As a swimmer, she had her own problems,
developing bulimia in an attempt to stem weight gain from
steroids. She struggled with bulimia for 20 years, she
said, and once tried to kill herself by swallowing sleeping
pills and vodka.
"Since we have been together, she has not thrown up,"
Andreas said.
Ute manages a pair of nursing homes as Andreas struggles to
find a job in graphic design in a region with high
unemployment. When they watch sports, it is with a certain
skepticism about doping. Now, when he sees a woman throw
the shot more than 65 feet, Andreas said, "I know this is
not only from drinking water."
He is adamant that athletes caught using drugs should be
treated as criminals and banned permanently from sports.
And he considers it hypocritical for other countries to
hire coaches from the former East Germany. Through it all,
Andreas keeps Heidi close, memories pressed between the
pages of a scrapbook.
"I have to accept that Heidi is part of my history,"
Andreas said. "The more open I am, the less problems I
have. Less than if I try to deny her."
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