Petra Schneider was not sure at first whether or not to assist Sharron Davies’s marketing campaign to get promoted to Olympic gold when the pair met within the former’s residence 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 value addressing.
However then she listened to Davies politely press her case, highlighting the frustration of shedding 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 assist you,’ Schneider mentioned of Davies’s try to steer 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 speedy 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 drugs, which had been later revealed to be the steroid Oral Turinabol.
Inside a 12 months her time for the 400 metres medley — the occasion by which 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) received 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 unintended effects, together with a disrupted menstrual cycle, elevated physique hair and deep voice.
As early as 1978, she had come to suspect that the drugs contained one thing ‘forbidden’, however felt she had no alternative apart from to stay with the crew. ‘Even then I requested myself, “Is it value it, although it’s making you sick?”’ she mentioned. ‘However we thought success would show us proper.
‘Right now I see it in another way, however I used to be caught within the system. I had no different alternative. In any other case I’d 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 advised to take 4 drugs every day, however docs 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 mentioned 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 tissue round her coronary heart turning into infected.
It could show to be the primary of a litany of well being points. ‘I’ve had fixed issues,’ added Schneider, who was married with a toddler 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 way 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 question she is wounded by the conflicting response to her function. 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 ideas that she was complicit within the dishonest.
‘You musn’t overlook what it was like for the East German swimmers,’ she advised 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’d have completed precisely what she did. I don’t condemn them in any respect.’
Schneider’s assist offered an necessary plank to the case that Davies and the documentary crew offered to Francois Garrard, then the director common 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 prompt 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 drugs that turned out to be steroid Oral Turinabol
Mail Sport have additionally prompt 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 necessary precedent by selling Davies and different rivals overwhelmed by East Germans to their rightful medals.
We’ve additionally prompt that the IOC recognise the struggling of the East German athletes, permitting them to maintain their medals — the medals must be shared, we recommend — 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 numerous concord,’ she mentioned of that filmed encounter in a subsequent interview, printed within the guide Accused: Youngster Doping. ‘She invited me to England. I’d like to drive over, however one way or the other I don’t have the arrogance.’
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