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Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce,

Media, Politics
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Sport under communism: behind the

East German miracle
a
Alan McDougall
a
University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada 2013, Alan McDougall
Published online: 07 May 2013.

To cite this article: Alan McDougall (2013) Sport under communism: behind the East German
miracle, Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics, 16:6, 841-843, DOI:
10.1080/17430437.2013.795384

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17430437.2013.795384

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 Sport in Society 841

Having covered their Caribbean adventure myself, I can confidently suggest that the
Afghans, now that they have made the cut are determined to stay at the top, a belief
reinforced by Albone. This determination was evident when Aimal Shinwari, the chaste
English-speaking CEO of the Afghan team, almost pleaded with journalists in Barbados to
write about their adventure. Unlike other teams participating in the competition who had
all opted to stay away from the media, the Afghans put out all stops to ensure that the media
got every opportunity to interact with the players and report on their life stories. They
wanted their stories told and justly so. It was the story of a new Afghanistan, not the nation
ravaged by the Taliban but one of hope and intensity. It spoke of a new dawn in Afghan
history and cricket, as Albone demonstrates, had played a huge part in bringing it about.

Boria Majumdar
University of Central Lancashire, UK
cristorian@yahoo.com
Downloaded by [Tufts University] at 10:30 27 October 2014

q 2013, Boria Majumdar

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17430437.2013.791491

Sport under communism: behind the East German miracle, by Mike Dennis and
Jonathan Grix, London, Palgrave MacMillan, 2012, xiv 261 pp., 55 (hardback), ISBN
978-0-230-22784-2

At the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal, the communist German Democratic Republic
(GDR), home to just 17 million inhabitants, won 90 medals. It finished second in the medal
table, behind the Soviet Union and ahead of both the USA and West Germany. Following
its breakthrough at the Munich Games 4 years earlier, the East German teams eye-
catching performance in Montreal cemented the GDRs position as the worlds leading
sports nation, an unofficial title that granted the country international and domestic respect
that it lacked in many other areas.
The causes of this sports miracle were, from the outset, hotly debated. Responding to
a reporters question in Montreal about the deep voices of the womens swimming team,
the East German coach Rolf Glaser tersely remarked: They didnt come to sing, they
came to swim (123). After communism collapsed, the systematic nature of drug use in
elite sport was publicly revealed, proving that the suspicions of the 1970s were well
founded. On a short list of tropes of the defunct East German state alongside the Berlin
Wall, the Trabant car and the Stasi (secret police) muscular, all-conquering female
athletes would feature prominently. Yet, as Mike Dennis and Jonathan Grix show in their
new study, doping neither encapsulates nor fully explains the story of sport under East
German communism.
Dennis and Grixs book offers the first scholarly, English-language study of the GDR
sports system. Drawing on a range of archival material as well as judicious use of existing
literature, it probes the hidden layers of the countrys sports behemoth. The aim is twofold:
first, to illustrate sports role as an exemplar of the contested nature of the East German
dictatorship. If there was a sports miracle, Dennis and Grix conclude, it was not based on
the smoothly oiled sports machine of Cold War mythology, but rather on successes
achieved in the face of institutional and personal rivalries that frequently caused the
machine to malfunction. Second, Sport under Communism places GDR sport in a
comparative context, arguing that much of what characterizes elite sport development in
 842 Book Reviews

modern-day democracies such as Australia, Britain and Canada can be traced, directly or
indirectly, to the GDRs path-breaking model.
After early chapters discussing the political use of sport and the evolution of the GDRs
elite sport programme, the book focuses on key topics that speak to the authors over-
arching themes. The regimes widely praised system of youth talent development is first
held up to critical examination. The evidence presented suggests that a variety of factors
from the obstructive role of parents to the waste inherent in a rigid pyramid system (76)
that overlooked late bloomers allowed talented sportspersons to slip through the net. The
weighty subject of doping is accorded two chapters, examining, respectively, the origins
and growth of the GDRs drug programme; and the morally and legally fraught post-
unification attempts to bring doping perpetrators to justice. Attention then turns to the
problem child of football. In this hugely popular contested sphere, local, regional and
institutional rivalries in conjunction with schematic training programmes and the global
competitiveness of the sport made it difficult for players to replicate the international
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impact of their peers in swimming or athletics. Football was among East Germanys most
popular recreational sports. In Chapter 7, the authors illustrate how the virtuous cycle of
sports development promoted by the East German authorities, in which elite and mass sport
are mutually reinforcing, was more myth than reality. During the 1970s and 1980s, there
was a vast gulf between the resources lavished on performance sport and the neglectful
provision of mass sport facilities and equipment. Although Olympic teams trained at
specialist centres in the latest Adidas clothing, recreational swimmers encountered run-
down pools and aspiring marathoners faced shortages in the supply of running shoes.
Dennis and Grixs book serves as an excellent introduction to the institutions and
policies that underpinned East German sport. For the uninitiated, negotiating the plethora
of organizations and individuals involved in this process can be a daunting task. Sport
under Communism lucidly introduces the key players, such as Manfred Ewald, the
authoritarian head of East German sport from 1961 to 1988; and Erich Mielke, Stasi boss,
football fanatic and chairman of the Dynamo sports club. It explains with equal clarity how
the three-tier sports system worked, or was meant to work. Echoing recent scholarship,
there is an emphasis here on the political in-fighting and institutional enmities that
complicated policy implementation and highlight the sometimes fragmented structures of
communist power. Even in the highly centralized field of doping, individual coaches and
organizations such as Dynamo and the army sports club (Vorwarts) marched to their own
tune. In football, entrenched territorialism made central planning all but impossible.
Another virtue of Dennis and Grixs work is to situate GDR sport in a comparative
framework. Often viewed sui generis, as an atypically ruthless attempt to subvert fair play,
the East German system did not exist in a vacuum. It was part of the international trend
towards professionalization that has characterized elite sport since the 1960s. On the issue
of doping, for example, the authors show how the gap between the GDR and its major
political and sporting rival, West Germany, was not as large as has often been assumed a
conclusion that endorses recent culturally focused histories of Cold War Germany, which
emphasize the similarities, rather than the differences, between the two states. The link
between the GDR model of elite sport development and those aggressively adopted by
contemporary democracies reminds us that the East German legacy remains influential
beyond the drugs issue. A hands-on government approach that fosters a professional
sporting environment, in which youth talent development, top-class facilities, high-quality
coaching and the latest sports science combine to create Olympic success: Ewalds vision
has been taken up by sports administrators across the world since the GDRs
disappearance in 1990.
 Sport in Society 843

Sport under Communism is more effective as an institutional than as a social history.

Though attempts are made to include the peoples voices through a selective examination
of Eingaben (petitions) to the authorities on sports-related issues, there are no interviews
with players, officials or fans. The books source base rich material from the central
party and Stasi archives tends to reinforce a top-down, institutional approach to the
history of GDR sport, even as the authors convincingly argue that this history was more
complex and multi-layered than such sources might suggest. Mass sport is given only one
short chapter. The conclusion that the provision of recreational facilities and equipment
declined from the late 1970s onwards, as a result of the GDRs growing economic crisis,
does not sufficiently recognize the similar problems that existed two decades earlier (and
the complaints that were also made then). The decline of the GDRs final decade was,
arguably, less about decline per se than it was about raised expectations.
The books emphasis on the final 20 years of communist rule is understandable, given
that many of the milestones of the sports miracle such as the 1969 high-performance
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directive (which focused attention and money on specific Olympic sports); the finalization
of an integrated talent-spotting system (1973); and the introduction of State Plan 14.25
(1974), the key document in the GDRs clandestine doping programme occurred at the
start of this period. Nonetheless, there is a sense in which, not only in the field of mass
sport, the more chaotic developments of the 1950s and early 1960s are under-represented.
More generally, the book might have engaged in greater depth with some of the key
theoretical debates in GDR studies. Sophisticated discussion on, for example, the
character of the communist dictatorship, the nature of state-societal relations or the
significance of the GDRs petition culture is largely absent.
Though not without shortcomings, Dennis and Grixs book provides a highly
informative, carefully researched and clearly argued introduction to East German sport,
one that places in its proper context the infamous distribution of 5 mg blue tablets of the
steroid Oral-Turinabol to unsuspecting minors. For anyone interested in understanding
sports contentious role in legitimizing the East German state and the central position
occupied by the GDR model in post-1989 approaches to elite sport development, it can be
strongly recommended.

Alan McDougall
University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada
amcdouga@uoguelph.ca
q 2013, Alan McDougall
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17430437.2013.795384

Deafness, community and culture in Britain: leisure and cohesion, 1945 1995, by
Martin Atherton, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2012, xi 224 pp., US$100
(hardcover), ISBN 9-78-071908467-6
Deafness, Community and Culture in Britain is a highly informative text which sheds fresh
light on socio-cultural understandings concerning deafness within British society. Utilizing
1945 1995 as its temporal focal point, the monograph delivers on its pledge to provide:
a more detailed understanding of how deaf people interacted with each other and the
surrounding hearing world, the social and cultural behaviour of British deaf people in leisure