Two Doctors in Freiburg and One World Cup
The Paris 2024 Games, like every Olympics, brought conversations about doping back to the fore. Football, like just about every other sport, has at some point got itself caught up in a web of murky practices.
While East Germany was busy turning its athletes into state-sponsored superhumans during the Cold War, their rivals in the West weren’t exactly taking the moral high ground. But it took decades for the full extent of it to come to light.
Post-war West Germany was keen to show the world that it was back in business, and sport was the perfect way to do it. Winning became a national obsession. East Germany’s success in athletics didn’t go unnoticed, and the pressure was on for West German athletes, including footballers, to secure top spot.
With a potent mixture of national pride and competitive paranoia, West Germany’s sports authorities began turning a blind eye to the use of performance-enhancing drugs.
In the iconic 1954 World Cup final, West Germany toppled the Mighty Magyars of Hungary with a 3-2 win. ‘The Miracle of Bern’, the stuff of legends, a true underdog story…
Rumours have persisted that the West German players were given Pervitin, a methamphetamine that had seen plenty of action during the war, helping soldiers stay alert and fuel aggression.
The drug was reportedly part of a study at the University of Freiburg in the 50s for its performance-enhancing properties. Could that famous victory have been more science than miracle?
In 1966, the West Germans made it to the final at the old Wembley. But because they went on to lose to England in what is still the Three Lions' finest hour, there’s a footnote to this story that gets overlooked.
A letter from a FIFA official at the time mentioned ‘fine traces’ of the stimulant ephedrine in the blood of three West German players. Whether it was intentional doping or innocent over-the-counter medication is up for debate.
The aforementioned University Medical Center Freiburg was the sports science brain farm of West Germany. Here, Professors Joseph Keul and Armin Klumper were pivotal in developing and dispensing all sorts of special supplements to athletes, including footballers.
Klumper was known for his so-called ‘Klumper cocktails’, a blend of prescription drugs, off-label meds and straight-up performance enhancers. Sportspeople were treated like guinea pigs, often without a full understanding of what they were putting into their bodies.
For years, football enjoyed its free pass when it came to doping. While cycling and athletics became mired in scandal, the beautiful game seemed to glide above it all. But this wasn’t because football was clean - it was because no one was checking.
When athletes, coaches and officials in other sports turned whistleblower in the late 80s, we didn’t hear much about football. It was a lucrative business that didn’t want its reputation tarnished as other sports were dragged through the mud.
The 2006 Tour de France doping scandal was groundbreaking. The façade finally cracked and investigations revealed that doping wasn’t just a dirty little secret in cycling. It was a widespread issue across most competitive sports, and football was no exception.
A report from Humboldt University and the University of Munster in 2013 dropped the bombshell that doping had not just been rampant, but systematic, on both sides of the Iron Curtain and continued after reunification. Even though much of the report remains redacted to this day, it reveals enough to raise serious questions about the integrity of West German success stories.
Based on information from BBC Sport’s ‘East v West - Germany's drug-fuelled Cold War for medals’