Medal Machine Grinding to Halt : East Germany: After years of special treatment, sports programs must struggle to survive in democratic society.

Within the last four months, the East German Gymnastics and Sports Federation (DTSB) has changed leadership three times.

A former vice president committed suicide, allegedly because he was involved in a financial scandal that was about to be uncovered. Coaches and athletes have been lured to the West with promises of luxury apartments, cars and hard currency.

“It is like living on a volcano,” DTSB Secretary Werner Neumann said this week. “There are new eruptions every day.”

But on Sunday, the DTSB, once known as the Miracle Machine for turning a country of 16 million into an international sports super power on a level with the Soviet Union and the United States, faces its most serious crisis.

Accustomed to generous government support, DTSB officials will find on that day that the well has run dry. In deference to the incoming government, the outgoing government of Prime Minister Hans Modrow has not submitted a new budget. The previous budget expires March 31.

“This is a very traumatic time,” said Neumann, second in charge of East Germany’s sports administration. “The main problem is the money. We don’t know how much the government will give us. To be realistic, we demanded the same amount as last year. But we need more.”

He is not optimistic. Although the former government under Erich Honecker used Olympic medals to advertise his Communist system’s efficiency, none of the parties running in last week’s free elections even had a sports policy.

Neumann said he recognizes that the winners, the Alliance for Germany, have more important priorities, including the economy, the environment and reunification with West Germany.

“If only we had concentrated on the economy or the environment before, instead of sports,” he said.

But it is reunification, not the economy or the environment, that dominates discussion in both countries. While many athletes are opposed to reunification because it will increase competition for places on national teams, most sports officials favor it. That is true even at the DTSB, which, with the realization of one Germany, will become obsolete.

Sports officials on both sides of the border initially predicted there would be a united German team in 1992, when the Winter Olympics are held in Albertville, France, and the Summer Olympics in Barcelona. Recently, however, most officials, including Neumann, had determined that a more realistic target is the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, in 1994, when the Winter Games start an alternating system with the Summer Olympics.

In either case, the Miracle Machine has no more future than the Trabant, the East German compact car that has the horsepower of an average American lawn mower.

“If there will be two German teams in Albertville and Barcelona, East Germany will rank from sixth to 10th in medals,” Neumann said. “That is a fair assessment of the development we have now.”

Considering that East Germany has had more Olympic success than any country except the Soviet Union since 1976, finishing second in gold medals and total medals in both the Winter Olympics and the Summer Olympics of 1988, one might think such a prediction would be accompanied by a tinge of regret. On the contrary, he said it is an indication that the DTSB, like the government, is putting its house in order.

Another indication was gathering dust in the hallway outside his office, a bundle of propaganda pamphlets prepared by the former government relating physical fitness and athletic success to Communism. The pamphlets will be disposed of, as were the DTSB’s Departments of Ideology and Culture.

“You cannot say that East German sports were all bad,” Neumann said. “Certainly, the results were good.

“But high-performance sports were misused by the Communist regime as a means to project itself to the world and prove that this society was the best.

“So there were privileged sports, those that guaranteed a medal maximum, such as track and field, rowing, swimming and canoeing. And there were sports that were discriminated against, such as basketball, tennis, table tennis, ice hockey, triathlon and car racing.

“Then there were leisure sports, which were completely neglected. If Kristin Otto had finished swimming, the swimming hall was closed. If Katarina Witt finished training, one of the few ice rinks we had in the country was closed to the public. So there was some resentment against high-performance sports.

“That is the reason top athletes are attacked now in the public and the press. It’s not their fault. They have achieved great things. But they were used by the party and the state leadership.”

In an attempt to provide balance, the DTSB has given all 41 of its national federations, including a new one for disabled sports, equal voices. With that eventually will come equal shares of the money from the government. Last year, that amounted to about $204 million, not including the additional $240 million that the government gave to army and police sports.

“As we move toward equality of sports, there are a lot of problems that have to be solved,” Neumann said. “When you think of 41 federations, that is not very much money.”

As a result, the DTSB has employed the former general secretary of its track and field federation, Heinz Czerwinski, as its marketing agent.

He signed Western sponsors for some sports that have high visibility here--Volvo and Grundig, a West German electronics company, for track and field; Spaten, a West German brewery, for bobsled; Kaufhof, a West German supermarket chain, for team handball; and Wella, a West German cosmetics company, for women’s volleyball.

Czerwinski said a sport such as track and field will have more money than before. Although some winter sports federations did not enter international competition this year for financial reasons, he said track and field could afford for the first time to send runners to last weekend’s world cross-country championships in France.

He said he eventually will find money for all sports.

“If East Germany is not as successful in future Olympics, it will not be for lack of money,” he said. “That is an optimistic view, but I think it is also realistic.”

Neumann disagreed.

“You need government assistance,” he said. “Some think we can live from sponsors, but that is impossible. If you have quality, you have sponsors. If we lose our quality, sponsors will not be here.”

East Germany’s decline in sports is inevitable, he said.

“The secret of our success was in finding the talented children and giving them qualified coaching in ages 10, 11, 12, 13 and so on along with a network of competitions,” he said. “There was close cooperation among athletes, coaches and physical therapists.”

But the system already is collapsing, starting with the sports schools. Athletically gifted children were recruited by the DTSB at young ages, placed in schools that specialized in certain sports and prepared to become medal winners.

About three-fourths of the families that were approached to send their children to the schools agreed, simply because successful athletes had privileges that were beyond average East Germans.

“Sports schools are still in existence, but we don’t know how the new minister of education will decide to use them,” Neumann said.

“In some schools, we had five kids and seven teachers. It was very expensive. Already, we have signs from the minister of education that we have to reduce the number of teachers and increase the number of students.”

Similarly, the sports college in Leipzig that trained coaches had been ordered by the government to expand the curriculum and open its doors to other students.

“It will be a regular, independent university,” Neumann said. “We hope it will continue to support us, but we can’t behave in the old authoritarian style and tell them to subordinate themselves to our goal of making medals.”

The research center connected to the college also faces changes. Because of the secrecy surrounding previous activities there, sports officials in other countries suspected all sorts of nefarious projects, many of them involving performance-enhancing drugs.

Neumann acknowledged that there was a small percentage of “black sheep” among East German athletes who used drugs. He said 13 athletes among 5,000 tested positive last year.

But he denied that the practice was encouraged by the DTSB. He said many of the experiments in Leipzig simply duplicated similar research in other countries, including the United States.

“There was a veil of secrecy that was completely unnecessary,” he said. “There are no secrets among experts.”

The army and the police, which supported many of East Germany’s postgraduate athletes, also are decreasing the amount of money they spend on sports. And sports clubs, often connected with the sports schools and funded by factories to provide subsistence for athletes not associated with the army or the police, are cutting back.

“You must be very positive that man is a free man now,” Neumann said. “He can do whatever he likes. He can use his talents and creativity to develop the way he wants.

“We want to continue high-performance sports. But it must be based on the will of every individual and the will of the society as a whole.

“We are a small country. We have only 16 million people. We can’t concentrate on just winning medals. We must make society enjoyable for everyone.”