HISTORY’S LOSERS : THE DISMANTLING OF THE EAST GERMAN SPORTS MACHINE

FEET POUNDING AGAINST THE TRACK, CHRISTINE Wachtel saw the finish line swim into view and felt the two Romanians close on her heels. She urged herself on, clenching her jaw in fierce determination. Just half a lap to go. The stands shook with the polyglot cheers of 85 nations as Wachtel flew across the white line, flinging her arms victoriously in the air. Pure rapture lit up her face. She had won. Again.

It was only an hour or so later that she strode back into the stadium in Seville, Spain, site of the 1991 World Indoor Track and Field Championships, to take her place on the awards stand. This time, though, Wachtel’s face was artfully frozen in the fathomless expression, that perfect blank, mastered by East Germans as small children. It is a look crafted to betray no emotion, draw no attention, offer no challenge, a look necessary in a society so riddled with informants that even church confessionals were bugged.

A gold medal, shiny-new, hung around her neck, and inside the packed stadium, they were hoisting her nation’s flag to honor the three-time world champion in the 800-meter run. Christine cradled an armful of roses and picked nervously at her unfamiliar turquoise warm-up suit that told the spectators she was representing the newly unified Germany. She stared vacantly at the red, gold and black banner, once the flag of only West Germany, as she heard the strains of a national anthem that will forever be known by the verse banned after World War II: “Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles.”

“It was an empty feeling,” Wachtel would later admit. “Everything went so fast, much too fast. You can’t grasp hearing one anthem, and six months later hearing a different one.”

A year ago, Christine Wachtel, one of the brightest stars on an astonishingly dominant East German women’s track team, could not even imagine wearing this uniform or paying respect to this flag or hearing this anthem played in her honor. But between the winning of her second and third gold medals in consecutive world indoor championships, the country Wachtel was born in, grew up in and ran for simply ceased to exist. The Germans call it Einheit . Unity. In history books, it will be recorded as the fairy-tale ending of a 40-year cold war, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the jubilant reunion of East Germany and West Germany.

With the 1992 Olympics looming, it would be logical to assume that united Germany is busily preparing for its debut as a veritable sports monster, powered by Christine Wachtel and all the other young talent inherited from defunct East Germany and its mysterious champion factory. It is easy to imagine sports officials greedily devouring all the secrets of success their old archrivals now must share, and pooling their Teutonic efficiency to build an even bigger Miracle Machine, one that could spew out winners well into the next century and elbow aside the United States and Soviet Union to become the ultimate sport nation.

But standing in a Spanish stadium one day early this spring, wearing a gold medal for united Germany, what Wachtel felt could scarcely be described as unity or jubilance; what she felt was not the energy of a new and powerful machine. What she felt was torn apart.

And, in many ways, what was happening to her--and to the rarefied world of East German sports--reflected what was happening to Germany as a whole during a unification process that had turned out to be far more painful than either side ever imagined. It had to do with the hard edge that exists between winners and losers, and with trying to surmount walls made of something more unyielding than concrete and barbed wire.

In the end, it seems, the story is not at all about Germany building a giant but about Germany destroying one.

NESTLED IN THE RURAL MIDDLE OF WHAT USED TO BE the German Democratic Republic, two country-road hours north of Berlin, the medieval town of Neubrandenburg is an unlikely mecca. But for decades that is how aspiring track-and-field stars have regarded it or, more precisely, the fenced-in Neubrandenburg Sports Club on its outskirts.

The club was one of 25 elite sports-training centers across the small country, where the best athletes were honed into Olympic material. Different clubs specialized in different disciplines, and Neubrandenburg was recognized as one of the top producers of world-class runners and jumpers--participants in all track-and-field events. To be granted admission to a club like Neubrandenburg, was considered a tremendous opportunity. For sport was East Germany’s obsession, its glory and, above all, its ticket to the world.

“Sport was a weapon against the west,” says Peter Busse, the Interior Ministry official overseeing the athletic merger of east and west. “The entire system was run from above by a Communist central commando, and there was only one goal--to bring East Germany recognition in the world.”

Busse recalls how Walter Ulbricht, the first leader of the GDR, was fond of saying that East Germany’s ambition came “clad in training suits.”

Minus that ambition, East Germany would have been just another oppressive nation behind the Iron Curtain, a country so desperately cruel that it issued shoot-to-kill orders against its own people should they try to escape. Athletic achievement allowed a different escape, though. The breathtaking grace of an ice skater, or the clean jackknife of a high diver, or the triumphant smile on Christine Wachtel’s face--this, occasionally, let people on both sides of its bloodstained frontier shift the focus away from the mean realities of life in East Germany. It spelled fame instead of notoriety.

By the time East Germany merged with West Germany last October 3, it had reaped 519 Olympic medals, nearly 37% of them gold, in a wide range of disciplines. A country of about 16 million people--roughly half the population of California--East Germany ranked third in the world of international sport, behind only the Soviet Union and the United States.

While the west has eagerly adopted the prize athletes from the east, the blueprint for their success is being erased. Without the almost unlimited support the sports machine enjoyed under the corrupt regime of Communist leader Erich Honecker, its various parts are facing destruction--the community centers where young talent was spotted and the elite clubs such as Neubrandenburg and the Leipzig College of Physical Culture, which turned out legions of highly trained coaches.

Already, thousands of the professionals who staffed the system have joined the ranks of Germany’s unemployed. The numbers are staggering. “West Germany had 1,500 paid coaches and functionaries, for all sports. East Germany had 12,000. In track, West Germany had 16 top coaches; East Germany had about 500,” says Busse. “Almost every athlete (in the east) had his own coach.” In addition, an estimated 1,800 doctors in East Germany treated only athletes. There were state masseurs, physical therapists, sports psychologists and scores of scientists whose research was aimed at improving East Germany’s athletic performance--through biomechanics, state-of-the-art equipment and virtually undetectable doping.

The Bonn government has made it clear that a democracy cannot support such a system financially, politically or morally. No matter how good it might have been. Five months after unification, Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble increased the federal sports budget 43%, earmarking 135 million of the 250 million marks for high-performance athletics in the five new states that comprise eastern Germany. The Track and Field Assn. oversees all the separate clubs, which are funded by a combination of state and federal support, corporate sponsorship and membership fees. But the lifeline supporting what remains of the machine will likely be disconnected after the 1992 Olympics.

“It has nothing to do with picking out the raisins,” Schaeuble insists. “It was never our goal to boost our international prestige through athletic success. Our primary concern is the top athletes in eastern Germany who have trained hard for years and should not be disappointed now that they stand at the peak of their athletic careers.”

But the new budget amounts to pocket change in comparison to the estimated half-billion or more marks the Communists annually invested, and those still hanging on in the east can’t help but be disappointed.

“We spent years building a pyramid of our talent,” explains Thomas Springstein, the 33-year-old Neubrandenburg coach whose women brought home six gold medals from the last European championships. “Every fourth child in the GDR was involved in organized sports. Those days are gone,” he laments. “We are history’s losers.”

CHRISTINE WACHTEL TOOK WHAT SHE describes as “the usual route” to the top of the pyramid. The middle of five children, Wachtel found her niche as an athlete when she was a little girl. She loved to run. Even now, after devoting 19 of her 26 years to track, she still describes running as her release, her “great and true joy.”

She began competing in school races at 8 and was spotted by sports officials who routinely visited every playground in the country, scouting talent from kindergarten on. She was invited to visit the regional training center for free professional coaching. Children signed up by these centers were given comprehensive medical exams to determine what sport they might excel in. Bones were measured, muscles weighed. A child might have yearned to be a pole-vaulter, but the choice was not up to him. If the shape of his hands suggested he could have a slight physiological advantage in swimming, then swimming it was.

A couple of years ago, for example, a Dresden school administrator was at first pleased when her 6-year-old son was selected for diving. She thought it would be an ideal opportunity for him to learn how to swim. When she brought him to the training center that first day, she was annoyed when parents were told they must wait outside. She felt a pang as her child was marched off to the pool. He seemed withdrawn when the lesson was over. They followed this routine for a few weeks, until one day, while driving home, the boy became distraught and began sobbing. He begged his mother not to make him go back. “It hurts my tummy,” he wailed. She stopped the car and pulled up his T-shirt.

“His stomach was fire-red,” she recalls. “I discovered that they weren’t teaching them to swim at all. They were making them jump from the high dive, then fishing them out of the water with a pole. If the kids balked or were frightened, like my son, then they picked them up and threw them belly-down into the water.” She never took her son back, but voicing any complaint would have been considered antisocial. It could have cost her her job.

Christine Wachtel was one of the lucky ones. She was born to run, and soon was winning medals at the Spartacus, a national junior Olympics that drew 8,000-plus young athletes a year. At 12, Wachtel passed another battery of physical tests and was invited to attend the Neubrandenburg Sports School. The country had 25 such boarding schools, all attached to sports clubs. The aim was to allow children to build every single day around their sport. If the childrens’ athletic performances did not reach certain expectations, they were expelled.

Even though she lived in the area, Wachtel chose to board at the school, going home on weekends. School lessons came second to the two, sometimes three, training sessions a day. The children’s diets were regulated according to their respective sports, to keep the shot-putters husky and the runners lithe. Since the Communist government was toppled, some athletes and sports officials have alleged that the daily dose of vitamins placed next to each child’s breakfast plate included performance-enhancing drugs. Others, including Christine Wachtel, deny that this occurred.

At 15, Wachtel began training with one of the country’s top coaches, Walter Gladrow. Many described their 12-year relationship as father-daughter-like, and the two became the pride of Neubrandenburg. After setting the junior world record in the 800-meters, she went on to place second in the 1988 Olympics, coming behind her training partner and another Gladrow protege, Sigrun Wodars Grau. That same year, in a competition in Vienna, Wachtel clocked a world indoor record time of 1:56.40. She and Gladrow might have personified the East German system: the intense nurturing, the ever-improving performances, a successful match of coach, athlete and training program. They had no reason to believe it would ever be different.

THE NIKE LOGO PAINTED ON THE NEUbrandenburg gymnasium looks out over the grounds like a gigantic orange eye. Below its unblinking gaze, the club’s young athletes saunter about in their new warm-up suits, providing a neon fashion show the kids never even dreamed of during the days when East German uniforms resembled baggy, blue-gray bowling shirts. Even the trash is colorful now, brimming with the shiny wrappers of Western candy bars and cigarettes and potato chips. In the administration building, workers are ripping up the ancient vinyl floor and putting down new carpeting. Carved wooden doors are being installed in the lobby near the booth where party security guards used to sit. The mood is one of self-satisfied bemusement, as if to say, “So this is imperialism!”

“My God, when you think about all that’s happened in just one year, it’s crazy!” Klaus Licht, co-administrator of the Neubrandenburg club, shakes his head in amazement.

In early 1989, Licht and others at Neubrandenburg could see the writing on the collapsing wall. The fall of East Germany would in all likelihood mean the end of the club. But Neubrandenburg also knew that it had a commodity of value to the world outside that wall.

In March 1990, after Honecker’s government had fallen but before unification was a sure thing, Nike International sent representatives to Neubrandenburg and persuaded club officials to sign a contract. The club considered its 1.2-million-mark (more than $800,000) deal particularly lucrative because Nike agreed to equip and support the entire club rather than just its star athletes. That meant the 12- and 13-year-olds would have new shoes and money for meets and training camps. Almost immediately, Nike sent a group of eight young athletes and their coaches to train in Australia, a far cry from the Communist facilities they used to train at in Bulgaria and Ethiopia.

Nike also signed separate contracts offering performance bonuses and stipends to Neubrandenburg’s world-class members. In the process, the Dutchman who represented Nike in the deal, Jos Hermens, quickly added the star Neubrandenburg women to his personal client list.

That August, the East Germans competed as a team for the last time, at the 1990 European track-and-field championships in Split, Yugoslavia. For the first time ever, the two German teams stayed in the same hotel and gave joint press conferences.

But it was hardly a joint result: The East Germans ran away with 34 medals, the highest total count and the highest number of golds in the meet. And a 20-year-old blond sprinter from Neubrandenburg, Katrin Krabbe, took home three golds.

By then, Germans were delirious with unification fever, and the mass media was hungry for a fresh face, a symbol. Overnight, Krabbe became the Great Blond Hope of united Germany. The press fawned over her long legs (she is 6-foot-1) and her ice-blue eyes. No part of her anatomy seemed to go unanalyzed. She was compared to Greta Garbo and Grace Kelly. A sex researcher even felt compelled to publicly comment that Krabbe’s victory smile reflected “a feeling on the level of orgasm.” A Zurich weekly concluded that the disgraced Communists could have elected their party chairman chancellor of united Germany if they had only had Krabbe as a poster girl.

The Neubrandenburgers’ manager, Jos Hermens, was besieged with requests, and Krabbe signed agreements to endorse hair products and clothing. Proposals for her own perfume were nixed. Recognizing her marketing potential and rewarding her Split performance, Nike sweetened Krabbe’s contract. Daimler-Benz gave her a Mercedes. Then she jilted her fiance and went on a romantic vacation with a Nike official. The tabloids followed.

“The attention has been just incredible, but stressful as well,” said Hermens, noting that Krabbe eventually went back to her boyfriend, and Nike found itself a new point man for the club. Krabbe opened her own sporting-goods store. German media and television viewers named her Female Athlete of the Year, surpassing tennis star Steffi Graf in popularity. Her coach told the Wall Street Journal that an interview with his sprinter would cost $2,000 for 45 minutes--photos extra.

“Krabbe is accepted all over Europe,” says Ian Campbell, Nike’s director of international sports marketing. “It’s very difficult to market a German sports star in Europe, for obvious reasons.” Katrin Krabbe was becoming a millionaire.

Christine Wachtel, however, was not. The club’s consistent winner, Olympic medalist and world-record holder was learning that in the new Germany, medals were not enough.

“WE TOOK OVER THEIR COUNTRY, AND they took over our team.” Heike Henkel can afford to say that with a smile; the westerner’s spot as united Germany’s dominant high jumper seems secure. But it was tense uncertainty, not confidence, that set the mood early this year when east and west met, and merged, in Dortmund at the German Indoor Track and Field Championships. It didn’t help that the press was publishing a steady stream of documents indicating that the East German government had, in fact, regularly doped many of its athletes.

Not only would unified Germany’s track stars be crowned at Dortmund, the German national team would be formed by the results. The officials were keenly aware of the differences that separated the two sides. “We made the team bigger to give more chances,” says Horst Blattgerste, director of the German Track and Field Assn. Stricter doping controls were also initiated. But nothing alleviated the disunity behind locker-room doors. As Sandra Seuser, a relay runner from the west, put it: “Everyone runs the easterners down, saying they were good because they were all doped, that they never had everyday worries like we did. Suddenly it’s hopeless . . . the easterners are simply better, and you probably won’t even make the team. “ In fact, at Dortmund, the easterners scored seven golds, and the westerners five. Even Ulrike Sarvari, the No. 1 sprinter for the west, sidelined by injuries and overshadowed by easterners, didn’t make the cut.

For their part, the easterners suffered a disorienting culture shock: They were winners and outsiders at the same time. “There’s so much to think about now,” says Beate Anders, an easterner and world-record race walker. “It’s not all rosy.” Nike manager Hermens reports that his new clients had been so cosseted in the past, they looked to him to run their lives. They wanted him to tell them where to eat, to make their travel plans, even to make sure they made flights on time. Amid a culture of individuals, they missed the old team spirit. “The mood,” says Anders, “is completely different.”

At an international meet in Paris a few weeks after Dortmund, the combined women’s team made its debut. Of a six-nation field, including the Soviet Union, united Germany placed first. But wariness, not celebration, accompanied the win. “At the team meetings,” says Henkel, “there are a lot fewer westerners, and you feel like a guest.” Sandra Seuser, whose showing at Dortmund guaranteed her a spot as the sole westerner on the 4x400-relay national team, had heard rumors that her new teammates didn’t want her. When the coach for the event, an easterner, offered her a chance to run the individual 400-meter, she suspected a conspiracy. Seuser knew she didn’t have a chance of winning individually; the competition was too fast. At the Paris meet, she confronted the coach. “He never said he wanted an all-eastern team, but it’s what I thought,” she admits. “He was stunned when I told him. He never meant that at all. He was incredibly nice and reassured me that I was welcome on the team.”

In Paris, other misconceptions were also laid to rest. When she was leaving Berlin for the meet, Seuser ran into her new teammates at the airport. The easterners, who lived and breathed track, knew everyone’s face and times. They greeted Seuser by name, though they’d never met her. At the Paris hotel, the 25-year-old West Berliner hung back as everyone else chose roommates. She felt like the last second-grader picked for dodge ball. Then one of the easterners, Anett Hesselbarth, grinned at her. “C’mon,” she said, “I want you to room with me.” To Seuser’s astonishment, they stayed up all night, gabbing in their pajamas.

The Paris meet was not among the most important world track competitions. Despite their strong showing, the German women had to consider their triumph preliminary. Katrin Krabbe had run to form in the 200-meter race and taken the gold. The eastern women also collected golds in the 1,500-meter and in the long jump. Impossible to say is whether another gold medal might have been won that day. Christine Wachtel, the world’s fastest woman in the 800-meter race, was conspicuously absent. She had exercised her new freedom and was locked in a battle over her Nike contract and her membership at Neubrandenburg. Neubrandenburg had filed a protest, and Wachtel was banned from competition for a month. With just weeks to go before the championships at Seville, one of Germany’s best athletes wasn’t even allowed to compete.

IN THE MONTHS AFTER THE SPLIT, YUGOslavia, competition, nobody was begging Christine Wachtel to pose for hair-spray ads and fashion layouts. Then Mazda made her an offer: The car company wanted to put its logo on her uniform. But Wachtel quickly discovered that Neubrandenburg’s contract gave Nike exclusive rights.

Late in the fall, she and another promising Gladrow protege, Yvonne Mai, who competes in various events, broke ranks. First, they left Jos Hermens and hired a new management team: Robert Wagner, an Austrian sports reporter, and Cubie Seegobin, an American consultant. And then they began negotiations with Nike for a better deal. At stake was not just money and fair play but their ties to Neubrandenburg, the club that had created them. If Nike and Wachtel could not come to terms, if she instead signed with a corporate competitor such as Adidas, she would have to leave the club.

The forces that were pushing Wachtel into rebellion had also pushed at her coach, Gladrow. When the Nike people first came around Neubrandenburg, they were eager to sign up Gladrow as part of the deal. But Gladrow declined. During his youth, his parents separated along with his country; his father moved to West Germany. The father’s freedom came at the price of his son’s. Even though he was one of East Germany’s top coaches, Gladrow was never granted permission to travel abroad with the track team, not even when some of his athletes made the 1976 Munich Olympics. Anyone with relatives in the west was considered a security risk. But at meets in the east, Gladrow befriended a West German representative of Adidas. Sometimes Gladrow would slip the man a letter to his father. The Adidas rep played postman for years, at no small risk. If the ever-present secret police had caught him carrying one of the letters on East German soil, he could easily have landed in prison. So when Neubrandenburg became a Nike Club, Gladrow was torn. He could not accept money from an Adidas rival.

Instead, Gladrow chose a middle ground. He lives off the modest salary the Bonn government pays and keeps his ties to Neubrandenburg, but he also keeps a personal distance from Nike. “I have no job security,” Gladrow, 57, admits. It’s a major understatement. Because the cost of living in eastern Germany is lower than in the west, the Bonn government pays eastern coaches such as Gladrow only half of what their western counterparts earn. And the contract runs for just one year.

Walter Gladrow is a pensive man, the kind who can be found alone in his office late in the afternoon staring into the dark swirls of coffee in his delicate china cup. He can tick off the names of former colleagues, world-class coaches who are now being re-trained to sell insurance or to work in banks, or who have ventured out on their own, such as the man who bought a catering truck and rides around town selling bananas. He says that through it all--even the trouble between Wachtel and Nike--he has felt fortunate. He refuses to dwell on the negative: “I believe overall in the goodness of people, and their sense of fairness,” he insists.

Christine Wachtel’s battle with Nike dragged on for more than two months and left a bitter taste in many mouths. Like Katrin Krabbe’s, her private life quickly became entangled in her professional one--and Nike supporters gossiped that her close relationship with Cubie Seegobin was really behind all the trouble. In the end, Nike would not give Wachtel what she thought she deserved. She was released from her contract, and she immediately signed with Adidas. Even Hermens admits that Nike had snapped up Neubrandenburg’s best at bargain-basement prices (“Nobody even knew then when unification might be,” he said later. “You couldn’t just go in there and play Santa Claus. The contracts were lower than the west.”). He estimates that Wachtel now earns 20,000 marks more than she would have with any of Nike’s offers, though he asserts that “she would have been happier with us.” (He also maintains that Krabbe, who has yet to repeat her Split success, earns at least three times as much as Wachtel every time she runs--not counting her commercial endorsements.)

Seegobin recalls the atmosphere last winter with indignation. “All Christine wanted was to be treated fairly,” he fumes from his Southern California home. “She never wanted to leave that club. It was her club. She was Neubrandenburg’s oldest member. She had to leave because of a contract and an American sponsor.

“They compare Krabbe to Christine Wachtel,” he says. “They saw Krabbe selling shoes for them. What has Krabbe done except be beautiful and blond and have a good body and run well sometimes? In East Germany, athletes were always treated according to their performance. The west comes in there now, and it becomes a marketing fiasco. Now it’s more about who’s beautiful and who’ll do what for you.”

Last December, as the negotiations in Neubrandenburg were fast falling apart, Seegobin brought Wachtel and Mai out to Irvine to train with some of the other athletes he manages. Wachtel was an emotional wreck.

“The whole thing caused Christine a lot of pain and heartache,” he says. “There were a lot of times when she cried and cried. She never wanted to hurt Gladrow or make him unhappy.”

In California, she ran one meet in Adidas shoes and was listed as a member of another club. Neubrandenburg filed a protest, saying she had not properly notified them of the switch. Wachtel was banned and missed the German national championships and the debut of the united German team in Paris. Although her suspension prevented her from competing in the nationals, Wachtel, contrary to the usual federation rules, was still allowed to start for Germany at the more important international events such as Seville.

“Maybe if she had been even five seconds slower,” says Henneng Eisfeld, track-and-field editor for the German sports news agency, SID, “nobody would have cared. But she was the clear favorite to win the gold medal at Seville.”

When asked who she was training with back then, her answer was sad and curt: “Myself.”

HORST BLATTGERSTE OF the German Track and Field Assn. tries to make sense of the turmoil the east-west merger has caused in German sports. “It’s not possible to say we’re one plus one and therefore two,” he explains. “Maybe one plus one only adds up to 1 1/2 here.” At the association’s headquarters in Darmstadt, Blattgerste counts what has survived, so far. Fourteen of the 25 clubs in the east have been saved for one year, with six designated as Olympic nerve-centers.

“We cannot help every situation,” he says. Only 35 of the 614 full-time East German track-and-field coaches have full-time contracts in united German track. However, many of the laid-off coaches can still be found at the clubs, training their athletes without pay.

All German athletes preparing for the Summer Olympics in Barcelona next year receive up to 1,500 marks ($870) a month in “sports help,” but the stipend is not enough to live on. Sigrun Wodars Grau plans to begin studying sales this fall, right after she completes what she now considers a useless education in coaching. “I don’t think I’d find work,” the 25-year-old Neubrandenburger says. “It’s sad. But it’ll work out. I’m not the only one.”

Neubrandenburg was chosen as one of the Bonn-supported clubs and an Olympic center. Blattgerste thinks it stands a good chance of surviving the transition period. “They saw which way the wind blows, and changed. You can see very quickly who’s flexible and who’s not.” In addition to the Nike contract, Neubrandenburg, after 40 years of operating in secrecy, opened its doors to the public last year and now offers aerobics for senior citizens and sports for the disabled.

At much greater risk in the equation is the sports school. “Someone once asked me when unification would be perfect,” says Heinz Kleeberg, the principal. “I’ll tell you exactly when: when we stop saying ‘you’ and start saying ‘we.’ You can’t just throw a whole country away like a shirt that goes to the laundry and comes back clean.”

Kleeberg has a school full of youngsters who will probably spend their lives struggling with this lesson. Like many of the eastern coaches, Kleeberg worries about the next generation--the adolescents who were in the middle of the sports pyramid, the ones who launched careers under a socialist security net that no longer exists.

They don’t yet realize, he says, that the hothouse nurturing they’d come to expect under the medal-mad Communist reign is no longer possible. “Their understanding of democracy is ‘I’ll do what I want,’ ” Kleeberg says.

In the old days, he adds, “sports came first. The sports club would tell us when they were going to train and when we could teach.” Exams were scheduled around meets, and pupils who didn’t meet athletic-performance goals were sent back to their regular schools in disgrace. “Their little worlds collapsed,” Kleeberg recalls. “It wasn’t exactly humane.”

Now the school itself may not make the cut. The 213 students don’t pay tuition, and Neubrandenburg’s home state, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, which is now responsible for all its schools, is far too poor to underwrite a sports academy. The state funding is there for another year, but after that? Kleeberg shrugs.

The place is a shambles. Despite all the money that went to sports in East Germany, the school’s cheap vinyl floors have surfer-ready waves in them. The kitchen is straight out of 1940--the hundreds of daily dishes are still done by hand. The roof leaks. The old brown-coal heating system never worked; classroom temperatures would dip down below 40 degrees, and children would be sick all winter. They used to heat the shots for the shot put in warm water before training. Kleeberg’s wife worked evenings as housemother in the boarding school and would come home and sit in a hot bath just to get warm. After officials from the Interior Ministry visited last year, the government immediately paid for a new heating system. There won’t be many more such quick fixes, Kleeberg knows. Now the students have to concentrate harder on their studies and think about careers beyond sports. As athletes, they used to automatically receive coveted admission to universities. Now, even vocational training is competitive, and apprenticeships are disappearing as firms cut back their payrolls, or go bankrupt. The situation is so grave that the Interior Ministry has approved hiring guidance counselors at the sports clubs.

But without this part of the pyramid--the hand-chosen, single-minded junior athletes--there can be no more miracles, the eastern experts warn. Mega-stars in united Germany, according to Neubrandenburg’s Thomas Springstein, will soon be one of two things: “Flukes or fanatics.”

BY THE TIME THE WORLD indoor championships rolled around in March, Christine Wachtel and Neubrandenburg had called a cease-fire, agreeing that Wachtel would run one final race for her old club before becoming the property of rival Rostock. The switch would really be in name only, but Wachtel had learned that her name “is no small thing.”

Walter Gladrow had been named an Olympics coach for the 800-meter, and since Wachtel was prime Olympics material, she will be training with him, after all. Something from the Miracle Machine had endured westernization--the bond between a young woman yearning to be the best and the coach devoted to her dream. After Wachtel burst across the finish line in Seville, some of her western teammates spotted Gladrow weeping in the stands. They assumed it was because it hurt him to think of his protege winning for the side always referred to as “the enemy.”

Katrin Krabbe didn’t even make it to the finals in Seville. Predictably, her rivals sniped it proved she previously had been doped, although she has consistently tested clean. Krabbe blamed it on the flu and cheerily noted, “My marketing value doesn’t seem to have suffered especially.” Her coach, Springstein, thinks she had wasted too much time signing autographs and posing for pictures. “In her free time, she used to be able to catch up on her sleep and relax, “ he complains. “Performance isn’t the focal point now. We never had to think about building an image before.” The entire atmosphere left him disgruntled; Springstein began talking about finding work abroad.

Beate Anders set a world record in race walking in Seville, but told the press that she could not identify with a united Germany. This win, she said, belonged to her, and to her coach.

Sandra Seuser also helped set a world record with her three eastern teammates in the 4x400-meter relay. When they fell into tearful embraces on the track, Seuser didn’t hang back.

Sprinter Ulrike Sarvari flicked on the television set at home and watched the Seville meet. “It gave me a funny feeling to see them in our uniform,” she remarked of the East Germans. It was even stranger not to be wearing the uniform herself.

The Germans finished second overall in Seville, one gold medal behind the Soviet Union’s seven, but well below the dozen golds German officials had boldly predicted for their first major test as a united team. With all that had happened, it wasn’t surprising that Seville saw no public burst of patriotism from the Germans.

“We Germans, after the last World War--” Blattgerste struggles to explain. “Well, nationalism was, quite simply, a bad thing. . . . Very seldom can you see our athletes running with their flag around the stadium.” Privately, though, some feelings ran much deeper than anyone realized in Seville.

When he saw Christine Wachtel defend her world title for the third time, Walter Gladrow felt his heart swell and tears fill his eyes. “I learned the German anthem as a child,” he remembers. “I had a very unique feeling when this hymn was played for her. It was beautiful.”

Back in Neubrandenburg, Wachtel dropped by the club for the traditional victory celebration. Just as they had in the old days, the two administrators bought flowers for the unbeatable team of Walter Gladrow and Christine Wachtel. The four of them ate cake in the cafeteria and sat for a few minutes afterward, trying hard to find something to say. Wachtel’s face remained closed, as if she were staring blankly again at a flag she did not recognize. Only when the others had left did she speak of her hopes for the future.

“Time heals all wounds,” is what she said.