Two stories dominate the history of doping in gymnastics. The first is a story of incompatibility: the widespread belief that performance-enhancing drugs simply don’t work in a sport built on precision, balance, and spatial awareness rather than brute strength. The second is a story of geography: the assumption that systematic doping was an Eastern Bloc problem, a product of Communist sports systems that treated athletes as instruments of national prestige. Both narratives contain elements of truth. But both also obscure a more complicated reality.
The case of Eberhard Gienger dismantles both myths at once. Gienger was not an East German athlete subjected to a centralized doping program. He was a West German star—1974 world champion on high bar, 1976 Olympic bronze medalist, inventor of the Gienger release, and later a member of the Bundestag (the lower house of the German federal parliament)—and decades after his competitive career ended, he acknowledged using anabolic steroids. His admission unsettles the comfortable boundaries of doping history. Doping in gymnastics was not impossible. And it was not uniquely Communist. It was, instead, embedded in a broader landscape of sports medicine, scientific authority, and permissive norms that transcended Cold War divides.
A Brief History of Doping in West Germany
Beginning in the 1960s and accelerating through the 1970s, West German sport developed what scholars have called a “culture of doping”—a diffuse, decentralized system supported by sports physicians, university laboratories, and tolerant athletic federations.¹ Anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, insulin, and other substances circulated widely in elite training groups, often under medical supervision. Officially, anti-doping rules existed; in practice, enforcement was inconsistent, and testing regimes were weak. Athletes and coaches operated in a gray zone where performance-enhancing drugs were accessible, normalized, and seldom punished.
Unlike East Germany’s state-directed model, the West German system relied on networks rather than directives. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Federal Institute of Sports Science (BISp) funded studies on anabolic steroids and peptide hormones—research framed not as doping but as legitimate scientific inquiry into performance optimization.² The Hamburg–Berlin research group later concluded that this scientific infrastructure helped normalize doping by providing institutional legitimacy and technical cover.
International pressures reinforced the pattern. As West German federations compared their results to those of the GDR, many adopted a tacit acceptance of pharmacological “support.” Coaches who resisted found little institutional backing; others embraced the emerging medical logic of “restorative” substances. Because West Germany lacked a centralized directive, it also left behind fewer paper trails. The 2013 BISp report notes that missing or incomplete records make full reconstruction impossible, but the available documents are clear: doping in the Federal Republic was neither marginal nor accidental—it was woven into the fabric of high-performance sport.³
Eberhard Gienger’s Admission
Eberhard Gienger’s 2006 admission did not describe a sustained doping regime so much as a single episode shaped by the ambiguities of its era. In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, he recalled that after a serious postoperative setback—his leg circumference shrinking six centimeters overnight—he received “an anabolic steroid for about eight days,” a treatment he described as restorative rather than enhancing.⁴ In a follow-up statement to SID (the Sport-Informations-Dienst, Germany’s main sports news agency), he emphasized timing: “The intake dates to a time before 1976, the year international sport began sanctioning these substances. Anabolics were banned in competition back then, but in training, not at all.”⁵ For Gienger, then a CDU member of parliament (the Christlich Demokratische Union, Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union) and soon to be DOSB Vice President for Elite Sport (the Deutscher Olympischer Sportbund, Germany’s national Olympic committee), the episode belonged to a medical past in which the rules were unsettled and testing barely existed.
The regulatory landscape was more nuanced than Gienger described. The minutes from the IOC General Session in 1967 declared anabolic steroids to be “doping from the Olympic viewpoint.” Morally and medically, they were thought of as prohibited—appended to meeting minutes with warnings about jaundice, cardiovascular damage, and stunted growth—but they were not yet banned in the sense that mattered most: inclusion on the enforceable testing list. The IOC left steroids off that list entirely because no reliable assay existed for testing. Thus, throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, anti-doping policy contained a fundamental contradiction: steroids were condemned in principle but unenforceable in practice. Only after the development of radioimmunoassay and gas-chromatography/mass-spectrometry techniques did the IOC formally add anabolic steroids to its prohibited list in May 1975.⁶ At the 1976 Montreal Games, eight athletes tested positive and were sanctioned.⁷
A regulatory gap, however, is only part of the story. The other part lies in how physicians operated within that gap—and here, Gienger’s account points directly to the figure who shaped his medical care. Gienger’s steroids came from Freiburg orthopedist Armin Klümper, one of the most influential—and later notorious—figures in West German sports medicine. Gienger had long defended him; in 1997, he joined other former athletes in signing a newspaper advertisement praising Klümper against what they portrayed as public envy.⁸ But in 2006, he offered a more candid description: “Professor Klümper was a doctor who prescribed very generously. Over time, I realized I couldn’t possibly take all the medication he gave me. I would carry it back to the pharmacy. Quite an arsenal would accumulate if you didn’t do that.”⁹ Eventually, he said, he stopped taking everything home—“only a part of them, those I thought would be enough.” Klümper’s medical empire would soon become infamous; in 1987, one of his patients, heptathlete Birgit Dressel, died after ingesting more than 120 medications simultaneously.¹⁰
While Gienger believed he had a medical reason to take steroids, not all experts agreed. Heinz Birnesser, former Olympic doctor and then head of Sports Orthopedics and Traumatology at the University Hospital Freiburg, rejected such justifications outright: “Administering anabolic steroids was always medical nonsense in high-performance sport because it disrupts hormone metabolism.”¹¹ His critique cut against both Gienger’s recollection and the broader medical culture that made such treatments possible, underscoring the central question raised by Gienger’s admission: when detection was impossible, rules were fragmented, and physicians wielded enormous authority, who determined where legitimate treatment ended and doping began?
The Burden Athletes Were Never Meant to Carry
Comparatively, Gienger’s episode seems almost quaint. His steroid use lasted scarcely more than a week, occurred in a regulatory gray zone before the IOC formally added anabolic steroids to its enforceable banned list, and was framed as therapeutic recovery rather than engineered advantage. In a landscape now shaped by the memory of state-sponsored doping programs and industrial-scale pharmacology, his story feels small.
But his admission contains a quieter and more troubling detail—one easy to overlook amid the timelines and testing protocols. “I couldn’t possibly take all the medication he gave me,” he said of Armin Klümper. He described returning handfuls of drugs to the pharmacy, keeping only the ones he thought “would be enough.”12 The image is jarring not just because it implies misconduct, but because of what it reveals: an elite athlete standing alone in front of a mountain of medication, forced to make choices he never should have had to make.
It is tempting to treat his story as an aberration, a relic of an era when rules were vague and oversight was weak. But the same dynamic persists today—often involving substances that are perfectly legal. Even if Gienger’s example is extreme, it highlights a recurring reality: athletes are still routinely asked to navigate medical decisions they are not trained to make. How many ibuprofen tablets before training is too many? How many Toradol injections before competition cross the line from pain management to coerced risk? At what point does “getting through it” become something closer to harm?
These questions extend far beyond the outdated pharmacology of the 1970s. They reach into the daily routines of modern sport, where the substances may be legal, the prescriptions documented, and the intentions framed as therapeutic—yet the burden of determining what is acceptable still falls, too often, on the athlete. To be sure, today’s athletes tend to be far more informed than their predecessors, yet even today, as athlete-welfare scholars repeatedly note, competitors—no matter how experienced—operate within medical and sporting hierarchies in which expertise, authority, and risk are unevenly distributed.¹³ No amount of experience can compensate for a structure that routinely asks athletes to judge medical risks that remain contested even among specialists.
Which leaves us with an uncomfortable question—one that echoes across generations, even as substances, regulations, and terminology have changed. So, who will ensure today’s athletes no longer have to decide for themselves what “enough” really is?
Notes
- “West Germany Cultivated ‘Culture of Doping,’ Report Says,” ESPN, August 5, 2013; “Systematic Doping of West German Athletes Revealed,” The Guardian, August 5, 2013.
- Bundesinstitut für Sportwissenschaft (BISp), Doping in Deutschland von 1950 bis heute (2013); “Culture of Doping Revealed,” France 24, August 5, 2013.
- BISp, Doping in Deutschland (2013); Jens Weinreich, “Doping in Deutschland: Die ersten Berichte zum Forschungsprojekt,” 2013.
- “Eberhard Gienger: Habe Anabolika genommen.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 12, 2006.
- “Turnweltmeister Gienger hat Anabolika genommen.” Der Spiegel, May 12, 2006.
- Thomas M. Hunt, Drug Games: The International Olympic Committee and the Politics of Doping, 1960–2008 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011).
- Ibid.
- “Eberhard Gienger: Habe Anabolika genommen.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 12, 2006.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- “Turnweltmeister Gienger hat Anabolika genommen.” Der Spiegel, May 12, 2006.
- “Eberhard Gienger: Habe Anabolika genommen.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 12, 2006.
- See John Hoberman, Mortal Engines: The Science of Performance and the Dehumanization of Sport (New York: Free Press, 1992), esp. 113–42, on how medical authority in elite sport can eclipse athlete autonomy; Ivan Waddington and Andy Smith, An Introduction to Drugs in Sport: Addicted to Winning? (London: Routledge, 2009), 77–98, on the asymmetrical power relationships between athletes and team doctors; and Dominic Malcolm, “The Social Construction of Medical Knowledge in Sport,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 41, no. 3–4 (2006): 279–97, which shows that athletes rarely grasp the full implications of the treatments they receive.
