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.
