This week Craig Lord reported on SwimVortex that Kornelia Ender has turned 60 years old. It is a lovely article, balanced and sincere; well worth a read. Here is the link:

https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=swimvortex

Craig Lord discusses the paradox of Ender’s career. On the one hand you had the multiple Olympic medalist who broke 29 world records. On the other hand Ender was the victim of a massive state drug abuse program. Lord calls it a life of “irony and sorrow”; wonderful and accurate words to describe Ender’s participation in the East German drug heist.

The abuse was unimaginable. But it was my personal contact with a coaching participant that brought me face to face with the cruelty of that period. Shortly before the Berlin Wall was destroyed in 1989 I read that the East German women’s coach, Mike Regner, had escaped to West Germany. Mike was extremely well known. He was acknowledged as the East German expert on altitude training. He had also played a leading role in coaching the successful East German women’s team at the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games. At the Games East German women won 10 Gold Medals in the 15 event women’s program. Mike had worked closely with illustrious names such as Kristin Otto, Heike Friedrich, Silke Horner and Daniela Hunger.

At the time I was looking for a coach for our club and wondered if Mike would consider moving to New Zealand. I had no idea how to get in contact with him but contacted the West German Embassy in Australia and asked if they could find out if Mike was interested in talking to me. A couple of weeks later the Embassy called back to say they had spoken to Mike. He was interested in talking about a job in New Zealand. They gave me a phone number in Frankfurt.

In half an hour we had worked out the terms of his employment. In a week he was in New Zealand. In a month he was settled in a pool coaching swimmers that included New Zealand backstroke champion, Sharron Musson.

There is no question Mike knew how to coach. Every day I watched him work I learned. He used drills I had never seen before – Chicken Wings and Otter for example. He excluded drills I used – One Arm Freestyle and Backstroke for example. He had rules I found interesting – “If you want someone to swim like a fish, they must feel like a fish,” for example. He balanced aerobic, anaerobic and speed training in unusual and interesting ways.

If Swimming New Zealand (SNZ) had listened to Mike Regner they could have saved themselves many hundreds of thousands of dollars on wasted high altitude camps. But they never did. Here, in New Zealand for free, SNZ had access to the world’s leading authority on altitude training. Training that, in one Olympic Games, had been used to prepare ten Olympic Champions. But would they use him? Not SNZ – they knew best. There was no way they were going to ask someone employed by David Wright. Far better to waste a million dollars than do that. The ridiculous 2017 camp in Arizona before the last World Championships is the most recent example of waste that listening to Mike Regner could have avoided.

After a month in New Zealand I knew Mike well enough to ask the question, “Mike, I know you are a good coach. You do things on the side of a pool I have never seen before. Why was it in East Germany you needed to cheat? Why did you use drugs? You probably could have won many of those medals without drugs.”

Mike took a diary out of his briefcase. He opened it and pointed to an entry that said the name of a swimmer and in German beside the name, “Zum meizinischen Zentrum.”

“Do you know what that says?” he asked. “It says to the medical center.”

Page after page was the same. The name of a swimmer followed by, “To the medical center.” Mike then argued that, yes he knew what was happening but as an officer in the East German army he had no option but to obey orders. If he hadn’t, his wife and boy and he would have been jailed or worse. I have never been entirely convinced by that type of, an order is an order, “Nuremberg Defense”.

But probably the argument that changed my mind occurred at the first National Championships after Mike arrived in New Zealand. The CEO of SNZ came and sat down beside Gary Hurring, Mike and me. I introduced him to Mike. Without pause the CEO launched into a full assault. He said Mike should know that SNZ were not happy he was in New Zealand. Mike’s name was permanently associated with a corrupt regime. Mike had done nothing to prevent the abuse of drugs. The sooner he left New Zealand the better.

Mike was deadly calm and quietly said he was sorry SNZ felt that way. He said he was interested to hear SNZ ask what he had done to prevent the East German drug abuse. Mike then explained what he had done was to collect his wife and little boy in the middle of the night in order to cut and crawl through two barbed wire fences, past sweeping search lights and sentry posts. Being caught meant instant death. Leaving behind parents and grandparents also put them in terrible danger. That is what Mike had done to get out of the drug culture of East German sport. What, Mike asked the CEO of SNZ, had he done that could compare? As is normal with SNZ the CEO got up and walked away. In the three years Mike was in New Zealand SNZ never spoke to him again.

Craig Lord is right. That story highlights the “irony and the sorrow” of state drug abuse. The state sponsors deserve nothing but contempt and punishment. But there are many victims inside and outside the system. In my view Mike’s question is as relevant today as it was when he was in New Zealand. What has SNZ or Gerrard or Cotterill or Johns or WADA or FINA or the IOC done today to bring an end to the current Russian or Chinese abuse of drugs that could compare with crawling between two barbed wire fences, waiting for shots to signal detection. Nothing is the answer. And that is truly ironic and sad.