COMRADES IN ARMS : Wilkins, Schmidt Taking Another Whirl at Olympics Without Wall in Between

The video cassette is a Mac Wilkins production, created three years ago as an instructional guide for throwing the discus, something he has done with world-class success for 15 years. Wilkins took the cassette from the bookcase next to the television in his living room and inserted it into the VCR. It opens with the competition at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, where he won the gold medal. But the image on the screen was of the man who finished second, East Germany’s Wolfgang Schmidt.

Only 22, Schmidt already was considered Wilkins’ equal. But he would have had difficulty convincing anyone of that in Montreal until his sixth and final throw. That is the one Wilkins captured on the cassette. Displaying his perfect made-in-East Germany form, extracting the maximum leverage from his 6-foot 6-inch, 250-pound frame, Schmidt hurled the discus 217 feet 3 inches, behind the 25-year-old Wilkins’ winning throw of 221-5 but ahead of John Powell’s 215-7.

Schmidt raised his arms in triumph. He did not win the gold medal, but he denied the United States a one-two finish.

From out of the shadows, and into Schmidt’s moment of glory, dashed Wilkins, long-haired and bearded in the counter-culture style of the day, draping his immense arms around the East German’s midsection and bear-hugging him. What was Schmidt to do but put his arms around Wilkins?

Almost 12 years later, in the living room of the home he shares with his wife and young son, Wilkins activated the VCR’s slow motion option so that his visitors could read the inscription on the film.

“Dedicated to Wolfgang Schmidt. Former world-record holder and, since 1981, a political prisoner in his native East Germany. He is a friend and a fine competitor . . . a man who loved to throw the discus.”

Minutes later, Schmidt knocked on Wilkins’ door, having arrived in the used Cougar he bought upon arriving for a three-month stay in San Jose. Allowed to leave East Germany on Nov. 2, the man who loves to throw the discus came here in early February to train with Wilkins. Now 34, Schmidt’s goal for 1988 is to compete in his third Olympics, this time as a West German.

Wilkins, 37, also is attempting a comeback. Although he announced his retirement after his second-place finish in the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, he began training again this winter. If he finishes among the top three at the U.S. track and field trials in July, he would earn a berth on his fourth Olympic team. But his thoughts on this occasion were of his first Olympics, in Montreal.

Even though he won the gold medal, he arrived in the interview room afterward to find that a number of U.S. journalists were offended by his reaction to Schmidt’s silver-medal throw. All of them were aware by then of the cool relationship between Wilkins and Powell. Wilkins was a liberal former teacher, Powell a conservative policeman. They had little more in common than Wilkins and Schmidt.

By the tone of their questions, it was apparent that some journalists believed Wilkins tried to humiliate Powell by hugging Schmidt. A few even implied that Wilkins’ action was anti-American. He tried to explain that he simply was overcome by a friend’s clutch performance. When he determined that he was speaking to closed minds, he became sarcastic.

“Maybe I was just happy because Wolfgang didn’t beat me ,” Wilkins said last week, now able to joke about the experience.

“I was just answering questions and telling the truth and turning into a real bad guy. Unfortunately, it confirmed my perception of my country’s understanding of the Olympic Games and my event in particular. They didn’t really understand much about it at all.

“In a very general sense, I was painted as a bad guy because of my friendship with Wolfgang and my admiration for his talents, and he had some consequences to pay because of his friendship with me. His price, of course, was much higher than mine.”

THE ARREST

On July 2, 1982, in East Berlin, Schmidt was on his way to a workout in his white, Soviet-made Lada sports car when he noticed in his rear-view mirror that he was being followed by four unmarked cars.

His reaction, he said in an interview, was to step on the accelerator, try to outrun them. They had followed him before, but he sensed this time that they had been sent to do more than frighten him.

Who could have guessed it would come to this? Schmidt was a national hero, decorated by East German President Erich Honecker with the Order of Service for the Fatherland, the country’s most prestigious award. Four times, he was named an Athlete of Outstanding Merit. Twice, he was selected to carry the flag for the East Germans in international competitions.

Along with the silver medal in the 1976 Olympics, he won the World Cup in 1977 and 1979, beating Wilkins both times, and the European championships in 1978. He broke Wilkins’ world record in 1978 with a throw of 233-5, a record that stood until 1983. In 1979, Schmidt was undefeated and ranked No. 1 in the world for the fourth time.

Because of the boycott by numerous Western nations, including the United States, Schmidt was the prohibitive favorite to win the gold medal in Moscow’s 1980 Summer Olympics. Hampered by a foot injury and harassed by hostile spectators, who were boisterous in their efforts on behalf of Soviet throwers, he finished fourth. On his exit from Lenin Stadium, he expressed his frustration by shaking his fist at the crowd.

“On the fifth throw, I get injury,” Schmidt said, his English improving daily with the help of Wilkins, who speaks some German. “I complete sixth throw, but it has no chance. I throw maybe 45 meters (147-8). The people are laughing and also whistling. Very loud. I was so angry.

“If you think you are with a friend and you see it is not a friend, you are disappointed. Very. I was very disappointed.”

Schmidt said he believes East German officials decided then to make an example of him, using him as a warning to other athletes of the consequences if they did not conform. Upon his return to East Berlin, he said, all but one his competitions outside the country were canceled and his coach was reassigned.

Although Schmidt still finished the 1981 season ranked No. 2 in the world, he said he was informed by the track and field federation later that year, not long before his 28th birthday, that he had been retired. A few weeks later, he said, he was told to resume training. Then, in April of 1982, he said he was told that he had been retired again, this time forever.

Wilkins rummaged through a drawer in his living room and found the self-addressed postcard that he sent Schmidt six years ago, inviting the East German to a discus and shotput competition near San Jose in May of 1982. Schmidt returned the postcard, putting a check in the box to indicate that he would attend.

“But I can not,” he wrote in longhand. “I can never start all over! No more sport for me in DDR (East Germany). Never. Please help me . . . “

Real trouble came two months later. It was in his rear-view mirror.

According to a detailed account in a West German newspaper, BILD, Schmidt pulled over when he noticed a police car emerge from behind the unmarked cars and a police motorcycle on his tail. He was surrounded by 13 men. Taken to a villa in a forest outside East Berlin, he was locked in a room with barred windows, a bed and a television. When he asked to call his parents, he said he was told that there was no telephone.

Two hours later, he told the newspaper, two men who identified themselves as members of the Ministry for State Security entered the room.

“I want out of this country,” Schmidt said he told the men. “I want to throw the discus. If I can’t do this here, then somewhere else. I am a discus thrower. I am an athlete. I want to throw.”

When he asked them the charge against him, he said they told him that he was speeding.

One night last week, in Wilkins’ living room, Schmidt resumed the story. He said that 8 to 10 days after he arrived at the villa, three men from the district attorney’s office visited him, informing him that he was under arrest. He said they handcuffed him and took him to a minimum security prison in East Berlin, where he remained for four months before receiving a judicial hearing.

“It was a farce,” he said.

Schmidt was sentenced to 18 months at a minimum security prison in Frankfurt an der Oder after his conviction on more than 30 charges, including anti-social behavior, attempting to escape the country and harboring arms. He said he had a flare gun that he found as a child in a garbage dump.

“You must understand,” he said. “Only because I am so friendly with Mac, this is the reason for all.”

AN OPEN KNIFE

Before 1976, in an interview on East German television, Schmidt said he considered Wilkins his archrival, even though they had never met.

“I want to beat the American Wilkins because I represent another social system for which I also put in my athletic performance,” he said.

“Then I met the man Mac Wilkins and my difficulties began,” Schmidt said 12 years later.

Wilkins and Schmidt first spoke at the 1975 World Games in Helsinki, Finland, but did not become friends until May of the next year after a meet in Cologne, West Germany. Wilkins set the first of his four world records earlier that month, but Schmidt beat him in Cologne.

After lunch one afternoon last week, Wilkins and Schmidt sat at a table outside a restaurant and reminisced. Wilkins has a tamer look than he did in 1976. He has not worn a beard in more than 10 years, and his hair is almost as short as the policeman John Powell’s.

Schmidt’s appearance has changed less. He is blond, blue-eyed, tall, tan and powerfully built. Wagner no doubt had Schmidt’s type in mind when he wrote his opera about Siegfried, the legendary German hero who slayed a dragon and won lovely Brunnhilde’s heart.

“Afterward, I was with a friend from high school,” Wilkins said of that spring night 12 years ago in Cologne. “He was going to take me to a disco. We were in a taxi in front of the hotel when we saw Wolfgang walking through the door. I said, ‘Wolfgang, come on. Let’s go to the disco.’ He ran out and jumped into the taxi.

“As we were pulling away, I see this old guy come out of the front door. This old guy in a suit was the (East German team) leader. We ended up at the disco and were sitting at the table. Five minutes later, this old guy walks in and smiles and says hello and sits down at the table with us, as if he had been invited.”

“I was always under control,” Schmidt said.

“Always someone was watching you?” Wilkins said.

“Yes,” Schmidt said.

Wilkins continued.

“We were trying to talk, and it was difficult because of the noise but also because we really didn’t care to share our conversation with this old guy,” he said. “So we had to grab a couple of girls and go out and dance. He didn’t follow us on the dance floor. It was that day that we touched on the common bond that our friendship has been based on.”

Wilkins recalled that Schmidt wanted to talk about the United States’ involvement in Vietnam.

“It made him very angry what he saw on television about Vietnam,” Wilkins said. “I said, ‘I know. I understand. Many things are not good about my country. Many things are not good about yours.’ I didn’t say one was better than the other. He was learning about the world.”

Schmidt gave his account of the same conversation to BILD. “Mac didn’t gloss over it,” he said. “He didn’t defend himself. He didn’t accuse me of the Hungarian revolution, the (Berlin) Wall, the orders to shoot. He said, ‘Yes, Wolfgang.’ I had never met such a man before.”

They saw each other only 11 times over a seven-year period, but their friendship, forged out of respect for each other’s devotion to a solitary discipline, grew stronger.

“It’s the way we feel about our sport, the intensity and the depth with which we live in throwing the discus,” Wilkins said. “In a way, we’re artists, and we’re at a level nobody else was performing at. It was exciting. It was heady. Nobody else in the world could do what we were doing. Nobody could appreciate it or understand it the way we were able to. To this day, that perspective affects a lot of other things in our lives.”

Schmidt also was close with two other discus throwers from the West, Sweden’s Ricky Bruch and West Germany’s Alwin Wagner. But Schmidt was not all work. He also had a Canadian girlfriend, a teacher whom he met during a training camp in Sudbury, Canada, before the Montreal Olympics. She visited him in East Berlin the next year.

His father, the head coach of the national team’s throwers, warned Schmidt repeatedly that his contact with Westerners would cause trouble for him with East German officials.

“He said, ‘You are running into an open knife,’ ” Schmidt said.

In particular, Ernst Schmidt warned his son to avoid the American, Wilkins. When Schmidt broke Wilkins’ world record in 1978, the East German used a discus that Wilkins gave him as a gift earlier that year at a meet in Zurich.

“Daddy,” Schmidt said he told his father, “he is a good man.”

MIRACLE MACHINE

Ernst Schmidt was a 10-time East German champion in the shotput, discus and decathlon from 1950-54, but that is not the reason he became a national hero, presented as an example to all youth as someone who sacrificed personally out of loyalty to the state.

Because East Germany did not have a National Olympic Committee in 1952, preventing the nation from entering a team in that summer’s Games in Helsinki, Finland, the West Germans offered Schmidt an opportunity to compete for them. It must have been tempting. He would have been a medal contender. But he declined, explaining that he, as an East German, could not compete under another country’s flag.

According to “The Miracle Machine,” a book published in 1980 about East Germany’s sports system, Klaus Huhn, a sportswriter for the national newspaper, Neues Deutschland, met Schmidt in 1954 on a street in East Berlin. Schmidt was pushing a baby carriage.

“He had accepted the fact that he would never compete in the Olympic Games because of the political situation,” Huhn told the author. “But he told me that without a shadow of a doubt, the passage of 20 years’ time would solve the political problems in time for the little boy in the baby carriage to grow up and compete for (East Germany) in the Olympics.”

Twenty-two years later, Wolfgang Schmidt won the silver medal in Montreal.

His road to the Olympics began not on a road but in a pool. He said he began swimming when he was 8.

“It is a good sport for children, a very good sport to build the body,” he said, a mischievous grin starting to form. “My mother, she was thinking, ‘If he goes swimming, I have not to wash training clothes. Every time he comes home, he is clean.’ It’s a little joke, but she said this.”

The regimen his father planned for him was no joke. Ernst Schmidt was the East German equivalent of a Little League father. Instead of a bat, ball and a glove, he gave Wolfgang a shotput, a discus and a hammer. Ernst was, after all, the national throwing coach. When Wolfgang was 11, his father converted the hallway in the family’s apartment into a weight room.

“My father, he also goes running with me in evenings when he comes home,” Wolfgang said. “Across from the flat where I live was a playground. It was about 300 meters (328 yards) around. I ran 10 rounds two times a week.

“He was very tough. This time as a child I was interested in playing football (soccer) and hanging out in the street. Sometimes I was crying.”

“Because your father was so demanding?” he was asked.

“No.” he said. “I was lazy. Not a long time later, I was grateful to him. At this time, I needed that.”

Wolfgang’s formative years coincided with his young nation’s. The sports system was still evolving. Today, he said, children are tested at age 5 or 6 to determine their physical abilities. Those who are believed to have potential as elite athletes, he said, are placed in sports programs that complement their educations. In Schmidt’s case, his father was more responsible for his development. But even before he won the European junior discus championship when he was 19, the system adopted him to assure that he maintained his edge.

At the time of his arrest in 1982, he had a house and a garden in East Berlin, this in a nation with a housing shortage that is particularly severe in the capital. In a nation where the average citizen waits 10 to 12 years for an automobile, then must settle for a sub-standard East German model, Schmidt drove a Soviet-made Lada sports car. After the season, he received paid vacations, generally river cruises. He also was provided with a salary as a second-lieutenant in the People’s Police and had a guaranteed job as a coach for the days after his retirement as a competitive athlete.

The breaks he received as an athlete in the classroom may sound familiar to those aware of practices in some U.S. universities. Even though he was a D student in his major, engineering, he was allowed to enroll in graduate studies at the nation’s most prestigious sports school. The school is in Leipzig, but he never had to leave East Berlin to earn his degree.

“The athlete has all,” Schmidt said. “A plan for training, coaches, also studies and work. Food. Good money. We have everything we need to bring good results.”

Performance-enhancing drugs?

Anyone who asks that question has missed the point, Schmidt said. East Germany is an international sports power, he said, because it has no peer in identifying and developing athletes despite the nation’s population of only 16.7 million, 41st in the world.

“Really, sports in the United States is a little shameful for the country,” he said. “(U.S. athletes) are very good. But it’s possible to be much better. Good food, nice weather and some good places for training are here. But the system is upside down. The (East German) sports system is the best in the world.

“But also there are some problems and some very bad things, I think. For me, it was that I was not free. I remember Jan. 16, 1980. I was 26 years old that day. We were in training camp. I was sitting with a masseur at a restaurant. I drank a beer at 11:30 p.m. My coach comes in and said, ‘So Wolfgang, 11:30, it is time you must go sleep.’ On my birthday.

“I couldn’t believe he did it. It was for me so crazy. I like to go sleep early after hard training. But also you need a day when you can be happy and make a party. It must be.”

That was one of the more minor intrusions into his life. He said he was ordered to end a relationship with a married woman in East Germany who was about to receive a divorce. He said it was apparent from his discussion with track and field federation officials that they not only had him and the woman followed on several occasions but also that they had listened to his telephone conversations with her.

Pointing to the painting on Wilkins’ living room wall, Schmidt said: “You see the frame? Everyone (in East Germany) must stay within the frame. It’s a closed system.

“Every country has problems. You can live in East Germany. Many people are very happy to live in East Germany. Really. For me, it was better to go out. I know some (athletes) before me who had the same destiny. But they were broken in the mind. They said, ‘OK, I stay and make my life here. I have a little freedom.’ But I, never.”

THE POTATO FARM

When Schmidt did not attend the 1981 World Cup in Rome, Wilkins said he began to worry about his friend. It was not natural for one of the world’s best athletes to miss the most important competition of the year unless he was injured. He made inquiries but heard only rumors. In the summer of 1982, East German athletes who dared to speak of such matters to Western athletes told them that Schmidt was “on the potato farm,” their euphemism for prison.

After four months in detention in East Berlin, Schmidt was transferred to a prison in Frankfurt an der Oder, a city 50 miles east of Berlin on the Oder River, across the border from Poland.

“I must work from 7 o’clock in the morning until 5 o’clock in the afternoon,” he said. “I must work in the garage, under the cars, cleaning the bottoms. Some days I must wash five or six cars in the wintertime by hand. In this time, there was dirty snow. If they drive one kilometer, the car is the same as before I wash it. I must do it again.”

He was allowed to train for two hours each day after he finished work. In the summer, he lifted weights and ran around the prison yard. In the winter, he ran in the underground garage where he worked.

“The smell from the gas and the petroleum and the exhaust,” he said, making a face. “Crazy time, crazy time. Yeah, crazy time.”

His family also suffered. His sister, Bettina, was a secretary at the sports club in East Berlin where Schmidt trained. When she refused to denounce her brother, she was fired. Schmidt’s father, a national hero not so many years ago, was demoted from national team throwing coach to equipment manager. He since has retired.

In July, 1983, nine months into his prison term, Schmidt formally applied to leave the country. The reply, he said, came in the form of 10 days of solitary confinement. He said he was taken to a small cell that had no windows, only a bed and a bucket. To keep his sanity, he said, he dug a piece of clay out of a crack in the floor and formed figures.

When he refused to withdraw his emigration application, he said he was ordered to spend 10 more days in solitary confinement. There have been reports in West German newspapers that Schmidt was beaten when he refused to enter the cell under his own power. He would not confirm them. Only when threatened with an additional 10 days did he withdraw his application.

“I was afraid I would die,” he said.

Six months later, three months before his sentence was due to expire, he was released.

Upon returning to East Berlin, he discovered that his house, under construction when he was arrested, had been completed. He figured it was an attempt at appeasement. But when he was not allowed to resume training in the discus, he and a few friends from Western countries plotted his escape.

According to BILD, one of their plans almost reached the border. Ricky Bruch, the Swedish discus thrower, hired a race car driver to take a Volkswagen Golf GTI into East Germany with 220 pounds of extra weight. When Schmidt lay down in the back seat, the extra weight was removed. Six miles from the border, he halted the attempt. Better red than dead.

On Nov. 2 of last year, almost four years after his release from prison, Schmidt suddenly was told to leave the country. He was offered no explanation but said he believes that West German sportswriters embarrassed the East Germans by keeping his story alive in the newspapers.

“Leaving East Germany meant more to me than my (Olympic) medal,” he said. “To see friends again, to compete again, to train again is my best medal.”

THE REUNION

Schmidt’s only previous visit to the United States was in 1979, when the East German team’s plane stopped in Houston for an hour en route from Mexico City to Montreal for the World Cup.

“I was a little disappointed because we must stay on the airplane,” he said. “But the gangway came. So I go down and step on the ground and say, ‘Here are the United States.’ Then I go back up. ‘Oh, what a pity.’ I said. I wait for nine years to be here again.”

As soon as Wilkins learned last November that Schmidt was in West Germany, staying in Hamburg with relatives, the American called and invited him to train in San Jose. That is a fantasy they have shared since that night in a Cologne disco 12 years ago. Schmidt arrived in February and has been living with three of Wilkins’ friends, also discus throwers.

“When he came over here, I wasn’t sure who this guy was,” Wilkins said. “I knew him, but I didn’t really know him. Since we’ve been together now, we both found out that we know each other. We always did know each other.”

Schmidt was able to throw only about 206 feet when he resumed training last November in Hamburg but since has improved to 223. East Germany’s Jurgen Schult won the world championship last year with a throw of 225-6. Schmidt said he would like to compete in three meets this spring in California before returning in May to West Germany. He is pointing toward the West German national championships in July, when the Olympic team will be selected.

International Olympic Committee spokesperson Michelle Verdier said last week Schmidt could compete in the Olympics this summer in Seoul, South Korea, only with permission from East Germany because he has not lived in West Germany for three years. Schmidt said he not sure how East German officials will respond to his request. If they deny him, he said his priority for this year will be to win the first West German-East German duel track and field meet in June in Dusseldorf.

“This time for me, now I think back, it’s like a movie,” he said, sitting in Wilkins’ living room. “First sport, very good athlete, Olympic medal, world record, European champion. Then, prison. Six years fight and my goal is accomplished, to go out of the country.

“Now, I wake up in the night and say, ‘Is it a dream or what? I am really here?’ Here, training with Mac. It’s all reality.”