Freedom Has Price : Ex-East Germans Learn to Compete on a Shoestring

Sunning himself by one of the three pools at Los Caballeros Sports Club in Fountain Valley on a picture-postcard Southern California day, Peter Dost recalled the last time he visited Orange County.

It was the summer of 1983, when the powerful East German track and field team, on a rare appearance in this country for a dual meet against the United States at the Coliseum, went to Disneyland.

As one of the coaches, Dost was a chaperon. But even he was watched by a Stasi man, an agent of the East German security police whose job that day at Disneyland was to make sure that the athletes and coaches stayed in line, literally and figuratively.

“This functionary said that we would have to stay together, 100 young athletes at Disneyland,” Dost said, rolling his eyes incredulously. “Can you imagine? It would have worked better if he’d brought a chain and chained us all together.”

Less than eight years have passed, but that must seem like a lifetime to the 10 German track athletes and two coaches, all from the formerly socialistic east side of the recently reunified country, who spent January in Southern California.

Most stayed in luxury condominiums at Los Caballeros, which, in addition to three swimming pools, has a gymnasium with one volleyball and two basketball courts, a health club with three weight rooms, 30 tennis courts, 20 indoor racquetball courts, a restaurant and a snack bar.

It was an eye-opening month for the Germans, who never had made an unsupervised visit to the United States. No Stasi. No chains. No restraints except those self-imposed. Primarily, they came to Southern California to train at UC Irvine and Mt. San Antonio College, and most of them, honor graduates of the East German sports system, did so religiously.

Even on the Sunday afternoon that they drove to Las Vegas, they worked out first. They left at 5 p.m., arrived in Vegas at 10 p.m., stayed for five hours to play the slot machines and marvel at the lights, then returned so that they could get some sleep before their Monday workouts. They made other outings to Palm Springs, Venice Beach, Beverly Hills and, of course, Disneyland.

But their most marvelous discovery was the mall.

On the afternoon that their Woodland Hills-based manager, Cubie Seegobin, arranged for the athletes to be interviewed, two of them never showed. They explained later that they had cut their workouts short so they could spend the afternoon at South Coast Plaza.

How things have changed, noted quarter-miler Thomas Schoenlebe, as he lounged by the pool at Los Caballeros.

“You can choose to look at it either negatively or positively,” he said.

“How do you look at it?” he was asked.

He smiled. “We’re here, aren’t we?”

BABY, IT’S COLD OUTSIDE THE SYSTEM

That was the last week in January. Now, after competing last weekend in indoor meets in New York and Fairfax, Va., most of the Germans are back home, where the high temperature Monday was below freezing, and the reality was equally cold, even for the still relatively privileged athletes and coaches.

Dost returned to a world so upside down that even the name of his city has changed, from Karl-Marx-Stadt to Chemnitz.

Last year at this time, the East German government-supported sports club that he represents employed 18 coaches for 120 track and field athletes. After the reunification process began in October, the West German government agreed to fund the club for at least one more year, but at a significantly reduced level. Sixteen of the 18 coaches were fired.

“It’s impossible to train all that many athletes with two coaches,” he said. “Some of the coaches are still coming in without pay to work with their groups. They haven’t been able to find other jobs anyway. When they get jobs, they won’t come back.”

The job market for coaches will get worse before it gets better, he said. Of the 37 sports clubs for elite athletes, which worked in conjunction with sports schools to form the cornerstone of the East German athletic system, Dost predicted that many will close next year unless they find sponsors.

“Making a living, sponsorship, the whole money thing . . . that’s our biggest problem,” he said.

Even if the Chemnitz club is spared, Dost is not certain he will have a job. He is a 48-year-old man with a family, deep roots in his community and a one-year contract.

“I’m not a 25-year-old coach who can move again, again and again,” he said.

Most of the athletes said they are simply trying to hang on through the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, Spain, before they retire. The changes have been almost as traumatic for them as for their coaches.

After leaving the sports school in Neubrandenberg, half-miler Christine Wachtel said she was given a well-paying job in the city with a state-owned construction company that required her to work only three hours, one day a week. That was standard for East German postgraduate athletes, who spent most of their working hours training.

Now that the construction company is privately owned, Wachtel, 26, is fortunate because her employer has continued to support her track career, allowing her to set her own hours.

“That’s an exception,” she said. “Most of the companies are not so lenient with the athletes. A lot of athletes now have to show up for their jobs and work all day. They can only train afterward. And a lot of other athletes don’t even have jobs any more. They rarely showed up before. So they were the first to be let go when times got hard.”

As a star athlete, Wachtel, who won silver medals in the 800 meters at the 1987 World Championships and the 1988 Olympics, was well-compensated by the system. Besides the job, she had a car and a private apartment, both luxuries for someone so young in East Germany. She retained all of that.

But the transition has not been entirely smooth for her. When the Neubrandenberg club signed a sponsorship agreement with a Western company, she and her coach of 10 years also signed contracts with the company and hired one of its representatives as their manager.

Later, when she discovered the deal was not as lucrative as she had believed, she changed managers and broke the contract. As a result, the Neubrandenberg club, which had supported her since she was 12, dropped her. She now competes for a club in Rostock, but her coach remained behind. She trains herself.

Still, even if she had the magical power to rebuild the Wall and restore the East German system, she said she would not do it.

“For personal development, it wasn’t a good system,” she said. “I didn’t even know how to go to the airport by myself. They took your passport, guided you through all the steps, then gave it back to you. It wasn’t good in human terms.”

All of the athletes gave similar responses.

Said Schoenlebe: “There was no way you could decide things for yourself--which sport you liked, which races you were going to compete in, how you were going to train. Everything was decided by the big boss.”

THE MIRACLE MACHINE

The big boss was Manfred Ewald. In reality, he was not involved in the day-to-day training of each athlete, but he did set the agenda for the East German sports committee, the DTSB, after becoming its president almost 40 years ago.

In an interview last year in Berlin, he said his goal was to give his small country (population 16.7 million, fewer than live in California) an international identity through sports. To that aim, it has been estimated that the DTSB spent $700 million a year.

Ewald got what he paid for. In the 20 years after 1968, when East Germany competed separately for the first time, it won more Olympic medals than any other country except the Soviet Union and the United States.

In his 1980 book, “The Miracle Machine,” the late American journalist, Doug Gilbert, was the first to describe in detail the sports system. The wheel consisted of the sports schools and clubs throughout the country. The spoke was a university for the training of coaches and a sports science research center in Leipzig.

Even after Gilbert’s book was published, many Westerners still imagined East German versions of Dr. Frankenstein manufacturing athletes in their laboratories. But the athletes said there was nothing so sinister about the system.

Wachtel’s story is typical. Raised in Neubrandenberg, she showed exceptional athletic ability in physical education classes at her elementary school. Her P.E. teacher reported her to a local DTSB representative, who began to follow her progress. When she was 12, he recommended her for the sports school in Neubrandenberg for advanced athletic training and the continuation of her academic curriculum.

She could have stayed at home while attending the school, but her mother decided that Wachtel should sleep in the dormitory because she was either in workouts or classes from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Most of the other students, some of whom lived as far as 60 miles away, also stayed in the dormitory. They went home on weekends.

“It was fun,” she said. “It wasn’t like other schools where you went home in the afternoon and that was it. We were all living together. It was like a family.”

Wachtel said there was no pressure placed on families to allow their children to attend the schools, and many, particularly the parents of elementary-age gymnasts, figure skaters and swimmers, declined.

“It had to be a consensus between the parents and children,” she said. “It would have been senseless to do it if the children didn’t want it. It would have been senseless to do it if the parents didn’t want it.”

TAKE ONE PILL AND CALL ME FROM THE OLYMPICS

None of those training in Southern California were named in the German publications that recently detailed the use of anabolic steroids in East Germany, but the implication was that virtually every successful athlete in the country was on a drug program that was administered by the DTSB.

When Seegobin, the manager, arranged the interviews with his athletes and coaches, he said they were prepared to answer any and all questions about drugs. Which meant that most of them were in their hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil poses.

“Nobody ever tried to persuade me to use drugs on my athletes,” Dost said. “The allegations are completely false. It’s really annoying for East German athletes who are clean. They’re painting everyone with the same brush.”

The only athlete who acknowledged that steroids were a problem in East Germany was Ellen Kiessling, a middle-distance runner from Dresden.

“Doping was available,” she said. “But it was the individual athlete who made the decision whether to take drugs and ruin his or her health. It was not systematic.”

One thing that was force-fed in the sports schools to the athletes, they all agreed, was Marxist ideology.

Required reading, middle-distance runner Yvonne Mai said during an interview in the condo that she shared with Wachtel, was a textbook, “Comrades, the History and Development of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).”

“Everything in it said something good about the GDR,” she said.

“Did you believe it?” she was asked.

“Not everything,” she said. “But if you said everything was good, you got good marks. You learned to play the game. You had to be careful.”

“Very careful,” Wachtel agreed.

Wachtel said that because the Stasi could not be everywhere, it paid some athletes to inform on others who were suspected of doubting the purity of Marxist ideology. Contact with Westerners, even athletes before and after competitions, was forbidden. Wachtel said she was closely watched because, unlike most other successful athletes, she never joined the Communist Party.

“There was a lot of pressure to join the Party,” she said. “I didn’t want to do it, although I probably could have gotten more privileges if I had. About 80% of the good athletes joined.

“Some of them really believed in it. When we were together as a team, the comrades would give dirty looks to the non-comrades. But most of the athletes would say, ‘I’ll just join and have my peace.’ Most of them left the Party after reunification.”

TOGETHER AGAIN, FOR THE FIRST TIME

It was getting late at Ed Debevic’s, a 1950s-style diner in Beverly Hills. Most of the Germans had returned to Orange County because they had to train early the next morning.

Wearing their new clothes from the South Coast Plaza, they had looked as up-to-date as the other young people in the restaurant. Only when the disc jockey was unable to coax them into joining a group-participation song called “Hand Jive” were they exposed as strangers from a strange land.

Now, Kiessling and Birte Bruhns, another middle-distance runner, were the only Germans remaining behind, waiting for a promised tour of Rodeo Drive.

When the conversation turned to the effect of reunification on German sports, Bruhns was hopeful. It has worked for her. Even before the Wall came completely down, Bruhns, 20, transferred along with her coach from the Rostock club in the East to the Cologne club in the West.

But Kiessling, 22, was not so optimistic.

“There will be problems,” she said, referring to the merger of track and field teams that will occur for the first time in the World Indoor Championships next month at Seville, Spain. “With our generation, it will always be that way, East and West. We won’t mix together so easily.

“In principle, the unified team should be a power,” she said. “But in sports, like all other areas, what was good in the East is not being taken over in the West. The West took over everything without compromise.”

“Are you angry?” she was asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Would you like for the Wall to go back up?”

“No, I wouldn’t want to go back to that,” she said. “But I would like to change some things. It doesn’t matter for my generation. We’ve already benefited from the system and realized our potential as athletes. But I feel sorry for the younger generation. They won’t have that.”

If Kiessling wins a gold medal at Seville next month, she will step up on the victory stand and listen as the German anthem--the former West German anthem--is played for her.

“For me,” she said, “it’s a foreign anthem.”

Times staff writer Tamara Jones contributed to this story.