“Will women soon outrun men?” This is the question that exercise scientists Brian J. Whipp and Susan A. Ward asked in the title of their 1992 letter to the journal Nature.
The authors suggested that women would outpace men in distance running by 1998. Television and news coverage of their findings shaped public perceptions of the sports performance gap.
Of course, the evidence failed to replicate over time, but without the fanfare of the original, false positive result.
“The world's fastest women are now getting slower, while the men keep getting faster”, sports statistician Steven Sailer and Norwegian journalist Stephen Seiler reported in 1997.
However, “a pre-Olympic poll of 1,000 adults last May found that 66 percent of Americans believe ‘the day is coming when top female athletes will beat top males at the highest competitive levels’”.
Whereas Whipp and Ward had seen a steep improvement curve for women, one key rule change had flattened their progress. “We believe that drug testing has reduced the use of anabolic steroids by both men and women. Drug testing is restoring the physiological gender gap.”
After eliminating all the other possible explanations, Sailer and Seiler were left with the end of the Cold War and eastern bloc doping programs as the only remaining logical reason for the discrepancy. After the Ben Johnson steroid scandal in 1988, the Olympics instituted random, unannounced drug testing.
“The single most powerful explanation for the growth of the gender gap in running is that the use of banned performance-enhancing drugs has declined as a result of this testing program, and that drug use, including anabolic steroid use, has previously benefited female performers more than males”, Sailer and Seiler wrote.
As monitored by the Stasi, State Plan 14.25 put as many as 10,000 athletes at risk through athletic doping. Women and girls had priority because they showed the largest performance gains.
Stasi files and later court cases confirm that East German coaches and sports doctors knew the health risks: early heart disease, other organ damage, cancer, infertility, depression, and stunted growth. For some sports, like gymnastics and figure skating, that last bug was a feature.
“East German sports doctors had systematically manipulated her growth”, Gymnastics History records of one victim. When her gymnastics career ended, so that she no longer needed to be small, Heike M. was given growth hormones to restore her to normal height.
Because her growth plates had been locked, however, “her musculoskeletal system could not withstand this forced transformation. The result was damaged joints, causing lifelong pain.”
Swimmer Andrea Pollack died of cancer at age 57 after acknowledging systemic steroid use during her career.
“Like other members of that team, she was systematically doped as a teenager with Oral-Turinabol, an anabolic steroid created by the state-run company Jenapharm”, Lucas Ackroyd reported in 2019. “Christiane Knacke, Pollack’s teammate at the 1980 Olympics, said Pollack also suffered a miscarriage.”
The athletes had no choice. They were given mysterious “vitamins” and told to take them, or else leave the team. Gold medalist Rica Reinisch “subsequently had several miscarriages, which she attributes to steroids.”
Other women had “physical side effects such as acne, deepened voices, excess growth of leg hair and pubic hair, and enlarged clitorises. Some female athletes gave birth to children with club feet or other defects.”
These symptoms will be sadly familiar to anyone who has studied the lived experience of the ‘trans man’. Victims of the Stasi’s doping regimen reportedly die 10-12 years earlier than the general population of what was East Germany.
The implications of this history are sadly obvious for the “best life” that so many young women are living on testosterone, these days.
