The GDR's Olympic legacy, and "The Rise and Fall of Gerd Bonk, the World Champion of Doping."

Photo credit, Der Spiegel.

A long read, a must read, and a very sad story.

THE RISE AND FALL OF GERD BONK, THE WORLD CHAMPION OF DOPING, by Brian Blickenstaff (Vice Sports)

Gerd Bonk approached the bar with an almost pained expression, as though suddenly sad. It was his third and final attempt at the clean and jerk in the 1976 Olympics, and the bar was set to 235 kilograms (about 518 pounds)—17.5 kilograms less than he'd lifted at the European Championships three months prior, when he had set a world record. The East German super heavyweight stood for a moment, eyes closed, head tilted back, face to the sky. Perhaps he was praying.

Then he opened his eyes, bent at the waist, and gripped the bar. In the kind of swift and efficient motion one doesn't expect from a wide-bodied, six-foot-one, 320-pound hoss, he hoisted the bar to his shoulders, the part of the lift known as the "clean"; from there, he "jerked" the weight, thrusting it quickly above his head. After a moment teetering slightly under the heavy load, arms extended, Bonk dropped the bar and for the first time acknowledged the roaring Montreal crowd. He raised both hands. Smirked. It may not have been a world record, but Bonk had just won Olympic silver.

Bonk was one of 22 weightlifters from the Eastern Bloc to medal at the 1976 Games. Athletes from NATO countries, by contrast, won just two medals. To see the world's strongest man lose out on the gold was high drama, but Bonk's defeat only got more fascinating with time. Thirteen years later, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it emerged that he had used an unfathomable amount of steroids—and still didn't win.

"He was not just the world [record holder in] weightlifting," Herbert Fischer-Solms, a retired German radio journalist who spent much of his career reporting on doping and knew Bonk, told me by phone. "He was also the world champion of doping—given to him by his trainers, functionaries, and his doctors."

The baseball fans doth protest too much, methinks, and yet ...

When you've almost entirely lost interest in the perennial baseball Hall of Fame routine well before the current "who gets kept out" controversy, it's tough being a baseball history nut, because as much as it annoys me, I still do care about it in some strange way even when I say I don't. That's frustrating.

The Hall held its election, and yesterday it was revealed that no one won. I read three solid explications, two before the fact and one after. As usual, Keith Olbermann is right on target, and he gives some love to my baseball writer hero, former pitcher Jim Bouton.

Nobody Elected to HOF: We Deserve It, at Baseball Nerd

 ... To his eternal credit (in 1998), the author and former pitcher Jim Bouton not only disagreed, but got it exactly right. Some day, he says in the interview, baseball will have to reckon with years and years of records that will be artificially inflated, distorted beyond all measure, by the effects of a drug that lets you keep working out when the guys next to you – or before you, chronologically – have to drop the barbell. It was Bouton, after all, who had written in the eternal Ball Four that if a pitcher could take a pill that guaranteed him a) 20 wins and b) that he’d die five years sooner, he would’ve swallowed it before you finished that “b)” part ...

... The path to Steroid Hell was indeed paved with good intentions. And Jim Bouton’s pills. And the drugs that he didn’t know the name of that the guy told me about 26 years ago that they also gave the East German Women Swimmers. And the stuff we saw with our lying eyes and just pretended wasn’t real.

Bill Pennington focuses on the the many creative forms of aberrant behavior previously tolerated by voters.

Hall of Fame Has Always Made Room for Infamy, at the New York Times

... Players linked to steroid use have been resoundingly rejected by Hall of Fame voters in recent years, shunned as synthetically enhanced frauds. But drawing an integrity line in the sand is a tenuous stance at a Hall of Fame with a membership that already includes multiple virulent racists, drunks, cheats, brawlers, drug users and at least one acknowledged sex addict.

In the spirit of Groucho Marx, who refused to join any club that would have him as a member, would not baseball’s 77-year-old gallery of rogues be the perfect fit for (Barry) Bonds and (Roger) Clemens?

In the process, he digs up a classic baseball boozer anecdote.

Casey Stengel (class of 1966) once called right fielder Paul Waner (class of 1952) a graceful player. Why?

“Because,” Stengel said, “he could slide into second base without breaking the bottle in his hip pocket.”

But Jayson Stark's viewpoint comes closest to mirroring my own, except that a baseball establishment refusing to recognize Marvin Miller probably can't be trusted to tell the truth about its past, and that's quite regrettable.

Let's face it: Hall of Fame is a mess; Something must be done because current system of electing players isn't working, at ESPN

... Maybe it needs to be a place that does what other great history museums do -- tell the story of a time in history, for better and for worse, wherever it leads. Maybe that's not exactly what we would hope and dream a Hall of Fame should be. Maybe, though, that's what it has to be, because if we try traveling down that other road, we'll find nothing but forks and detours and roadblocks.

But once we have that conversation, at least we'll know how to vote and how to proceed and how to build a Hall of Fame for the 21st century.

If we decide it's a museum, then we need to put all of these men -- the greatest players of their generation -- in the Hall of Fame, and let the sport do what it should have done years ago: Figure out some way to explain what happened back then.

There are many ways to do that. Put the good stuff and the bad stuff right there on the plaques. Erect informational signs that explain the context of that era -- and every era in baseball history. Just be real and honest, and let the truth carry the weight of history in all its permutations.

Barry Bonds: "Is steroids cheating? You want to define cheating in America?"

Lance Armstrong is next in line for non-acknowledgement, isn't he?

His colossal success and unprecedented seven straight Tour de France titles took place in a sports culture where he was the most famous, but far from the only, perpetrator of fraud. In Major League Baseball, we know that the real single-season home run champion is still Roger Maris (not Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa or Barry Bonds) and the true, all-time home run king remains Hank Aaron (not Bonds). Unlike baseball, cycling hasn't aired all its dirty linen yet, but that doesn't excuse Lance.
-- Jordan Schultz in Huffington Post

But the exiled slugger has a point, doesn't he? Corporate America cheats all the time, and politicians like Mitt Romney lie the way I drink beer. Americana is Americana. Why must Bonds bear the brunt of the opprobrium?

'It's Bonds. Barry Bonds': The Return of Baseball's Invisible Man, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

 ... There is a delight that the baseball cognoscenti takes in making Barry Bonds their “invisible man.” It’s a way to marginalize him without confronting what he represents. He’s a home-run king in exile. He’s the end product of an era where owners made billions selling a steroid-enhanced product. He’s the person who can no longer tell the press to go to hell, because they won’t acknowledge his voice. The press corps once asked Bonds if he thought steroids was cheating. Bonds responded, “Is steroids cheating? You want to define cheating in America? When they make a shirt in Korea for a $1.50 and sell it here for 500 bucks. And you ask me what cheating means?” Now they don’t have to care what he thinks. Now they can humiliate him forever by denying his existence.

"Chasing Jose" -- by the great Pat Jordan.

If you're a sports fan and are still unfamiliar with the work of Pat Jordan, you're missing out.

Jordan is a gifted writer who only happens to write about games, and by doing so, he invests the normally mundane topic with a depth and universal applicability seldom seen in the genre, as in a recent piece (linked below) on baseball star, steroid abuser and supposed screenplay writer Jose Canseco's inability to return a telephone call.

It is wickedly funny, but at the same time, Canseco's nihilistic self-absorption is revealed as far more sad than anything else. Jordan's question is left unstated: Why do we idolize such flawed men?

Chasing Jose

I tried to picture Jose writing his book and his movie. Hunched over, his broad shoulders casting a shadow across his desk like a raptor's wings, his brow furrowed in concentration, his massively muscled body tensed in anticipation of that torrent of words about to flow out of him like urine for one of the many steroid tests he'd been forced to take during his baseball career. I wondered, just how does Jose write? Like Shakespeare, with a quill pen on parchment? Like Dickens, wearing a green eye shade while seated at a clerk's desk? Like Hemingway, standing at a lectern in Finca Vigia, with a stubby pencil and unlined paper? Like Thomas Wolfe, in his Victorian house in Ashville, pounding away on a tall, black, manual Underwood? Or maybe the words flow out of Jose in such a torrent, 10,000 an hour, that he can relieve himself adequately of his thoughts only by tap-tap-tapping on a lightning fast computer, like Stephen King?