"These are all harmless drugs. All athletes take them. It's really nothing special."
That was what German heptathlete Birgit Dressel, who finished ninth in the 1984 Olympic Games, once told her mother.
Sadly, those words couldn't have been further from the truth. On 8 April 1987, after taking medication to help with a bad back, Dressel's body went into allergic-toxic shock, leading to rapid organ failure.
After two days of agony in Mainz hospital, she died at the age of 26.
Her autopsy revealed traces of more than 100 drugs in her system, including anabolic steroids that she had been taking for years, while her medical history showed she had been injected with at least 40 different substances throughout her career, with one practitioner alone administering 400 injections.
At the end of the Cold War, East Germany's systematic doping secrets spilled out. The truth on the other side of the Berlin Wall has taken longer to emerge.
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