Norbert Warnatzsch, the current coach of Britta Steffen, the most (only) successful German swimmer at the Olympic Games last year, and the last coach of Franziska Van Almsick, has been dropped by the DSV (German federation) as the head of the Berlin Olympic centre. His current contract ended ended in 2008 and will not be extended.
Lutz Buschkow, 50, performance director for Germany, is using the greater powers handed to him when Orjan Madsen waved farewell to Germany in the wake of the Beijing Games. As part of a restructuring of the German swimming programme, he wants to cut ties with "the old ways", in the words of reports in the German media today.
He has formed a "Competence Team 2012", composed of Dirk Lange, head coach, junior head coach Achim Jedamsky, and Beate Ludewig, new head of the talent-scouting team, plus all the heads of the Olympic training centres - newly designated under the terms of Buschkow's revolution - at Hamburg, Halle, Heidelberg, Essen, Frankfurt/Main and Berlin. Berlin remains unmanned at the helm after only a small number of applicants applied for the job. Warnatzsch was among them but was rejected.
Buschkow tells Die Welt: "Warnatzsch doesn't fit into the new concept. Obviously it will hurt some individuals to lose old privileges. But I can't be responsible for every individual need ... we are looking for someone young who is able to integrate the swimmers into our new system."
Warnatzsch remains Steffen's personal coach at Neukoelln in Berlin. He was born in 1947 and became a major with the Stasi, the secret police of the german Democratic Republic. His career has from time to time been tainted by talk of doping from the days of the GDR. However, an investigation by the German commission for past doping offences did not find him culpable. When Steffen's performances were questioned, primarily in Australia, in the period between her world-record breaking performances at Budapest 2006 European Championships and the world championships in Melbourne 2007, Warnatzsch issued angry statements denying that doping had anything to do with his programme or his swimmers. The past belonged to the past and it was unfair to taint the current generation with the problems of a bygone era and a political entity that no longer existed.
Die Welt online today notes that current DSV head Christa Thiel "can now say 'we have no coach with a doping past in our federation'." No idea if she would want to say such a thing but what she cannot say is that there is no link to the past: GDR records remain German records and GDR performances thus continue to be celebrated by the DSV, in keeping with the failure of the international organisations - from the IOC to FINA and LEN - to address the issue of past criminality in their midst. Worse than the upholding of tainted performances by swimmers who were themselves often victims is the continued presence of the likes of Dr Lothar Kipke on the list of award winners of international swimming remains a source of sadness and anger for all who understand the harm caused by the system that he helped to govern and control: harm wreaked on the youth of the GDR and the victims of the "success" of those "ambassadors in track suits" fed a diet of Oral Turinabol, among other substances, some never clinically tested before being administered to teenagers under the dark auspices of State Plan 14:25.
