Mercedes is celebrating its 100th year with a number of events in Leipzig this month. The centenary festivities coincided today with a confession from Kristin Otto, the last Wundermadchen of the German Democratic Republic with six gold medals at the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul (tainted, to the shame of the perpetrators of the systematic doping programme that went by the official name of State Plan 14:25).
Otto tells Bild, the tabloid paper, this weekend that in her youth she would sneak past the guards at the Leipzig Messe (a large venue for trade fairs) and snap the Merc signs off the limos parked in the VIP compound.
"During the trade fair there were a lot of West German cars, among them a lot of Mercedes limos. We sneaked past security and snapped them [the Mercedes symbols] off and then were very proud to say 'that's my star now'," said Otto. "You may forgive me."
We do. We just about forgive her, too, for her performance in 1991 at the world championships in Perth, Western Australia. I passed Otto (who was wearing an anti-doping backpack bearing the words "just say no" at the time) in the press stand just as Shane Gould came into view not far away. I said 'look, there's Shane Gould.' 'Who?' said Otto.
The greatest woman swimmer of all time, says I: held all world records from 100m to 1,500m free all at the same time, five medals, three of them gold at Munich 1972, one of them over 200m medley ahead of Kornelia Ender, all in solo events, three of them in world record times. Otto shrugged and walked away. The bar on news from the world was pretty severe back in those days when Otto was an ambassador in a tracksuit.
These days, Otto is a sports presenter for ZDF television, a station that abandoned the Tour de France amid doping scandal after doping scandal in protest at the cycling circus unfolding.
