Four years after the political change in former East Germany (GDR), Andreas Wornowski had the feeling something was not quite right.

"A doctor at the Bundeswehr hospital asked me directly about performance-enhancing drugs. My answer was a shrug of the shoulders," Wornowski said. "I didn't allow myself to think about it, never gave it a second thought, ignored it."

Today, the 54-year-old former boxer has been suffering from massive health issues, including pain day and night — starting from his crippled left hand, his power hand when he boxed. He also suffers from severe depression.

The former GDR competitive athlete has realized these are the consequences of forced doping in the GDR and is slowly beginning to come to terms with his past.

In the GDR academy at 13

Wornowski's path to elite boxing began relatively late, at the age of 11. With talent, discipline and diligence, he became district champion in his age group in Magdeburg just one year later.

At the age of 13, he went to Berlin Children's and Youth Sports School, an elite sports boarding school where the GDR trained its future medal winners. Wornowski lived at the boarding school until he was an adult and was only allowed to go home every four weeks.

His mother, a nurse, was initially strictly against boxing because of its brutality, but his father and the district council of his hometown persuaded her. Looking back, Wornowski understands his mother's concern: boxing means consenting to bodily harm.

If the hardness of the blows was then also increased with medication, it turned into a real "battle with the body," as Wornowski puts it, with "steam hammer" blows to the head.

Boxing in the junior national team of the GDR

Wornowski describes the time that followed as "a kind of extreme training camp" in which everything was to be extracted by means of performance-enhancing, painkilling and disinhibiting drugs.

The youngsters were also put under massive psychological and physical pressure to perform. Anyone who didn't stand up to this or asked uncomfortable questions about pills or injections had to leave. 

In year eight, there were still 21 young boxers. By year 10, only four remained. Wornowski was one of them and soon made it onto the GDR junior national team.

From 1986, Wornowski was regularly given various drugs, blue and black-and-red capsules, which were officially described as "vitamins and immune-boosting agents." Today, Wornowski is convinced that these were the anabolic agent Oral-Turinabol, the anabolic steroid Mestanolone, the steroid test substance 646 and psychotropic drugs to increase aggression.

These were administered to Wornowski's entire training group during experimental training treatments under the direction of Hans Gürtler, who was a leading GDR sports physician. Gürtler was also co-responsible for the state doping program, which ran from 1974 under the name "Staatsplanthema  (State plan subject) 14.25."

Wornowski's sporting heyday began at 16 when he became GDR youth champion in the light heavyweight division and won international tournaments. He became a representative of the GDR, a "diplomat in a tracksuit," as it was called at the time.

A Stasi memo from that time attests to Wornowski: "He defines the performance level of the GDR in his age and weight class." His fights were often decided by knockout in the first round.

But alongside his fame came physical deterioration. Wornowski's pain increased, and the injuries piled up: shattered nasal bones, eyelids stitched together, knocked-out teeth.

Training at 90 degrees

Then, there was the relentless training with up to four sessions of two hours per day. Under normal circumstances, this is beyond the limit.

"I couldn't really do anymore, but I carried on anyway. Today I would say [it was] the most brutal conditions," recalled Wornowski.

He pushed away the pain, sometimes taking up to 20 painkillers a day. To reduce his weight before a competition, he often had to do elements of his training in a sauna heated to 90 degrees Celsius (194 degrees Fahrenheit). At the German University of Physical Culture and Sport in Leipzig, he was even driven to the point of fainting on the treadmill to test his limits. Only a harness prevented him from falling.

Wornowski's sporting career ended abruptly at the age of 19 in the spring of 1989, more than six months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Officially, he stepped out of the ring because of health problems, but Wornowski believes there was another reason: He had refused to become a member of the GDR state party, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED).

All he had left was a profession he had never learned: car mechanic. Wornowski had never seen the inside of a car repair shop; the Stasi had given him his examination paper. Officially, like all competitive athletes in the GDR, he was considered an amateur because, officially, there was no professional sport in the socialist state.

Assistance laws expired, records gone

After German reunification, it was not until 1997 that several court cases brought the full extent of GDR state doping to light. In response to this, several assistance laws for doping victims were passed in 2002 and later. As a result, around 2,000 victims, including Wornowski, received one-off payments of €10,500 each. These laws have since expired. The current recognition procedures are complicated and involve high hurdles. The Doping Victim Support Association estimates that around 15,000 people are affected.

Wornowski is now fighting for a monthly pension due to his health problems. His application was rejected, and it is difficult to prove the damage caused by doping because his entire medical file has disappeared. As a result, he has filed a lawsuit.

"It's this huge tragedy. The real problem for those affected is that their health records are gone and that they are in a predicament that will probably not be resolved even with the legal amendment," explains Wornowski's lawyer Ingo Klee.

A new legal regulation intended to reverse the burden of proof has brought hope, though. Doping is assumed to be the cause of certain illnesses. However, this is by no means automatic, warns Klee, who adds that the council offices could still doubt the consequential damage.

"It's not just the lack of evidence, the health problems, the financial difficulties — it's disgusting and almost unbearable," said Wornowski, who lives in seclusion with his wife in a house in the forest. Some of his former training buddies are already dead. "And at every funeral, everyone has the same thought: who knows what they gave us back then?"

This article has been adapted from its original German.