One woman leads a crusade to cleanup cycling in Germany

Sylvia Schenk, a lawyer and former Olympic runner, is trying to rid sports of drugs by getting sponsors to force athletes to submit to testing.

By Isabelle de Pommereau | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the July 14, 2008 edition

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FRANKFURT - For years, Germany culivated national pride through bicycle racing. The triumph of German teams across Europe triggered a nationwide craze. Sponsors lavished riders with money, and some, like Jan Ullrich – who in 1997 became the first German to win the Tour de France – emerged as national icons. But a problem loomed. Many cyclists were taking performance-enhancing drugs. "Everybody knew about it," recalls Nikolaus Brender, editor in chief of ZDF, a publicly funded German television station. "But nobody said anything."

Enter Sylvia Schenk. A former Olympic runner turned lawyer, she was serving as councilor for women's affairs for the city of Frankfurt. In 2001, she became the first woman elected president of the powerful German Cycling Federation. Since then, she has helped spearhead a shake-up in cycling's – and the German public's – attitudes about the use of illegal drugs in sports.

She became one of the first high-ranking cycling officials to break the code of silence on the issue. Though Ms. Schenk resigned in 2004 to protest what she saw as the federation's attempt to cover up a potential drug scandal, she has crusaded relentlessly ever since.

Today, the drug issue draws almost daily headlines, sponsors are pulling money from long-established races, and parliament has adopted aggressive antidoping laws.

"There's a strong awakening to the problem of doping in many aspects of society – politics, athletes, sponsors, and the media," says Peter Danckert, head of the German parliament's sports committee.

Schenk sits in the vanguard of a growing group of activists worldwide who are bringing new attention to a decades-old problem, working to rid pelotons and dugouts of an alphabet-soup of banned substances.

While steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs remain widely used, enough public and private agencies are cracking down that some experts think the '00s will go down as the decade in which authorities finally began to subdue sports doping.

The next big test will come this summer with the Tour de France, now under way, and the Beijing Olympics. China plans the most aggressive antidoping controls in the history of the Games, but has a reputation as a top supplier of anabolic steroids.

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Schenk is a slight woman with the energy befitting a former world-class athlete. She bounds up and down the steps of her office building. Her choice of transportation around Frankfurt is, fittingly, a bicycle.

Schenk made the German Olympic team at age 20, competing in the terrorism-plagued 1972 Games in Munich. Later, when she turned to law, the first firm she applied to turned her down, telling her that, sooner or later, her maternal responsibilities would interfere. Determined to fight sexism, she became a labor-court judge and later a local councilor in charge of women's, legal, and sports issues.

Still, neither that nor the warnings of her husband, a European record-holder in the 800 meter and now a regional sports official, prepared her for what she would encounter. "I have a basic trust in people. If I had thought, 'They're all crooks there,' I would never had gone to [the] cycling [federation]," says Schenk.

When she first arrived at the governing body in 2001, things looked promising: A test had just come out for detecting erythropoietin (EPO), a blood-boosting hormone used illicitly by endurance athletes to increase their oxygen capacity. Schenk promised to bring "transparency" to the sport.

It would be no easy task, since some see cycling as particularly prone to drug use. For one thing, prodigious sponsorship money can tempt riders to take something that gives them an edge. For another, young riders are often exposed to artificial enhancements gradually. Sponsors will lavish them with vitamins. Zealous trainers put drops of painkillers in water bottles.

"Soon, they start thinking, 'If I want to achieve something, I have to take something,' " says Gerhard Treutlein, an antidoping expert at Germany's University of Heidelberg. "A doping mentality develops that isn't limited to legal products anymore."

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