FORUM: When Calligaris, Colella & Co Were Robbed Even As They Took The First World Champs By Storm
THEMA - Truth, Recognition, Reconciliation: What the IOC & World Aquatics Won't Do, We Will - in Part 3 of our recognition for those denied by GDR doping, we arrive at the first World Championships in 1973, and the GDR's unveiling of what 'supporting means' would mean for women's swimming
Our latest FORUM series highlights the decades-long failure of governors Olympic, global, continental and national to acknowledge the greatest fraud in swimming history and then to embrace the truth, recognition and reconciliation process required if integrity means as much to so-called 'reformists' as they claim it does.
Take a birds-eye view of world-class swimming during the past half a century and we see generations of blazeratti standing at the entrance to a moral maze and deciding they'd rather turn round and go home to focus on much bigger priorities, like all that important business of self-interest and politics and turning blind eyes to what truly matters if 'athletes' are 'the priority' so-called 'reformists' claim they are.
After looking at two Olympic Games at which doping paid off in 1976 and 1980 - and that message is just as solid today as its been for the past 50 years - we go back to the start of the East German roll out of the biggest fraud in swimming history, the sporting crime the Olympic movement both contributed to and then turned a blind eye to, leaving a trail of tears that shames past and present governors to this day.
Part 1
Craig Lord
Part 2
Craig Lord
It's 1973. We're in Belgrade and the inaugural World Championships has just concluded. Novella Calligaris is the star of the women's events, with two gold medals (one of them won in an official World record, the other inside the World record that had stood to the last non-East German swimmer), a silver and a bronze, all in individual events.
The Italian Olympic medallist of Munich 1972, was on fire: gold in the 800m freestyle, gold in the 400m medley, silver in the 200m medley, bronze in the 400m freestyle ... the swimmer of the year... ah, sorry, now I remember: she actually got a gold and two bronzes. Not bad at all. Just not the 'star turn' she might have been.
Truth: East Germany's women claimed 10 out of the 14 golds in finals, including both relays, while in five of the individual finals, they gave the rest of the world a GDR 1-2 punch that included this kind of thump (WR = World record; CR = championship record; ER = European record ... and all the WRs are, of course, records of all applicable standards of other kinds):
Those margins and the list of events, including all 100m finals and three out of five 200m finals, reflect the nature and timing of the GDR experiment: State Research Plan 14:25 would not become an official state secret until the year after swimming's first World Championships in 1973, but the impact of what was already underway and had been in some sports since the 1960s was clearly on display.
And, the recognition of podium placers without a link to any recorded and registered systematic doping.program in their day.
What the blazers, guardians and governors of Olympic sport, swimming and the halls of fame those folk call 'official repositories' have failed to do, SOS will do for them. Today, we honour (full podium lists in the tables below) the following swimmers with entry into our SOS Hall of Fame on recognition of the finishing places they merited and their unrecognised achievements at Belgrade 1973:
Beyond the elevation of Novella Calligaris to two-time World champion and four-times medallist and Lynn Colella, of the USA, to winner of two golds, in the 200m breaststroke and 200m butterfly, and a bronze in the 100m breaststroke, here are other podium shuffles that take the shine off results gained because one state cheated in systematic fashion, and recorded the details of its crime, allowing us to say 'we know', not 'we think':
- gold for American Shirley Babashoff in the 100m free ahead of Dutch challenger Enith Brigitha (58.876 to 58.879 ahead of a rule change that holds to his day: the sport counts to a hundredth of a second but no further)
- bronze for Australian Virginia Rickard in the 200m free
- gold for Olympic champion Melissa Belote, of the USA in the 100m backstroke a year after her backstroke double at Munich 1972; and elevation to silver for Wendy Cook, of Canada, and to bronze for Hungary’s Andrea Gyarmati
- gold for Soviet swimmer Lyubov Rusanova in the 100m breaststroke and elevation to silver for Britain’s Christine Jarvis
- silver behind Lynn Colella for Lyudmila Porubayko, of the URS, and elevation to bronze for Sweden’s Britt-Marie Smedh
- elevation to gold in the 100m butterfly for Olympic champion Mayumi Aoki, with American Deena Deardurff elevated to silver ahead of bronze for her teammate Peggy Tosdal
- behind Colella in the 200 ‘fly, the elevation to silver of José Damen, of the Netherlands, with bronze going to Australian Sandra Yost.
- no more bronze for Americans Kathy Heddy in the 200IM, her gold followed by elevation o the podium for Novella Calligaris and American Julie Woodcock
- Novella Calligaris’s gold in the 400IM followed by elevation to silver for Canadian Leslie Cliff and bronze for American Terry Potts
- elevation to gold for Americans Kim Peyton, Kathy Heddy, Heather Greenwood and Shirley Babashoff in the 4x100m freestyle, with quartets from West Germany and Canada elevated (see rosters above)
- elevation to gold for Americans Melissa Belote, Marcia Morey, Deena Deardurff and Shirley Babashoff in the 4x100m medley, making Babashoff a three-times gold medallist, ahead of quartets from West Germany and the Netherlands (see rosters above)
While GDR doping had less of an impacted on men as it did on women being clobbered by rivals who has been administered with testosterone at levels well beyond the norm for females from a very early age, the following shuffles also apply:
- there’s bronze for Australian Steven Badger behind Americans Jim Montgomery and Kurt Krumpholz in the 200m freestyle
- bronze for American John Murphy in the 100 m backstroke behind East Germany’s Roland Matthes* (see footnote and link) and American Mike Stamm
- bronze for Britain's Brian Brinkley in the 200m butterfly behind Americans Robin Backhaus and Steven Gregg.
- elevation to bronze for West Germans Klaus Steinbach, Peter Nocke, Gerhard Schiller and Peter Labudde in the 4x100m free woman by the USA (see rosters above)
- elevation to silver for Canadians Ian MacKenzie, Peter Hrdlitschka, Bruce Robertson and Brian Phillips; and to bronze for West Germans Steinbach, Walter Kusch, Folkert Meeuw and Nocke in the 4x100 medley.
