Top Secret: Doping CHILDREN - The Darkest Chapter in World Sport"
There are some 10 million children, among a global population of 200 million under 18s, taking part in elite sport, who are victims of child doping. A new documentary series six years in the making at EyeOpeningMedia (for ARD/RBB) in Germany shines a light on the darkest chapter in world sport
Potsdam, November 2026, and we're gathered in a cinema for the launch of "Geheimsache Doping KINDER - Das Dunkelste Capital Des Weltsports" - "Top Secret: Doping CHILDREN - The Darkest Chapter in World Sport".
Along the road, at a separate event, other journalists are gathered for a different launch in a different realm. The two events will rarely be mentioned in the same breath but some of the underlying aspects of the abuse and harm at play bind human behaviour that appears to have chained us all to a very dark and distant past, locked us in and thrown away the key. That other event:
Kate Connolly
At the Thalia Kino about 100m from a sign on a door that announces the medical practice of a doctor who was convicted of abuse of minors in the GDR dropping trials off 1998-2000 - and yet managed to retain his job as a doctor for all these years - we're about to watch two episodes of a six-part documentary series six years in the making and taking in evidence from 50 nations.
When the lights go on after the second film, which is part 4 in the series, the applause are muted, adult eyes shine with the tears for the tears of a young baseball player, now 20, who is five years beyond the moment he was first injected with Stanozolol (commonly known by the brand name Winstrol), a synthetic anabolic-androgenic steroid (AAS) derived from dihydrotestosterone (DHT).
He's speaking to camera from the depths of despair far from his mother, far from home in the Dominican Republic. He's in Madrid with his father - and an ambulance picks him up three times a week to take him for dialysis, a cleaning of blood poisoned in his youth by the people who doped him - and a great many of his peers down the decades. Some of them ended up playing in the NFL and earning biog money in the NFL, some never made that goal of children back home, and some of them never made it because they never made it at all: they're dead buried and forgotten.
Joel, the victim now in Madrid, rubs his arms as his tears fall on grotesquely swollen veins. The film invites us into a young life in ruins, a family in torment. After we've seen pictures of the moments Joel, pumped full of bulking poison so he can throw with more force, is rushed into the emergency room for the first time, second and third times, wired up with tubes, ventilators, crash teams trying to save his life. They did, but young Joel wishes they hadn't.
"I've become a monster," he says, all because he had a dream of buying his mum a nice place to live, and baseball, the national game in his country, was the pathway to it.; one lined with rogues and needles full of life-threatening, banned substances.
Joel is not alone, he's one of an estimated 10 million, among a global population of 200 million children taking part in performance sport from a young age, who are victims of child doping.
We are 36 years beyond the moment child doping was confirmed as having been part of East Germany's state-secret Research Plan 14:25 - a systematic doping program partly maintained by the IOC-accredited anti-doping laboratory that served as a place to not catch the positive results and report them to the authorities but to catch such outcomes in order to keep the fraud from the eyes of the world.
We're 26 years beyond the moment that convictions criminal and otherwise were handed out to coaches, officials, doctors and politicians in the German Doping Trials of 1998-2000. Child doping is illegal in Germany and has been for many decades. And yet... it's still going on - and how!
I was invited to the premiere in Potsdam as one of those who contributed to the work of the team at EyeOpeningMedia, in partnership with German public- broadcaster ARD, and its member RBB, as the 'Doping Unit' that investigates the dark side of sport. That team:
The Eye-Opening team was behind the exposure of the China 23-go-free scandal in the lead-up to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, as covered in our China Diaries section:
Craig Lord
There's a lot to unpack, in the series, and from the premiere in Potsdam in the presence of Germany's sports minister, heads of NADA, the national anti-doping agency, the head of the Doping Victims association that still works daily with those impacted by the GDR doping system, and political heads charged with tackling issues of abuse in general.
We won't get to all that today, but here's where you can watch the whole series in English for yourself, including the part that deals with hot-housing in swimming, among other sports, Russia and China in specific focus:
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