Germany’s 153 athletes in Vancouver and Whistler carry the weight of arguably the world’s most bittersweet national Olympic legacy.
These athletes represent a well-financed Olympic powerhouse that is backed by widespread public enthusiasm for sports, leading to an incredible 1,600 winter and summer medals since the modern Games began in Athens in 1896.
That total dwarfs the performance of Germany’s main European rivals and is second only to the U.S. total of 2,504. It is also higher than the combined medal count of the former Soviet Union (1,204), Russia (391) and the pre-1917 Russian empire (eight).
And in winter sports, Germany stands alone at the top, with 329 medals 119 gold, 117 silver and 93 bronze.
Germans, today and throughout much of their recent history, love watching and especially playing sports, with 91,000 sports clubs engaging an estimated 27.5 million members and 7.5 million volunteer coaches and other supporters.
Many in the country of 82.5 million will ignore time zone challenges this month to glue themselves to their televisions to watch German athletes collect medals in Canada.
How enthusiastic? German broadcasters are famously eager to interrupt major events like a crucial hockey match such as Canada versus Russia to show a German competing in an obscure sport.
“It’s embarrassing. I wish this wouldn’t happen, but it does,” jokes Michael Reinsch, who writes extensively on Olympic sports for the daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Yet Germany’s Olympic experience has been soiled by the worst of the politics, corruption and tragedy that have always represented the dark side of the Olympic movement.
Germany is the only country to host both the Summer and Winter Games in the same year, but both took place in 1936 the fateful year when dictator Adolf Hitler used the events as a propaganda tool to promote Aryan racial supremacy and to legitimize a regime about to unleash a war that would cost tens of millions of lives.
A horrible tragedy ensued in 1972 when Germany tried to remove the Nazi-era stain on the nation’s Olympic heritage by hosting that year’s Summer Games in Munich.
Major investments were made in amateur sports in the years leading up to the Munich Games, driven in part by fear that West Germany didn’t want to be outperformed by its East German rivals.
But Palestinian terrorists forever marred the event dubbed “The Happy Games,” to reflect Germany’s new optimism – by breaking into the poorly secured Olympic Village and murdering 11 members of the Israeli team.
And even Germany’s overall medal total is tainted, with 519 of those medals coming from East German athletes during the 1968-1988 period before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, when that tiny communist country of 18 million went to enormous lengths to use sports excellence as a propaganda tool.
Germany’s reunification in 1990 led to shocking revelations of widespread, state-sanctioned doping of East German athletes.
Yet the German team, now with a well-financed, “zero tolerance” anti-doping program, has shaken off these legacies to consistently outperform most rivals.
At the Beijing 2008 Summer Games, Germany finished fifth with 41 medals, including 15 golds.
And Germany remains dominant in the Winter Games, finishing first in three subsequent Games after unification – 1992 in Albertville, in 1998 in Nagano and in 2006 in Turin. Germany was second in Salt Lake City in 2002 and third in Lillehammer in 1994.
What is Germany’s secret?
German athletes are backed up by an impressive combination of government, private sector, and volunteer support systems, all in turn supported by a society where sports is a major building block in the country.
Historians say the driving impetus for sport success was the intense post-Second World War rivalry between communist East Germany and their Western rivals.
“It’s all relates to the Cold War,” said Uta Balbier of the Washington, D.C.-based German Historical Institute.
West Germany’s government largely ignored sports in the postwar period, associating it with Nazi ideology, but that changed in the 1960s as commentators began complaining about the nation’s underperforming compared to the East Germans, she said.
The obsessive link between Olympic gold and national pride continued after unification in 1990, and was reflected in an agreement in late 2009 cementing Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government.
“The Cold War created in Germany a mentality that success in sports relates to a successful representation of the nation, that success in sports reflects economic and technological strength,” according to Balbier. “It was this mentality that survived the Cold War and that explains the ongoing support of sports in Germany.”
Sport, according to the interior ministry’s website, teaches citizens about responsibility, helping others, creating a more egalitarian society, improving health, fighting violence, and boosting social integration among different ethnic groups.
While many governments around the world engage in such boosterism, Germany walks the walk. The interior ministry alone spends 139 million euros, or nearly $200 million Cdn, on high-performance sports each year.
The money is distributed to 61 national sports federations, based partly but not entirely on past success, according to Christian Klaue, spokesman for the German Olympic Sports Confederation.
“In the past national federations got the money based on the success of the past Games. So if they failed to be successful they had hard times ahead.”
Now the national body negotiates with each individual sports federation based on established annual goals.
But that’s not all. Germany’s 16 state governments make heavy investments in amateur sports, and the military, police, and even fire departments and the border guard agency have hundreds of employees who spend all their working hours preparing for high-level competitions.
For instance, 62 of the 153 athletes in B.C. – 31 women, and 31 men – are among an estimated 800 athlete-soldiers in the German military.
Germans also point with pride to the German Sports Aid Foundation, founded in 1967, which solicits donations from corporations to supplement athletes’ income and is sometimes an athlete’s only financial backer.
The foundation, which has funded more than 40,000 athletes since its creation in 1967, currently contributes between $300 and $600 a month to some 3,800 Germans.
It is described as the “most successful independent organization in Europe supporting top-level athletes,” and only 10 per cent of Germany’s medal winners aren’t backed by the foundation, according to its website.
Most major German corporations such as Lufthansa, Mercedes-Benz, German Telecom and Deutsche Bank, in addition to sponsoring individual athletes, fund amateur sports through the foundation, sometimes holding galas to lure wealthy individual donors.
Payback, a product loyalty company, has raised $435,000 since 2003 for German athletes with programs such a credit card that earns points for the foundation.
German athletes, in addition to sponsorship opportunities, earn cash awards for finishing in the top eight. A gold medal earns $22,000, a silver medal about $15,000, and a bronze about $11,000.
German athletes, both elite and amateur, also enjoy world-class sports training and sports medicine facilities. That infrastructure was enhanced during the global economic meltdown when Germany’s huge economic stimulus budget included about $850 million in sports spending.
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