Athletes Behaving Badly

Introduction

This book uses specific cases in which athletes received punishments, mainly in regards to defecting, to examine the evolving relationship between athletes and the sport leadership (and to some extent, with the socialist state as well) between 1948-1989. Most of the scholarship on the elite sport systems in the Eastern Bloc countries focuses on the victim-repressor narrative based on the East German case.[1] The German Democratic Republic’s development of a state-controlled, secret police-enforced doping program was certainly brutal in its intent to ensure their athletes’ sport success. But GDR sport system cannot be used to explain the elite sport systems as a whole.[2]

The first case depicted in this book largely mirrors the Hungarian Communist system’s changing relationship with the broader Hungarian public during between 1948-1989. The impact of the 1956 Revolution, particularly with the mass defection of over forty Olympic athletes after the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games, directly influenced sport leaders to implement a significant change in tactics with athletes. After 1956, elite athletes typically received lighter punishments than their Hungarian counterparts did for similar crimes. At the same time, these three men endured more scrutiny (in terms of being monitored by the secret police) from the Hungarian leadership as a result of their privileges and popularity within the public eye than the average person. Had these men been ordinary Hungarians, perhaps their plans for defection or smuggling endeavors would not have attracted the attention of state leaders. Athletes thereby occupied a unique position between the Hungarian state and OTSH and Hungarian society. This position gave athletes the hardest task of all: balancing their top privileges and status on the one hand, with their increased visibility and scrutiny under the eyes of Hungarian leaders on the other.
 
[1] Steven Ungerleider’s work is the best example of the works that take a moralistic approach to studying the GDR’s doping regime. It does contain excellent information about the control that the Stasi exerted and how it was organized and implemented. Steven Ungerleider, Faust’s Gold: Inside the East German Doping Machine, Thomas Dunne Books, 2001.

[2] In the last five years, two excellent works have been published that depict the broader milieu of elite sport in East Germany. See Mike Dennis and Jonathan Grix, Sport Under Communism: Behind the East German ‘Miracle,’ Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; and Alan McDougall, The People’s Game: Football, State and Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

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