by Herbie Sykes
I had to go to see the section leader and he said, ‘I don’t see any reason for you not to be a member.’ I told him I didn’t want to, so he said, ‘All right, but at least get yourself a blue shirt and play along with it.’ So my wearing the shirt meant that they left me in peace. I put it on the same as everyone else, because if I hadn’t I’d have been an enemy of socialism and they wouldn’t have let me race my bike.
TÄVE
When I was kid there was a tank factory around the corner from us. They hid the tanks in the woods behind our house so that the Allies wouldn’t see them. One of my childhood memories is a bombing raid in 1941. I remember being unable to hear for three days after it, and being traumatised by this absolute and total devastation.
Then I started to grow up, and to understand what it had all been about. And what had it all been about? Nothing! Nothing whatsoever except for greed and power! Just bullshit! So when you’re confronted by something like that you have to think seriously about it. You have a responsibility to try to find a different way, and to not repeat the same mistakes over and over again. You need to start building a better future, and I think that was what people of my generation started to do.
EMIL
I’d always planned to do just one season in the GDR anyway, but then the payments were discontinued. There was no more western money, and that was the point at which I drew a line. I insisted the GDR Cycling Federation adhered to our agreement, and president Scharch came to the Swiss border in person. He paid me every last pfenning and asked me for a signature confirming that I had no further demands of the GDR. Then he signed to confirm I hadn’t taken any GDR property, patted me on the shoulder and said, ‘You’ve done it right.’
So it was a perfectly normal departure with transit to the west, but then later I found out from the press that I’d defected. They revoked the Master of Sports honour I’d earned at the Peace Race.26 27
DIETER
My life was pretty simple. When I wasn’t working or sleeping I was on my bike.
I was becoming a pretty decent rider, so I joined the cycling section of the BSG,28 the company sports association. Everyone in the GDR was encouraged to participate in sports, and the way to do that was through a BSG. So in my section there would have been about twenty cyclists, then there were the footballers, gymnasts, athletes and all the rest. They gave me a jersey and paid my travelling expenses to and from the races, and I did well.
The problem with the BSGs was that they were open to everyone. They were extremely successful in incentivising people to take part in sports, but they weren’t designed to create the elite athletes the politicians wanted. They needed a better way to identify the most talented athletes and coaches, and so they started creating new sport clubs. They took the very best athletes out of the BSGs and put them into the sport clubs, with a view to them representing the GDR in international competitions. The better they were the more the state contributed to their earnings, and the best ones were fully funded, full-time athletes. The BSGs were left to concentrate on non-competitive sports, and local level competitions. Hardly any BSG members participated in international events.
Chemnitz was a big uranium mining area and the mining company, SDAG Wismut,29 ran a BSG. In 1954 they’d been tasked with creating a sport club, and had transferred all the best cyclists out of the BSG and into it.
DIETER
Then in 1956 Motor, another BSG in Chemnitz, was converted to a sport club as well. The cycling coach was a guy called Werner Richter, and he came to our house. He told us that he had been charged with getting the best young cyclists into the club, that he wanted me to join, and that if I did I would get everything I needed. They would sort out the travel, get me a new bike and see to it that I had two afternoons a week off to train. My dad knew him from way back and said he was a good man. I joined straight away, and I started riding quite a lot with Werner’s son, Udo.
UDO
My dad had already been quite successful before Dieter and I started riding there.
He was a single-minded person, and he was an optimist. So after he’d finished his own career his goal was to try to make a contribution to building the sports enterprises. As it happened they were looking for a cycling coach, and he decided it would be an interesting job. He wanted to introduce young people to cycling, and to inspire them through it.
DIETER
The better I got the less I had to work, and the less I worked the more I was able to train. Berlin was reimbursing the company for the hours I missed, and I got a bit of cash when I won. For a win I’d get about 30 marks, and maybe 20 if I got second, and there were other prizes here and there. I suppose in that sense it was no different from junior racing in the west.
I finished my apprenticeship in August 1957.
NEUES DEUTSCHLAND
ORGAN DES ZENTRALKOMITEES DER SOZIALISTISCHEN EINHEITSPARTEI DEUTSCHLANDS
The Press Office of the Prime Minister announces:
For health reasons the Minister of State Security, Ernst Wollweber, has asked to be relieved of his duties. Prime Minister Grotewohl has accepted his request and has appointed Erich Mielke, the former Deputy Minister for State Security, to replace him from 1 November.
Reprinted from ‘Erich Mielke Minister for State Security’, 1 November 1957
DIETER
Then in 1958 Motor sacked Richter, the coach. I couldn’t understand it because he was a good man and a good coach. He knew cycling, but apparently his methods were old-fashioned. There was a meeting and I got up and said, ‘I don’t understand why he’s being fired. Everyone knows he’s a good coach!’ One of the officials said, ‘That’s such a naïve question that it could only have come from somebody very young.’ I didn’t really know what he meant by that, but I was told that it had to do with his politics. The state was paying his wages, but he wasn’t following the party line.
UDO
The issue was that my dad wanted cycling competition between east and west to be revived. He made no secret of the fact, and he expressed his opinion quite openly. He read an article in Radsport-Woche, the cycling magazine, and it stated that sporting contacts with ‘capitalist countries’ were a betrayal of the socialist ideal. He wrote to the editors about it, and was critical of their stance. They replied using quite harsh words.
That was probably why they dismissed him from the club, because that way he wouldn’t be able to influence young people’s perceptions of socialism.
DIETER
The guy who replaced Richter was called Helmut Wechsler. He’d never ridden, but he was just about as red as they come. He was one of ‘them’, and I didn’t like him and didn’t trust him.
* Fifth SED Party Congress, June 1958
DIETER
I decided I wanted to leave Motor, but it didn’t work like that in GDR sport. I could have requested a transfer, but I couldn’t afford for them to think I was siding with Richter. Then in mid-season a directive arrived from Berlin. They were reviewing the structure of the sport clubs again, and Motor was to become a track club. Wismut would focus on the road, and the two disciplines would be separated off. I’d been earmarked as a road cyclist, so in effect I was delegated to Wismut after all.
I was already a pretty good climber and time trialist, but a very ordinary sprinter. I knew that I had to improve on that, and for that to happen I needed to spend time at the track. The problem was that their splitting the two codes meant that I was effectively barred from riding it, so it made no sense whatsoever. It actually had quite a negative impact on my riding, but the people making these decisions were party functionaries, not bike riders. They didn’t actually know the first thing about cycling, but as they saw it they were subsidising our careers. That gave them the right to decide things like that, and there was nothing you could do about it.
My dad was a really good mechanic, and Wismut offered him a full-time job. It was a dream for him. He loved the work, he was passionate about cycling and he enjoyed travelling to the ra
ces. My little brother started coming along as well.
DIETER
Eberhard started to race, and he was very good. Some of the coaches thought he was even more talented than me.
If you ask me about his character I’d say he and I were very different. I tended to be quite introspective, but Eberhard much more open. He was interested in clothes and I wasn’t, he liked to be in a crowd and I didn’t. So I was more reserved like our dad, and I guess he was more expressive.
There were four years between us, so we didn’t spend that much time together socially. He joined the youth club as I left it, and of course we had different sets of friends. The thing we had in common was cycling. It was what we talked about when we were at home together, and I guess I’d look out for him just like any brothers would.
EBERHARD
My brother was my idol when I was a child. I used to clean his bike, and I cleaned his cycling shoes. I wanted to be a racer like him, and as soon as I began I started to do well. Dieter’s success inspired me, and I wanted to prove that I could do it, too.
DIETER
1959 had been a really good year. I’d won a lot, and I was starting to become quite well known around Chemnitz. With the extra money I made we lived pretty well, and we were lucky. They abolished rationing that year, and a lot of people went hungry.
By now cycling was more popular than ever. Täve had won his second Peace Race,30 and then he’d gone to Holland and won another world championship. It was his second in succession, and he became even more famous. He was on the front page of the papers, and he was always being portrayed as the model socialist. He’d come from peasant stock, but through hard work and sacrifice he’d reached the top. They’d even elected him to the People’s Chamber,31 the parliament.
DIETER
In January 1960 they drew up the provisional list for the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, and I was on it.
I went on a winter training camp with Täve and the rest of the elites, doing cyclo-cross and cross-country skiing. I enjoyed it and it went well. It was a sort of carrot; they were letting me know that if I progressed and toed the line I’d soon be able to join them, with all the privileges that implied. I’d still be an ‘amateur’ cyclist, but in reality I’d be a full-time one. They placed a lot of emphasis on sport, so the status of full-time athletes was extremely high.
DIETER
So I started the season well, and in May I got a letter. It said that I was to stop working altogether during the season, and to focus exclusively on cycling. The state would fund my career from here on in, and I would be exempted from military service because I was a sportsman.
I would say that there would have been about 120 full-time road cyclists in the country, and I’m pretty sure I was the youngest. Obviously I wasn’t ready for the Peace Race yet, but I’d been identified as a candidate for later on. The GDR sent teams to amateur stage races all over East Europe and North Africa, and I was better suited to them than to single-day races. Like everyone else I wanted to travel, and I knew that if I got good results I might eventually qualify for the Peace Race and the World Championships. Of course the biggest dream of all was to compete at the Olympics, and now that I was full-time it was something I could genuinely aspire to.
DIETER
One of my Wismut team-mates, Johannes Schober, was selected to ride the Peace Race, but we’d expected a guy named Manfred Weissleder to make it as well. He was an excellent sprinter, and his results were exceptional. However it was starting to dawn on me that things were becoming more complicated among the seniors.
Ours was a provincial club and it wasn’t political at all. Others were, though, and they had much more influence than us.
The most powerful of all was DHfK. I’d been invited to enrol there the previous year, but I’d turned it down. I hadn’t wanted to move to Leipzig. I was worried there would be Stasi there, and I’m not a herd animal anyway.
We were ostensibly amateurs, so we had to have an occupation outside of cycling. Obviously you couldn’t do a job, so you became a student. I was on a teacher training course at a polytechnic in Chemnitz, working towards a teaching degree. There were about eight of us cyclists. We studied on site during the off-season, and did the rest as a correspondence course. In principle the DHfK guys were also studying, but in reality only the guys lower down the scale did, not the elites. In that sense we were at a disadvantage, but the real problem was that all the national team coaches and selectors worked at DHfK. To do that you had to be a party member and a good socialist, and obviously they looked after their own.
DHfK was the seat of power in GDR sport, and cycling was an extremely popular sport. The riders there were the chosen ones, and when they selected the Peace Race team there were four from DHfK. Then you had Schober from Wismut, and a guy called Egon Adler. He was from Leipzig as well, but he wasn’t enrolled at DHfK. He rode for Rotation, another sport club in Leipzig, but he was so good that it was inconceivable they might leave him out.
A few days before the race Günter Lörke, one of the DHfK riders, fell ill. So they called Weissleder up after all, and he won four stages.
It turned out to be one of the greatest races of all time. The last stage was Magdeburg to Berlin. The GDR team had the blue jerseys, and Adler the yellow one. Then a DHfK guy named Erich Hagen was second at thirty-eight seconds, a Belgian guy named Claes third at one minute and another Belgian fourth. It was a flat stage, but at the Peace Race the stage winner got a one-minute time bonus, the runner-up thirty seconds and the third fifteen. That meant that, come what may, the Peace Race would be decided at the stadium.
Claes wasn’t a sprinter, but Adler crashed after twenty kilometres and the Belgians saw their chance to eliminate him. The GDR team decided to have Täve and Weissleder wait, to try to tow Adler back on. They were the strongest time trialists, and the three of them were effectively riding a team pursuit to try to bridge across to the peloton. The problem was the Belgians were too strong, and after eighty kilometres they were cooked. That left Hagen, Schober and another DHfK guy named Eckstein fighting against the whole Belgian team. The first three from each team counted towards the team prize, and the Belgians knew that if they dropped one of the remaining GDR riders they could win it. So a mechanical problem or puncture would be disastrous for the team competition, and if something happened to Hagen we’d lose everything.
Luckily they didn’t have any mechanicals, and they managed to chase everything down. That still left the sprint at the stadium, and there were 70,000 people there to watch it. They all knew exactly what was happening, and so did everyone else because the entire country was listening on the radio. Weissleder would probably have won the sprint had he been there, and Täve was pretty fast, too. As it was, both of them were back down the road with Adler, and it was clear they’d made a big mistake in having them wait for him. Neither Eckstein nor Schober were sprinters, and if Claes beat Hagen and finished first or second he’d win the Peace Race. Hagen was a decent sprinter, but he was totally exposed. There were often crashes because it was a cinder track, and if one of the Belgians brought him off that would be that.
In the event Hagen won the stage and the yellow jersey, and the GDR team held on to the blue ones. It was probably the most dramatic Peace Race finale in history, and an unprecedented success for the GDR.
* Cited in Neues Deutschland, 18 May 1960
MANFRED
Everyone had the same objective. You wanted to do well at the Peace Race and the Olympics, then to turn pro’ and ride with a sponsor’s name on your jersey. You didn’t articulate that to the coaches, though, because you risked being turfed out straight away.
I’d won four stages, and between me, Schur, Adler and Hagen we’d had the yellow jersey from beginning to end. After the Peace Race I was offered contracts by professional teams from France, West Germany and Belgium. I thought about it a lot, but in the end I decided against going. On a sporting level I was tempted, but I wanted to ride in the Olympics in Rome,
and I didn’t want to leave my family.
They didn’t select me for Rome,32 so they basically threw away a gold medal in the team time trial.
DIETER
I’d been training with Weissleder and Schober, and so their performances at the Peace Race gave me a barometer of my progress. I had my nineteenth birthday the following month, and I knew that with each passing week I was getting closer to their level. I lived and breathed cycling, and I was working my way up the pecking order at Wismut. I was focused on trying to qualify for the national team time trial championships in August, and I trained like fury to get there. Weissleder, Schober and a guy called Härtel pretty much selected themselves, so my big objective was to be chosen for the final spot.
And then, of course, you know what happened in July.
SYLVIA