Book Review: The Race Against the Stasi by Herbie Sykes

The Race Against the Stasi: The Incredible Story of Dieter Wiedemann, the Iron Curtain and the Greatest Cycling Race on Earth by Herbie Sykes (Aurum Press, 2016)

This is a compelling book even if read alone for the story of Dieter Wiedemann. The apolitical East German cyclist fell in love with a girl from the west and, frustrated by the political decisions that were hampering his career, decided to defect while attending an Olympic trial in West Germany. The book, however, comes into its own as a textbook case of all that will go wrong when government uses sport to relentlessly promote its own ideology while depicting its declared enemies as the Evil Other.

The German Democratic Republic realised early on that it could counter its outcast international status as both a communist and a post-Nazi state by using sport to showcase a more positive image of the putative workers’ paradise. It focused on football, athletics and cycling. In the book’s early chapters, Sykes and his sources tell the fascinating story of the Peace Race, the eastern Bloc version of the Tour de France that covered Poland, Czechoslovakia and the GDR over two weeks, and which included teams not just from the socialist states, but politically sympathetic riders from countries like the UK and the Nordic nations.

The Peace Race was massively popular as both a sporting and a social event, while being touted by the Iron Curtain countries as a way to build brotherhood across nations on the road to socialist perfection. Take away the socialist part, and it’s the same sentimentalist tosh that Fifa and the IOC parp out as a matter of course to put an altruistic gloss on their criminal activities. For young sportsmen like Wiedemann, being selected for their country’s team in the Peace Race was one of the highest goals they could aim for.

Professionals in all but name, GDR cyclists trained all day and were well-paid compared with other workers. They were celebrated in their communities, were rewarded with gifts like fridges and TVs if they did well, and were able to travel abroad to compete. They were encouraged to join the Communist Party, but if you kept a low profile and trained hard, like Wiedemann, they could generally stay out of politics. At the same time, they were constantly cited by the unreadable GDR propaganda organ Neues Deutschland to highlight the fraternal brilliance, solidarity and invincibility of the state’s riders.

Wiedemann’s problems started after the Berlin Wall was built in 1961 and the GDR was initially barred from international competition in the west. This narrowed the number of events he could take part in, and he found himself excluded from teams when passed over for riders in more politically favoured institutions, like the Stasi-backed Dynamo club, or the elite, Leipzig-based Deutsche Hochschule für Körperkultur. He was also marginalised because he didn’t go out of his way to promote the Party or talk to journalists. Driven too by his innocent young love for a western girl he’d met and had corresponded with for three years, Wiedemann decided that he’d had enough.

“So I’d missed out on both the [1963] Peace Race and the Tour of the GDR,” Wiedemann tells Sykes. “I was like a tree that can’t bear fruit, and the only things growing were anger and resentment. I’d started to hate all the hypocrisy of GDR cycling, and to resent the fact that my career was being hijacked by politicians.”

Although the Stasi had Wiedemann in its sights, like it did for any athlete who travelled to the west, it seemed as surprised as anyone when the apparently compliant Sportfreund defected during the Olympic trials that were held jointly with West Germany for an all-German team, ahead of the 1964 Olympics. The ubiquitous security service then put immense pressure on his family, in order to punish him indirectly for his ‘treason’. Wiedemann’s younger brother’s own cycling career was effectively over, his dad lost his well-paid job as a cycling mechanic, and they were granted no visas to visit Dieter in the west. The gifts had to be returned. Worst of all, Wiedemann’s mother ended up primarily blaming her son for his defection, above the manipulative state doctrines that had put the brakes on his promising career.

This book is an absorbing history of sport, political meddling and state oppression in the GDR. I did find myself speed-reading some of the Stasi reports and the extracts from Neues Deutschland. Important as they are, they don’t make for good literature and could perhaps have been cut or occasionally summarised. However, as an impeccably researched work reflecting the perils of ideological interference in citizens’ lives in order to shore up the total power of a paranoid, authoritarian elite, The Race Against the Stasi merits a prominent place in sporting literature’s leading pack. Thoroughly recommended.

Book Review: Brazil's Dance With the Devil by Dave Zirin

Essential reading matter
 for the next fortnight.

Brazil's Dance With the Devil - updated Olympic edition, by Dave Zirin (Haymarket Books, 2016)

I always prepare for a major international sporting event with some appropriately cheery reading matter. Dave Zirin's examination of Brazil's back-to-back hosting of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics have helped me reach the perfect conclusion - that we should all spend the next two weeks doing something better with our time than watching the drug-fixed, pseudo-harmonious sham that the quadrennial sporting fest has been ever since the 1936 Games were staged in Berlin.

Zirin precedes his book with a quote from the Brazilian footballer Socrates: "Victory is secondary. What matters is joy." Socrates was a free-spirited democratic socialist, and unfortunately these are few and far between in either sport or politics. The author also quotes George Orwell's famous essay 'The Sporting Spirit', in which Orwell professes his amazement that some people believe that "sport creates goodwill between the nations". He adds that "as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage instincts are aroused."

That depends to some extent on how much a government is invested in the success of its athletes for propaganda purposes. In the case of Russia, looking ahead to an embarrassingly low medals haul at the 2014 Winter Olympics, it decided instead to cheat, on a breathtakingly mass scale. It left the "savage instincts" until five days after that lamentable, egregiously expensive tournament was safely over, demonstrating its spirit of international unity and goodwill by annexing the Crimea region of Ukraine.

Brazil, as Zirin demonstrates, is a quite different case. It's less focused on flag-waving and medals and more on presenting a positive image of itself to the outside world. That means playing up the joy cited by Socrates, a virtue traditionally associated with Carnival, a particularly crowd-pleasing style of soccer, and the kind of jubilant public scenes that some years back greeted the awarding of the 2016 games to Rio de Janeiro.

Zirin travels to Brazil and talks to the people affected about what this really meant once the initial excitement gave way to hard sums, and the realisation that the physical presence of the city's favelas were an obstacle to the official concept of how the government wanted Rio 2016 to look. The author does a good job of tracing the history of the favelas and how they came to be in the first place - the county's land-hogging oligarchs made no provision to house the mainly illiterate labourers that flocked to the cities after the abolition of slavery towards the end of the nineteenth century. So the workers built their own houses wherever they could.

"The favelas are perhaps best known, and most notoriously, for their history of poverty and violence," writes Zirin, "mostly in the minds of those who have never set foot inside these communities." As he discovers, the favelas are much more community than slum, and though he stresses that the poverty and drug violence are very real problems, the sense of co-operation, openness and a collective civic society are much more prevalent than in the middle class housing units of either Brazil or, say, the US.

Favelas, though, don't look good to tourists, and so the city of Rio and the Brazilian government have been bulldozing those within plain sight, displacing residents who have lived there for decades, and opening the way for property interests. "The real-estate and construction magnates' dream of totally removing the favelas from Rio cannot be disconnected from the goals of hosting the Olympics and the World Cup," Zirin notes. "A full scale effort by the city to rebrand itself as a global city."

So Fifa and the IOC come to town, and the poor get shafted in every way - the money that might have been spent educating them, treating them, or re-housing them close to the communities where they have always lived is instead spent on stadiums and facilities that will, in many cases, be used for less than a month, or under-used and costly to maintain for several years to come. Sure, there's new infrastructure (like a cable car through Providencia favela that will mainly be used by tourists, or an improved access road to the airport), but isn't that the government's job anyway?

Meanwhile, in the name of 'security', the police and military are then bolstered to monitor those with the temerity to protest, and to tear-gas them or shoot them with rubber bullets if things seem to be getting out of hand. The security excuse can also be used to indiscriminately shoot dead hundreds of chiefly young black men in the favelas on the grounds of controlling the drug trade.

If Socrates had lived to see the current anger of the urban working class at the waste of $12 billion for Rio 2016, he might have said, "Victory is secondary. What matters is housing, health and education. Then we can have joy." Still, enjoy the Olympics. Alternatively, read this timely and necessary book.