Having looked in some detail at the former Soviet Sports machine in Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 6, I’m going to move somewhat chronologically to talk about the East German sports machine (dominant in about the 80’s) along with Bulgarian Olympic lifting (which actually overlapped with both).  While both share a lot of similarities to what the Soviets had done, there are a few key differences worth noting. Then just to fill some space I’ll briefly talk about Australian swimming.

For the groups I’m going to talk about today, I’m not going to do the subsections I’ve been using. This is to prevent me from being excessively wordy and it is getting repetitive at this point. Mainly I’ll sum up where things were the same and focus on difference and how they impacted on the end result in any given system.

I am, gradually, getting to a point.

.

East German Sports Dominance

The East Germans dominated a select number of sports in and around the 1980’s and, as I mentioned above, a lot of what they did is structurally similar to what the Soviets had done a decade earlier.  Fine, East Germany (or the GDR, German Democratic Republic) was Socialist as opposed to communist but, for all practical purposes, the end result was the same.

Folks in the culture are raised to believe in the whole over the individual and Germany was just as intent on using international sport for sociopolitical reasons as the Soviets.  This is just as reflected in Harre’s periodization manual as it was in Matveyev’s but I’ll spare you a block quote.

In contrast to the Soviets, however, the GDR was much more focused in terms of the sports that they, err, focused on and dominated in (and you’ll see this as a repeated theme when I talk about China on Monday).  And the reason, as much as anything, had mostly to do with the size of the country and its population.

Continue reading Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 7