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Mark Schmidt in court
Photo: Peter Kneffel / dpa
After almost two years of pre-trial detention and 23 days of trial in four months, Mark Schmidt tries one last time to show his composure.
In a blue sweater and chinos, the 42-year-old is standing between his defense lawyers in session room A101 of the Munich district court on Friday morning.
When the presiding judge Marion Tischler pronounces the verdict on the Erfurt doping doctor and his four accomplices, he leans on the chair in front of him, then he bows his head.
Until recently, Schmidt had hoped for leniency from the criminal chamber.
He had shown remorse, speaking in a broken voice of "big shit" that he had "screwed up" in a final word.
He had "taken a wrong turn," he said, although the phrase sounded a bit belittling.
Between 2013 and 2019, he helped a dozen cyclists and winter sports enthusiasts from several European countries with their own blood doping so that they could pedal more persistently at the Olympics or the Tour de France or speed down the cross-country ski run.
Allegedly not so much out of financial interest, as Schmidt asserted, but "out of love for sport" and to prevent his customers from turning to the charlatans of the doping scene.
The chamber was not convinced by Schmidt's unselfish motives.
The court sentenced Schmidt to four years and ten months' imprisonment for violating the Medicines Act, the unauthorized use of doping methods in sport and dangerous physical harm.
In addition, the doctor is banned from working for three years.
His four helpers received some suspended sentences and a fine.
First great success of the anti-doping law
Judge Tischler explained that Schmidt had "introduced athletes to doping with criminal energy," manipulated their performance and earned money from it.
The doctor was said to have been the "head of a doping system" who ordered performance-enhancing preparations and utensils for autologous blood treatment abroad.
And who took advantage of his accomplices and their sometimes financial hardship to win them over to his own ends.
The ruling of the Munich Regional Court is so far unique in the Federal Republic.
Never before has a professional athlete, doctor or man behind received a custodial sentence with no chance of parole based on the anti-doping law that has been in force since 2015.
“It's crazy what you do with your life,” said Schmidt's defense attorney Juri Goldstein.
He left it open whether he wanted to go into revision.
The verdict is not yet legally binding.
The danger of autologous doping
The chamber found it particularly difficult that the doctor had incorrectly injected an Austrian mountain biker with dried hemoglobin - a research preparation that caused the athlete to chill and an allergic reaction.
Tischler spoke of a "human experiment beyond ethical standards."
The court benefited the doctor, among other things, from his will to clarify.
Schmidt had handed the investigators a cell phone with data, "without this process not having occurred," said Tischler.
The Chamber also credited him for admitting his guilt.
Schmidt's defense lawyers had demanded a three-year prison sentence.
He repeatedly argued that performance manipulation is ubiquitous in endurance sports - and that athletes crave doping drugs.
Tischler contradicted that Schmidt also created this market himself - and served his customers with a wide variety of preparations without considering their interactions.
Autologous blood doping is not safe.
Side effects include dizziness, septic shock, or anxiety.
The experts summoned to the trial also judged as negligent that Schmidt did not carry out any blood group tests before reinfusion in order to rule out a mix-up of the blood.
When a judgment is supposed to be a deterrent, but it doesn't
Nevertheless, the judgment is an extraordinarily harsh one, which certainly raises the question of proportionality - considering that a criminal in this country also receives at least five years imprisonment for serious robbery.
The doctor's customers wanted to be doped.
For this, they paid up to 30,000 euros per season.
Schmidt's defense attorney Goldstein therefore considers the sentence to be grotesquely exaggerated and calls the judgment "an example" that one wants to make on his client.
In fact, it seems as if the court wants its judgment to be understood as a deterrent.
As a bang for the anti-doping law, the balance of which seems rather poor so far.
Practice has shown that the new law has made little contribution to the cleanliness of top-class sport.
So far, it was mainly amateur athletes who were sanctioned, for example for trading in anabolic steroids in fitness studios.
The verdict against Schmidt marks a turning point.
The investigating chief public prosecutor Kai Gräber said that the guilty verdict shows that the law has proven itself.
He had demanded five and a half years in prison for Schmidt.
He now has to "let the dish sink in" to ensure that the dish remained underneath.
What remains of the largest German doping criminal trial in recent history?
Certainly a success for the investigators, but also the realization that Schmidt was not the great doping mastermind after all.
More like a cog in the gears of the fraud machinery.
A man who knew about doping, but by no means looked after top athletes, but above all athletic backbenchers.
And whose accomplices, some of whom act amateurishly, were fed up with the rush to competitions for a daily rate of 200 euros.
The Munich public prosecutor's office had to watch as the court reduced a number of accused cases of autologous blood doping to 26 criminal offenses.
Partly because the acts took place before the introduction of the Anti-Doping Act 2015 and could no longer be prosecuted.
Partly because drawing or supplying blood by itself was not a criminal offense if it did not take place immediately before a competition.
As recently as December 2019, the authority had reported the greatest success to date in the fight against doping offenders in top-class sport - after raids during the Nordic World Ski Championships in Seefeld, Austria, and in Schmidt's Erfurt practice.
Prosecutor Gräber let it be known that his agency could rely on 54 volumes of files and more than 30 witnesses for the investigation.
Schmidt only admits what cannot be denied
But the longer the process lasted, the more the investigators' hopes of tracking down other doping athletes and people behind the scenes in addition to Schmidt's customers.
The medic only admitted what could no longer be denied, kept silent about possible accomplices.
Most of the foreign witnesses who were summoned to the trial and who could have contributed to the investigation did not come at all or were vague in their statements, which increasingly frustrated prosecutor Gräber.
“Where are the names?
Where are the doctors?
I have only heard speculation and speculation here, ”he exclaimed as he presented his pleading.
"All smoke and mirrors!"
Nevertheless, there are calls in politics for more public prosecutor's offices.
So far there are only three - in Munich, Zweibrücken and Freiburg.
Whether additional authorities will help curb organized performance fraud is questionable - if doping investigators are not puzzled by the stabbed arm crook of an athlete, as witnesses reported.
Or when cyclists are only checked a dozen times on 140 days of racing, as the former professional Danilo Hondo said.
The process also made little publicity for the leniency program planned for this year.
The provision is intended to encourage doping sinners to unpack;
In return, they should receive mitigation.
But if you open your mouth, you sometimes cut your own flesh.
Ex-cross-country skier Johannes Dürr experienced this firsthand.
The key witness in the process of Schmidt and his helpers was ostracized after his cooperation with the authorities in the Windersports scene, is considered a nest polluter.
The Austrian Ski Association (ÖSV) gave him a muzzle.
What Dürr actually knew about the doping practices in the ranks of the ÖSV, he is no longer allowed to talk about.
Associations and equipment suppliers will continue to have little interest in tracking doping athletes.
The globally marketed exhibition is far too lucrative for that.
Those who are caught are out - whether they are athletes, doctors or assistants.
But the show has to go on.
The gap that Mark Schmidt left in the fraud system has now been filled by someone else - we can assume that.
"We're shoveling a hole, and another opens somewhere else," Chief Public Prosecutor Gräber had said before the trial began.
That won't change anytime soon.
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