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Kamila Valiyeva
Photo: HOW HWEE YOUNG/EPA
There was a time of outrage in the late 1990s.
At that time, the comprehensive doping program of the GDR had been unveiled.
With the state plan 14.25, the supposed wonderland of sport cheated its competitors for decades.
What particularly shocked people was that the GDR had not shied away from doping children.
Even 12-year-old swimmers had been "masculinized" with anabolic steroids.
Something like this must never happen again – everyone agreed on that: athletes, officials, politicians.
But this indignation did not last long.
At the Beijing Olympics, it was revealed that Russian figure skater Kamila Valiyeva had traces of the heart drug trimetazidine in her body during a rehearsal in December.
she is 15
It is still unclear how the drug got into the body of the exceptional talent, who is to blame for the scandal.
But the evidence suggests that the Russian became the victim of her own confidants: a success-obsessed trainer, a supposedly unscrupulous doctor.
If this suspicion is confirmed, Valiyeva would be the next example of an athlete whose body has been abused to produce athletic performance.
The GDR has perished, but the attempt to use children for the production of medals has probably not.
And obviously not the tendency not to follow the (doping) rules of sport.
In figure skating, gymnastics and tennis, teenagers are among the best in the world.
If you want to make it to the top, you have to prepare yourself intensively for at least six to eight years with bone-hard training, depending on the sport.
Child labor is as much a part of high-performance sport as the celebration after a successful shot on goal.
Sport has many tools to combat excesses.
There are ombudswomen and ombudsmen, contact persons for abuse.
Tens of thousands of doping controls are taken and analyzed every year.
However, this is not enough to protect the children.
Because nobody can control what really happens in the gymnasium and swimming pool, how children are bullied on tennis courts and ice rinks.
Competitiveness and competition are part of sport.
Children also have fun competing.
Even tears of defeat are part of the game.
But it becomes threatening when young athletes are exploited to serve foreign interests.
From parents hungry for success, merciless coaches, from states for which it is important to look good in the medal table.
The best way to put a stop to this abuse is to raise the minimum age.
Why this hasn't happened a long time ago is a disgrace to organized sport.
What would speak against banning teenagers from the show sport stages in general?
It is a form of voyeurism to delight in watching young girls in tight suits perform quadruple jumps on the ice.
This form of acrobatics is not necessary for athletic competition.
The second way to curb abuse is to change the grading standards in technical-compositional sports.
So wherever the judges evaluate the quality of movements.
In the »women« competition of figure skating, it is currently the case that the Olympic champion becomes the one who stands the most quadruple jumps.
Such feats can only be achieved by very light athletes who have trained for years.
Anyone who witnessed how enchanting figure skating can be four years ago, when Alyona Savchenko won gold in pair skating with Bruno Massot, cannot understand this penchant for artistry.
Savchenko was 34 years old in Pyeongchang.
Savchenko's performance remained an exception, the trend in Olympic sports is towards the spectacle.
Also in Beijing.
The consequences of this development of entertainment sports, especially for the youngest, have been forgotten.