''They pushed her out of her sex,'' said Geipel, the former sprinter and writer who is a friend of Krieger's.

A Teenager's Torment

In 1979, at age 14, Heidi Krieger began attending the Sports School for Children and Youth in Berlin. It was affiliated with the powerful sports club Dynamo, which was sponsored by the Stasi, the East German secret police.

At 16, Heidi began to receive round blue pills wrapped in foil. This was the steroid Oral-Turinabol, but coaches typically called them vitamins that would increase strength and help the athletes endure the stress of training. In Heidi's case, the Oral-Turinabol was given in tandem with birth control pills.

Six months later, Heidi's clothes no longer fit and she felt ''like the Michelin Man or a stuffed goose,'' Krieger said. By the time she was 18, she weighed 220 pounds, had a deep voice, increased body and facial hair and appeared mannish. On the streets of Berlin, Krieger said, Heidi was derisively called a homosexual or a pimp. Once on a commuter train, in the presence of her mother, she was called a drag queen. She went home, removed her skirt and never wore one again.

At the airport in Vienna, where Heidi had gone for a track meet, a flight attendant gave her directions to the men's bathroom. Even later, as she considered a sex-change operation, Krieger said, a psychologist asked, ''So you want to change from a man to a woman?''

The insults stung, but Heidi kept taking the blue pills. She had wild mood swings, from depression to aggression to euphoria. Once, she swiped at a boxer who had taunted her. When she stopped taking the birth control pills, her breasts began to hurt severely. She felt out of place at the sports school and in her own body, but the shot-put was a way to measure up, to fit in. By 1986, she had become the European champion.

''The only thing I could do was sports,'' Krieger said. ''I got to travel, I received recognition. I got the feeling that I belonged. That's what I wanted, to belong. From my point of view, I deserved it. I had worked hard. To question whether these were hormones I was being given, I didn't ask or suspect.''