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Should Lord Coe want any reminder of the high price of tainted track and field glory, he need only talk to the forgotten victims of East Germany’s state-sponsored doping.

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, promising kids as young as eight were pumped full of steroids in a win-at-all-costs quest for victory.

It brought more than 500 summer and winter Olympic medals between 1968 and 1988 – but at a terrible price.

The stars of yesterday suffered severe depression, heart conditions, degenerative bone disease and infertility. Some even changed sex because of the drugs. Many spiralled into drink and drug addictions, unable to find work.

Olympic legend Coe, 59, now head of the athletics world governing body the IAAF, was called to account this week in the wake of the Russian doping scandal. He told MPs on the Culture, Media and Sport committee: “I have the support of the sport. Have there been failures? Yes. Will I fix them? Yes.”

(Image: Getty Images)

Maybe he will. But the sport has failed for years to stamp out cheating.

And for East German athletes, the vast majority duped into taking drugs, that has meant ruined lives. GDR weightlifter Roland Schmidt was pumped so full of steroids, he grew 36DD breasts.

He had to have them surgically removed as his body had stopped producing testosterone.

Shot putter Heidi Krieger suffered the opposite effect.

Testosterone took her femininity. She changed sex and now lives as a man, teaching youngsters the dangers of pumping steroids in a bid for sporting glory.

About 1,000 GDR former athletes who were given little blue pills have just celebrated a £7.2million pay-out from the German Government.

After more than 25 years of suffering, it amounts to little more than £7,200 per athlete.

But they are jubilant at their agony finally being recognised.

Heidi took so many steroids she is now Andreas. Drugs she was forced to take by coaches as a young girl changed her gender and left her with pain in her hips and legs from lifting huge weights while under the influence of steroids.

Nicknamed Hormone Heidi by rivals, she had a full sex-change operation in 1997, completing the physical change.

Read more:Doping agency declares Russia and four other countries "non-compliant"

Happily married to Ute Krause, a swimmer who was also a victim of the GDR system, Andreas shocks young people with photos of when he was Heidi.

“The big difference these days is that the Russian athletes have a choice,” says Andreas, 50.

“They will pay a terrible price in future. We had no choice because we were under a dictatorship.

“They told us they were vitamins, and we believed them. They exploited my love of sport.

“Now I give something back by teaching young people. I tell them about Athlete 54, a woman who was given pills every day by her coach.

“By 17, she had so many medals due to doping, but by 21 she was broken. Then I say ‘OK, Heidi can speak to you about doping – because Athlete 54 is me.’”

It has quite an impact.

He adds: “I understand Heidi better than ever today. When I see photos, I accept that was me. That is the secret, the first step. I did not hide my past. It is not worth it. She is part of me still.”

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Communist East Germany struggled to provide basics for its people, yet wanted to show the world its power through its athletes. It wrecked their lives.

Secret police files revealed they had been given Oral-Turinabol, a steroid produced by pharmaceutical firm Jenapharm. It was approved for some illnesses, but not meant as a performance enhancer.

Heidi’s records show that in 1986, the year in which she became European champion, she was given 2,590 milligrams of Oral-Turinabol.

Read more:London 2012 bosses told during Games their drug-testing procedures were ''appalling''

That is roughly 1,000 milligrams more than the amount given to Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, whose doping programme shocked the world when it was exposed in 1988.

Jenapharm argued it was not culpable, since the drug was legal but misused by trainers. Then a state-owned company, subservient to the wishes of the Communist regime during the 1970s and 1980s, it produced an estimated two million tablets per year given to GDR athletes.

Lawyers say files from East Germany’s notorious secret police, the Stasi, show that company officials had discussed the doping programme with the government.

But Isabelle Roth, the company’s then chief executive, insisted the firm was not the “driving force” behind the doping programme. She said: “The drug was misused. We cannot be held responsible.”

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(Image: Daily Mirror)

Former GDR hammer thrower Thomas Gotze, 53, now a state prosecutor in Germany, was given so many pills as a teenager that he would work out for up to six hours. “I only found out later they were steroids,” he says.

“Russians should come here to see how they will end up – broken, sick, injured. In 20 years, they will be just like us.”

Ines Geipel, 55, part of a 1980s world-beating East German sprint team and now a college lecturer, set up the group for GDR victims.

She is unsure about Coe’s ability to clean up athletics. But she has a stark message for President Vladimir Putin and the Russian athletes prepared to sacrifice everything for sporting glory: You will pay the price.

She says: “Putin needs great sporting success just as the GDR did.

“It is more than 25 years ago now and yet there are so many parallels with the Russian situation and ours. It is about a state-controlled abuse.

“It carried on until 1989. We are probably talking about 10 to 15,000 athletes in total. We saw kids as young as eight being doped. They were guinea pigs and we have seen the health impact down the generations, passed from grandfather to grandchild.

“The bodies are broken, and so are the souls. Naturally there was great gynaecological damage because the women were taking men’s hormones. We have seen still births, infertility, disabled children born to former athletes.”

(Image: Getty)

Ines says young athletes were often trapped in special training camps. Some mums revolted when daughters returned with deep voices, muscles, facial hair.

“Some managed to get out,” she says. “But most were too scared. You cannot imagine now what it was like to live under state control then. Athletes were alone, we could not talk to each other out of fear of being found out and punished.”

Ex-GDR sprinter Marita Koch still holds the world record for the 400m, 30 years after she ran, but has always denied doping. Her time of 47.60secs was set at the IAAF World Cup in Canberra, the last of her 11 individual outdoor world records.

(Image: Getty)

When the Mirror calls at her remote home near Rostock, a windswept town on Germany’s Baltic coast, husband and former coach Wolfgang Meier, 73, launches an outspoken defence of his wife’s career.

“The Germans should be proud they still have a world record,” he says. “Instead all they talk about is drugs.

“She never failed a drugs test. The problem was the West [German] view of the Osties [the East Germans]. We were winners, we succeeded, and there was some jealousy of our success.”

Koch, 58, declines to answer questions on the GDR doping machine. But for her former team-mates, the Russian scandal is a terrible echo of the past, when a state-run sport programme played a grotesque game of poker with their lives.