Kornelia Ender, who won four gold medals and a silver as a member of the controversial 1976 GDR Olympic team in Montreal, celebrated her 50th birthday at home in Pfalz with 80 party guests at the weekend. Former husband and the most successful male backstroke swimmer in history, Roland Matthes, with whom she had one of her two daughters, was not among the guests. The couple split after four years of marriage back in the early 1980s and Ender had little to say about Matthes beyond claiming in a German paper that he cheated on her and criticised the way she cooked potatoes. 

The dominant woman athlete of the 1976 Olympic Games, with four gold medals all won in world-record times, Ender was the first Wundermadchen of the GDR medals factory. Of the 29 world records she established between 1973 and 1976, 6 fell in relays, 14 on freestyle, 1 on backstroke, 6 on butterfly and 2 on medley. At the helm of it all was Ender’s stunning progress over 100m freestyle: from the 58.25 clocked on July 13, 1975, Ender set 10 world records, becoming the first woman to break 58, 57 and 56 seconds, the 55.65 at which she left the mark in Montreal on July 19, 1976 marking a 2.85sec gain on the clock since Gould’s 58.5 in 1972. At the start of 2008, the world was still waiting for such a drop to happen again, while it took 14 years for Dawn Fraser and Gould (behind whom Ender won a silver medal over 200m medley at the 1972 Games) to achieve that progress before Ender. 

On July 22 in Montreal, Ender won the 100m butterfly and 200m freestyle titles (by the biggest margin in history) within 27 minutes of each other, both in world-record time. Born in Halle, Ender won four world titles and a silver at each of the 1973 and 1975 world championships. When she wed Matthes in 1978, the event was described as "the world’s fastest marriage". It lasted four years. Their daughter Francesca is the offspring of parents who boast eight gold, six silver and two bronze medals at the Olympic Games, 11 gold, three silver and 1 bronze medal at world championships, and 49 world records. In the early 1990s confirmation of a secret state-run doping programme tainted all GDR results from 1973 onwards, though Matthes was a case apart, his coach alone in being able to refuse the systematic doping programme and stay in her job, thanks to the super-talent and results of her key charge, a man who won the 100 and 200m Olympic backstroke crowns in 1968 and 1972.

From The Archive:

Ignorance is bliss

Craig Lord - December 7, 1991

Kornelia Ender speaks for the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall and revelations that her coaches gave her performance-enhancing drugs. 

The bliss of ignorance, it seems, can survive even the most thought-provoking revelations. For Kornelia Grummt, who gained her reputation as Kornelia Ender, a statement this week by 20 former East German coaches that swimmers took performance-enhancing drugs, means looking back more in sadness than in anger.  

In the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games, Ender, then aged 18, won four gold medals to add to her eight world titles, four other Olympic medals and four European titles. Today, from her comfortable home in Schornsheim, a village in southwest Germany, she says she never knew that she was being given drugs to help her, but acknowledges that she was injected with substances.  

The coaches' statement came at the start of a week in which Germany, at Gelsenkirchen, hosts the first European sprint championships, and brings the success of the first wundermadchen of the East German sports machine sharply back into focus.

Ender was the experiment that went right, a role model for subsequent German generations. She was chosen by a state talent scout at the age of ten as the girl who would become the fastest woman sprint swimmer in the world; between 1973 and 1976, she set the world record at 100 metres freestyle ten times (a record in itself, one more than Dawn Fraser), lowering the time from 58.25sec to 55.65sec, and retired unbeaten.   

Before her arrival, it took ten years for the world record to improve just under a second and in he 15 years since 1976 the record has been reduced by only 0.92sec each of the four times by an East German, the holder being Kristin Otto, who won six Olympic gold medals the year before the Berlin Wall crumbled. 

This year, Ender's time would have won the European title and placed her third in the world.   The town of Halle housed the Child and Youth Sports School where Ender, at ten, was taken to board. From day one, the target was Olympic success. Ender spent two hours in the water twice a day and did one hour of land work each day, and was rewarded by an above-average lifestyle. 

Caught up in the success of team and self, and believing that the "GDR system was right and good", she says, in reference to drugs, she had "no knowledge, nor any way of knowing, that such a problem existed". She adds: "There was no mention of it and nobody spoke about it. It was possible that we were given things in our food and drink. We were fed by a special kitchen at the school but we didn't know of anything. When I was very young, we were never given pills or injections."   

However, in 1975, as the pressure for success grew and training workloads increased to more than 18km (about 11 miles) a day in water, she said she was "astonished that I had grown so much. I put on eight kilos (about 18lb), but in muscle, not height". 

"Now, after all this time, I still ask myself whether it could be possible they gave me things, because I remember being given injections during training and competition, but this was explained to me as being substances to help me regenerate and recuperate. It was natural to think this way because the distance swimmers had more injections than we did as sprinters," says Ender. 

Of the coaches now speaking up and the doctors who may still be hiding, she says: "It's very sad. The only losers in that are the athletes. It is easy for them to state these things now the finger of blame is pointed at us, not them, and we knew nothing of these things, they did. They deserve punishing. The medical men are the real guilty people. They know what they have done. When they gave us things to help us 'regenerate' we were never asked if we wanted it, it was just given."

That sadness, she insists, does not detract from the joy that is still fresh in her memory of a swimming life in a system in which she strongly believed. The pressure to win translated into pressure to do as she was told after her retirement, failure to do so costing her the chance to revisit Montreal, at the invitation of the city, in 1986. 

But she denies her first marriage at 19 to Roland Matthes, the Olympic backstroke champion in 1968 and 1972, was arranged to create a "superswimmer". The relationship, she says, was genuine and Francesca was born to the couple in 1978.   

The adage that parents live their dreams through their children may be applied to the Grummt family, though the norm would be reversed. "I don't pressure her to achieve what I did. I encourage her only to do the things she likes, the things she has talent for," Ender said. 

Francesca and her sister, Tiffany, aged six, will have freedom of choice but not the kind of "advantages" bestowed on their mother.  Ender, who left the east soon after unification, is unperturbed. A good family life is all that counts, she says. (Craig Lord - 1991)