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This article compares East Germany's Cold War-era approach to doping to that of the USA's in terms of their respective impacts on medical risk. Although deserving of criticism on many levels, the GDR doping programme featured a number of safeguards designed to minimise medical dangers. Unlike their East German counterparts, American governmental units were not directly involved in the administration of performance-enhancing substances. The US approach to doping was not ideal in terms of medical risk, however. As a result of the country's regulatory approach to doping, the country's athletes frequently turned to black market sources for doping agents. It was also relatively common for American athletes to use performance-enhancing drugs without the benefit of medical supervision. The US approach to doping was in these ways inferior to that of East Germany's on the subject of medical risk

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A number of prominent writers on the social history and policy of sports doping in the former East Germany have compared that system with the atrocities of Nazi medical experimentation. This article draws from a range of primary and secondary sources to discuss and challenge the Nazi comparison argument. We argue that while there were many cases of secretive abuse and experimentation that led to severe side-effects, there are also examples of athletes who knew what they were taking. Moreover, the doping administrators did not have complete control over how doctors and coaches implemented the system - it was not a closed, totalitarian system that denied individual agency. We further argue that when set in the wider context of crimes within the former GDR, sports does not register as the most serious. The comparison with Nazi Germany is an over-statement constructed by writers whose emphasis on traditional sporting ethics had led them to exaggerate their argument. As such, the discussion of individual experiences opens up dilemmas, contradictions, and the space for agency, that simplistic top-down sociological and political models have so far denied

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