The Mystery Of The UNBREAKABLE World Record

"never failed a drug test"....was before randomised testing was introduced and before HGH could be detected properly

I have never had to stop watching one of your videos before but I had to this time after three minutes… East German original documents that became available after the fall of the iron curtain show Koch used the anabolic steroid Oral-Turinabol (4-Chlorodehydromethyltestosterone) from 1981 to 1984 with dosages ranging from 530 to 1460 mg/year… this is where you should start, and if you think these documents are correct, this is where you end…

Koch was dosing on Oral Turinabol (aka CDMT) from 1981 to 1984. Berendonk & Franke saved documents written by the East German drug research programme and she listed by name in those documents listing her dosing from 530 to 1460 mg per year under State Plan Topic 14.25. She can say she didn't take it, but she would be hard pressed to not admit that she received 'vitamins' under her training program. The thing about CDMT is it is designed as a tablet.

Out of the top 10 fastest 400m times ever she holds 5! The soviet woman in 2nd in this race also ran the 9th fastest time ever in this same race. Only 3 of the top 10 times ever were ran outside the 1980's. All Eastern block countries were taking performance enhancing drugs at the time as well as some U.S. athletes. Every womens world record from the 100m to the 800m (not including hurdle races) was set in the 80's.

Her time was as legitimate as Flo Jo's times.

I remember seeing Koch and Kratochvilova run in the '80s. The entire Soviet bloc (Russian, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, etc.) was hopped up on steroids and "blood packing." It wasn't even that much of a secret. it was all sports, not just track & field. There were no tests that could detect all of the different steroids then so their federations just dared people to prove it. Occasionally someone would get caught in the urine testing, but not enough of them. Of course Koch is going to deny she was doping. That's like Kratochvilova saying she was just "a big country farm girl" and came by her muscle mass naturally. It was the stance of the Soviet Union that if they couldn't win the cold war - they'd prove their superiority with athletics. You know...since that worked out so well for Hitler in 1936..

Marita wasn’t on drugs; she was on cutting-edge drugs

As they used to say back in the 80's ..."If you're not on it, you're not in it." She, Koch, may not have known that she was being doped, but many GDR athletes admitted that after taking the "Pills" they were ordered to take, their performances increased dramatically. The women's voices deepened. Koch's autopsy will eventually reveal all.

Any Eastern Bloc record from the 80's should be suspect.

Would be interested on a deep dive into the women's 800m world record.

I would like to see a video analyzing Coe's 800 race from 1981. It still stands as the 3rd in the all-time list. And Jonathan Edward's triple jump world record.

The woman who came second ran 48.27 so should probably feature on the all time list though I appreciate it says since 1985. Amazing they ran those times from lanes 1 and 2.

Living in the Soviet bloc, during those times, their athletes would be under orders to take whatever PED, prescribed by the State Doctors....it was POLICY. Their athletes were propaganda objects of the State and were treated like machines. Any refusal of these tenets, would result in banishment of the athlete and his/her family. ....and we all know the word Gulag and Stasi, don't we.

As natural as Ronnie Coleman

If Koch hadn't broken it then we'd still be talking about the 47.99 of Kratochvilova as the Czech was an embodiment of the caricature image of a soviet era athlete, she was built like Ben Johnson.

This is a well presented history of the time and as a Track Aficionado from the 60’s through the 2020’s. I saw Ludmilla at an International meet in Eugene Oregon’s and it was obvious steroids that made her so strong. I ran in the 4 minute Miler era and as a distance runner in that era. Ludmilla admitted it and died young. So looking at Koch and this time I believe it was the perfect combination of Athletic performance build up and an East German mercedes class drug program which took her below 48. Read on yes thought I remembered that East German story about their evidence of CMBT

Thanks for this. Also see Marita's interview with Donna de Varona after the race.

It is no surprise that the record has lasted. Firstly, we have to accept that the coaches in the GDR used every chemical aid their state funded sports science industry could come up with. That is an indisputable fact. However, in addition those same coaches came up with ways of training in the sprint events - 60m to 400m. Read Charlie Francis' book "Speed Trap" which is mainly about his relationship with Ben Johnson. In this book Francis is very open about the huge amount of knowledge he absorbed from the GDR coaches. Their methods were very different from those used by most sprint coaches in the western world.

why is the time of the 2nd runner not listed in "fastest times since 1985" at 1:32 ? Russian Olga Wladykina-Bryshina finished 48,27 s in this race.

Maybe she was accelerating at the end. Secretariat, who won the triple crown in 1973 was actually running faster the last quarter mile of the Kentucky Derby than the first quarter.