Major honours
With a population of just 17 million, East Germany ran athletics as a state enterprise to compete with the United States and the Soviet Union. Promising youngsters were identified early and assigned to sports clubs such as SC Empor Rostock, SC Motor Jena and SC Karl-Marx-Stadt, while the College for Physical Culture in Leipzig and its attached research institute supplied training methods and physiological data. The results were overwhelming — at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, East German women won 9 of the 14 athletics events, and Marita Koch's 400m of 47.60, set in Canberra in 1985, remains the oldest world record still standing on the track four decades later. Gabriele Reinsch's discus throw of 76.80m from 1988 also remains unbroken. But documents released after reunification revealed a systematic doping program of oral-Turinabol, run under the name 'State Plan 14.25' from 1974, and many athletes took it as minors without knowing what it was. The system disappeared with the country itself in 1990, but the numbers it left behind still sit at the top of the record books.
Record comparison
Bars are scaled to the strongest team in this list.
Club legends
Rivalry
The medal race with the Soviet Union was the system's reason for being, and the contest with West Germany was itself a proxy war between the two Germanys — in 1976 and 1980, East Germany beat both nations in athletics.