On Monday, Frank Ullrich sent a press release - "I hope that this can be read in the next issue" - about his visit and that of colleague Jens Lehmann, the visit "of the two Olympic champions in the German Bundestag" to the Olympic champion at the top of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in Lausanne.

Lehmann, the CDU MP for Leipzig I, is the track cycling Olympic champion in Barcelona in 1992 and Sydney in 2000, Ullrich, the SPD MP for Schmalkalden-Meiningen II in the Thuringian Forest and chairman of the sports committee, is the Olympic champion in the biathlon in Lake Placid in 1980.

Michael Reinsch

Correspondent for sports in Berlin.

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Instead of thoughts about the Olympic Games in Germany, as Ullrich and Lehmann exchanged them with IOC President Thomas Bach, Ullrich's Olympic and top-class sporting past in GDR sports are now making the headlines.

“We clearly stand for a clean sport, not only in Germany, by the way.

We cannot tolerate a sports committee chairman who continues to block the investigation of his own doping past," said CDU MP Fritz Güntzler, chairman of the Union factions in the sports committee, on Wednesday and called for his resignation.

Ullrich failed to provide clarification himself and seems to be trying to sweep his doping past under the table.

"The SPD should withdraw him as committee chairman if this refusal continues," Güntzler demanded from the FAZ: "Otherwise this will damage the reputation of the entire committee." Ullrich must immediately clear the way for another member of the committee on the National Supervisory Board Anti-Doping Agency (NADA).

"He's the wrong man in the wrong place.

He should never have accepted the office with this history,” said Güntzler: “He is harming the committee, but also NADA in the long term.”

Athlete and selection coach of the GDR

Ullrich, athlete and selection coach in doping-ridden East German sport, had already decided in January to succeed his predecessor at the head of the committee, Dagmar Freitag, in the seat on the NADA supervisory board reserved for the Bundestag.

The members of the sports committee were surprised by the news.

The first meeting of the Supervisory Board with Ullrich is scheduled for April 26th.

"A devastating signal and a slap in the face to the victims of GDR doping" was the name given to the State of Saxony-Anhalt's commissioner for dealing with the SED dictatorship, Birgit Neumann-Becker, about Ullrich's appointment to the supervisory board of NADA.

She sees it as necessary for him to clarify his involvement as an athlete and, above all, as a trainer in relation to doping and to react to reports about it.

Ullrich himself did not answer a question from the FAZ on Wednesday. In October last year, when he had just won his direct mandate against the CDU candidate Hans-Georg Maaßen, he claimed on the subject of doping: "I am very glad that I was in no way and way, neither by a trainer nor by a doctor nor by anyone who said: Frank Ullrich, if you want to get better.

.

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I never had that touch.

The word doping has not been mentioned in any of our systems.

That didn't exist.” He never understood the term supportive substances – “either I was so naïve or in my tunnel” – as a doping substance.

That's amazing, because after studying sports at the German University for Physical Culture in Leipzig, Ullrich became a selection coach in the GDR and after the fall of the wall, national coach in biathlon.

The German Ski Association rejected an investigation by the doping commission of the German Sports Association.

A commission from the federation came to the conclusion that everyone involved in the sporting environment of the top athletes must have known that something was forbidden.

Although former athletes accused him, the commission exculpated Ullrich - with the restriction that his persistent cluelessness was to be understood as an "unconsciously controlled repression mechanism".

The silence of Ullrich is also bad for the coalition partner.

Philipp Krämer from the Greens, a member of the Sports Committee, comments: "In recent decades, Frank Ullrich has not been proven to have actively participated in the GDR's doping system.

Accordingly, nothing would stand in the way of his membership in the NADA supervisory board.

In 2009, however, a DSV commission found that Frank Ullrich must have known at least about the use of doping in the GDR.

In terms of a credible anti-doping policy by the German Bundestag and the Sports Committee, it would therefore be crucial for Frank Ullrich to come clean and explain what he actually knew.”