Frank Ullrich wants to resign from his position at the National Anti-Doping Agency (Nada).

The SPD deputy and chairman of the Sports Committee of the German Bundestag informed his colleagues in writing this Wednesday.

Michael Reinsch

Correspondent for sports in Berlin.

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The biathlon Olympic champion and former selection and national coach has sparked criticism because he wants to take a seat on the supervisory board of the National Anti-Doping Agency, which the Bundestag is entitled to.

Ullrich denies ever having come into contact with doping, although former teammates and athletes he once looked after accused him of having received or given doping substances.

State security files also contain references to his involvement in doping.

Ullrich now announced that he wanted to weigh the criticism for himself.

He doesn't think it's accurate, but he doesn't want to damage the office or the confidence of doping victims.

Ullrich was absent from the sports committee meeting on Wednesday due to illness.

The Union faction had therefore postponed its request for his dismissal from the supervisory board, on the condition, however, that he did not attend its first meeting of the year on April 26th.

The Sports Committee will not meet again until April 27th.

"Anyone who sits on the supervisory board of an organization whose main purpose is the fight against doping must be beyond any doubt as to their own past in connection with doping," says the application: "This is not the case with Frank Ullrich. "

Ullrich: "Was no longer an active athlete in the specified period"

Ullrich confirmed, as he did on Tuesday to the FAZ, that he had not knowingly come into contact with doping substances either as an active athlete or as a trainer.

"And yet I was part of a sporting system that was sometimes difficult for us athletes to understand," he continues in his statement: "The Stasi file of the association doctor who was responsible for me shows this.

I can't explain my name in it.

Especially since I was no longer an active athlete in the period specified there.” At the same time, it is clear that this raises questions “that are difficult to reconcile with my position at the National Anti-Doping Agency”.

In March 1984, East German association doctor Hans-Joachim Kampf gave the East German state security service a “brief assessment” of the effectiveness of doping in preparation for the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics.

Drug of choice was Oral-Turinabol (OT).

Kampf wrote: "In the biathlon, influencing with OT was planned and implemented according to the principles that had been tried and tested in previous years."

Ullrich was the flag bearer of the GDR team at the opening of the Sarajevo games.

Four years earlier in Lake Placid he had become Olympic champion.

In a report from 1985, the doctor describes a doping concept for the 85/86 season, which also mentions Ullrich.

However, he ended his sporting career after a disc operation in the same summer.

Ullrich announced on Wednesday that he would seek talks with those affected by doping together with Evelyn Zupke, the SED Victims' Commissioner in the German Bundestag.

"Ultimately, this is a chance to shed more light together on the GDR sports system and the role we played in it," he wrote.

"The talks will also help to find out where we can better support doping victims." The doping victim support based in Berlin had not yet been able to get in touch with Ullrich.

In 1991, Jens Steinigen, who was Ullrich's teammate and saw him as a GDR coach, accused Ullrich of having pushed him into doping as a coach.

Ullrich's statement that he had not noticed anything about doping was completely implausible to a commission from the ski association.

Former teammates Andreas Hess and Jürgen Grundler claimed that Ullrich lied during a police interrogation about doping in East Germany.

In 2009, former biathlete Jürgen Wirth also testified that Ullrich had urged him to doping.

Ullrich was the national coach at this time.

An investigation by the German Ski Association came to the conclusion that neither labor nor service law steps were indicated against Ullrich.

However, she found that all people working in the sporting environment of top athletes in the GDR at that time "must have known, because of the way these 'blue pills' were administered, that something 'forbidden' was involved".

When Ullrich claims that he assumed that these were legal training-supporting means, this was an "unconsciously controlled displacement mechanism".