As you all know, the Olympics are going on right now and I read an article about how some of them train.
There is always that one athlete that is so much better than the other competitors that it's downright scary.
Petra Schneider, who won the gold in 1980 in swimming was one such athlete.
How did she get so much more powerful?
This is where it gets sad.
As a little girl in East Germany, she was removed from school and placed in a training camp where she was not even identified by her name, but as "Sportsperson 137" because she was thought of as a "potential Champion".
She was constantly pushed for years to train in swimming, even getting forced to swim in a vacuum so that she can increase oxygen uptake. She was also injected with steroids so often that now in her older years she has a lot of health problems.
Sharron Davies was not racing against another swimmer that day - she was racing against a different species,’ she told me tearfully in an extraordinary mea culpa which later saw her ask for her world records to be expunged. ‘I was programmed to take the gold.’
This year, the winner was Ye Shiwen, and it's speculated that in China they do similar things to children in hopes of them winning gold medals.
For more reading on this, click here.
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