Finding and Promoting Young Sporting Talent

Abstract

The original idea for this volume came to us in 2006 over coffee and bacon sandwiches in Tony and Chris’s café in Wolverhampton. Both of us had studied the history and politics of East Germany for many years and both of us were active participants in, and observers of, sport. It seemed natural then that we combine our interests to plug a gap in the English-language treatment of the GDR sports ‘miracle’ through the interpretation of original German archival sources. This we set out to achieve by researching available files of the ruling communist party (the Socialist Unity Party; SED) and the files of the infamous Ministry for State Security (or ‘Stasi’), including those of its legion of informers in top-level sport. Our intention has