SPORTS AND SOCIETY 505
Tour de France. Instead, the East German cyclists pedaled for gold at the
most important amateur race in the world, the Peace Race, which went
through Warsaw, Berlin, and Prague.^22 The GDR enjoyed a surprisingly
successful string of victories at this race, from the legendary performances
of Täve Schur in the 1950s to the four-year string of gold medals won by
Uwe Ampler in the 1980s. A rather strange German-German showdown
occurred only once when, in honor of the 750th anniversary celebrations
of the city of Berlin, the Senate of West Berlin made arrangements for the
prologue of the Tour de France to run down the Kurfürstendamm in 1987;
the furious GDR sports leadership then moved the start of the Peace Race
to Karl-Marx-Allee in the East.^23 But the heyday of West German tennis in
the 1980s remained unparalleled in the East. Not only did it spawn two
exceptional world-class athletes, namely Boris Becker and Steffi Graf, but
also it had a direct eff ect on recreational sports. The West German Wim-
bledon and Davis Cup victories inspired younger tennis athletes, and new
tennis sections were created in sports associations all over the country.
Within just a few years, the number of active members in these tennis
clubs doubled.^24 The few tennis talents in the GDR could only watch wist-
fully from the other side of the Wall as they had to make do with the very
limited amount of material support and coaching staff at their disposal;
they also had to listen to people tell them that tennis was a “bourgeois”
sport.^25 For the fi rst time in 1988, when tennis offi cially became an Olym-
pic sport, the prospects for tennis players improved in East Germany, but
this was too late for the GDR.
In the mid-1980s, the separation of amateur and professional sports
became much less rigid due to a change in the Olympic charter that was
made by the IOC in Lausanne in 1986: in the future, the doors of the
Olympic Games were to be opened for professional athletes. From then
on, the Olympic villages were not only home to the spartan cadres of
competitive athletes dependent on the meager funding that they received
by the Stiftung Deutsche Sporthilfe, but also the glamorous stars of the
sports business. When the tennis multimillionaire Steffi Graf moved into
the Olympic village in Seoul in 1988 and Barcelona in 1992, she not only
attracted envious glances from the East Germans, but also her West Ger-
man colleagues and other nonprofessional athletes.^26
One sport in particular had a diff erent status on both sides of the
Wall, namely Germany’s favorite pastime, soccer. On this playing fi eld,
the combination of targeted support for grassroots soccer programs and
a commercially successful professional league proved to be able to top
the success of the state-managed soccer program in the GDR. Relatively
late in the game in 1963, West Germany opted for a uniform system of
leagues. It took until 1972 for professional soccer to become established