SPORTS AND SOCIETY 519
chim Teichler has pointed out, made no mention of where the lacking
bicycles, ice skates, and tennis rackets were to come from, nor what was
to be done about the missing weight rooms, saunas, tennis courts, and
so much more. In fact, this situation dramatically escalated because the
production of high-end sports equipment, such as racing bikes and ten-
nis rackets, had already been shut down or diverted to the export sector
by mid-1989. The country’s sports leadership had estimated that approx-
imately two billion marks would be needed in the next fi ve-year plan to
fi nance the urgently necessary expansion of the country’s sports infra-
structure, but this plan was set aside in 1988 because of a lack of funds.
Moreover, the funds that were provided to sports clubs continued to be
divided clearly between Sport I (“medal intensive”) and Sport II; the ra-
tio between these two sport types was about 81.3 percent to 17.6 per-
cent in 1989. Similarly, only 1.3 percent of the allotted Western currency
was given to the seventeen sports associations for “non-medal-intensive
sports.”^99
Transitions and Transformations since 1990
The Path to Unity in SportsThe fall of the Wall brought a whole new kind of freedom of movement for
athletes in both Germanys, but for East Germans in particular. Up to this
point, German-German sports had been constrained by the corset of the
so-called sports protocol that had—in its guise as the “basic contract for
sport”—ensured the implementation of Ostpolitik through athletic means
from 1974 onward. Accordingly, a strict number of athletic engagements
each year was supposed to guarantee regular contact between athletes
at a personal level. In practice, the GDR used this “sport calendar” to re-
duce the scope of these meetings to a bare minimum and, given the long
amount of time that they had to prepare for these interactions, to make
them “secure,” which meant that they were as frosty as possible.^100
The collapse of the GDR brought an end to this practice. The offi cial
“permission for athletic travel” issued on 17 November 1989 was really
only a formality because hundreds of sports meetings and matches had
already taken place that very same year shortly after the Wall had fallen.
Even before the Volkskammer elections on 18 March 1990 paved the way
for reunifi cation, the East German system began to adapt itself to the
West German system. The so-called Vereinigungsgesetz (associational
law) passed on 21 February 1990 permitted the free existence of civil
society associations in East Germany for the fi rst time ever. On the basis
of this legislation, the world of GDR sport was radically reformed from a