SPORTS AND SOCIETY 525
portunity for upward social mobility, especially for people at the bottom
rungs of the social ladder. In Germany, however, many aspiring competi-
tive athletes come from the middle or upper echelons of society. A career
in professional sports, however, has been considered to be a potential
“biographical trap”^121 —a conundrum that has yet to be resolved even to-
day. According to a survey conducted by the Deutsche Sporthilfe athletic
foundation in 2013, more than 90 percent of the A-cadres did not feel
properly prepared for life after competitive sport. Recently, Chancellor
Angela Merkel has become a patron for an internship program designed
to secure aspiring athletes experience working in companies.
In the end, the KJS model experienced a renaissance in the second
half of the 1990s. The former and new competitive sport stronghold in
Potsdam was a pioneer in this process. At the sport school in Potsdam,
specializations and the training of competitive athletes were once again
more strongly anchored in the school’s profi le.^122 This new concept, which
came to be known as the “Potsdam model,” was poised to gain recogni-
tion nationwide. The new moniker, with its unmistakable links to the GDR
system, was fi rst the Composite School and Competitive Sports System
(Schule-Leistungssport-Verbundsystem). In 1996, the Working Group
“Sport and Economics,” which was formed under the aegis of Helmut
Kohl, then decided to use the label Elite Schools of Sport in the future. As
early as 1998, there was already a network of twenty-nine schools with
a sport emphasis, twenty-one of which were located in the new federal
states; seventeen were distinguished as Elite Schools of Sport. Since this
time, some elements have returned as common principles in these sport
schools, such as morning training, fl exible test and exam dates, extended
school time, and the sorting out of students showing less talent. The re-
turn of some practices from the GDR era is quite apparent, but their rein-
troduction has continued to be controversial. Despite all of these eff orts,
the total package of care and long-term material security that had been
provided to athletes by the athletic Fürsorgediktatur^123 of the GDR could
not be off ered in the federal German system. The question of whether
new heights can be achieved by adopting GDR methods has reappeared
time and time again within the context of sport policy.^124 Most recently,
after the partially disappointing performance of the German team at the
London Olympic Games in 2012, the notion of returning to the GDR ap-
proach to talent scouting was bandied about.^125
“Doping for Germany”In dealing with the doping past in German sport, a strong interactive dy-
namic evolved between the investigations of doping in the East and those