SPORTS AND SOCIETY 531
East. But, the validity of such conclusions is still doubted by some. The
recreational sports commissioner of the Brandenburg Ministry of Sport,
Manfred Kruczek, for example, has argued that the participation of chil-
dren and teenagers in sports in the old federal states is double as high as
in the new federal states, but that there would be no reason to assume a
high number of passive members in these age cohorts.^157 Likewise, the
lack of attachment to recreational sports clubs may be something that is
being passed down within families.
Despite the end of the state sport system in the GDR, the expectations
of the state vis-à-vis sports organizations, as well as the demands of these
sports organizations on the state, have increased signifi cantly compared
to the old West Germany today, more than twenty-fi ve years after reuni-
fi cation. Since the 1990s, for example, the interest in the health benefi ts
of sports has increased signifi cantly: eff orts to strengthen physical re-
sources, as well as the infl uence of health-related behaviors, have fed into
the inclusion of an overarching concept within the mission of the DSB in
1998, namely “health programs in sports associations.” This idea was
also written into the mission statements of the public health insurance
companies in 2000, and the close cooperation between municipal gov-
ernments, sports associations, and insurance companies in this sector
has become a permanent part of the political agenda.^158
Whereas the state has sought to decrease costs in the health care sys-
tem through the physical mobilization of the population in recreational
sports, elite competitive sports continue to be an expensive and con-
troversial line on government budgets. Alongside providing fi nancial
sup port for competitive sports in the narrow sense of subsidizing the
associations of the diff erent sports disciplines, the state has had to in-
vest a considerable amount of money of late to fi nance anti-doping mea-
sures. Since the collapse of the Communist bloc, which had stood in the
way of an internationalization of anti-doping policies,^159 the pressure on
sports organizations to crack down on doping has increased signifi cantly.
The IOC’s global conference on doping in Lausanne at the beginning
of February in 1990 proved to be a turning point in this regard, func-
tioning as a “key factor in the establishment of an international political
anti-doping regime.”^160 This ultimately resulted in the establishment of
the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in November 1999, which rep-
resented a “public-private partnership” between organized sport and na-
tional governments. As a result, the German state has now also become
partly responsible for the fi ght against doping in the country. The capital
needed to establish the National Anti-Doping Agency in 2002, for exam-
ple, came almost entirely from public funds, with the exception of a small
percentage that was contributed by sports organizations. Moreover, the