Rica REINISCH

Rica Reinisch started to swim at the early age of 8. At the 1980 Olympic Games she won three gold medals and was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame nine years later. In 1982 she collapsed at a training camp in the Ukraine as a result of an inflammation of the ovaries and had to give up competitive swimming.

Reinisch later married her teammate Olaf Assmann, and in her second marriage a canoeist named Neumann. She later moved to Aachen, managed a public relation agency and raised two children, having had two abortive births – possibly related to her earlier doping history. Like many other GDR swimmers she was systematically doped by her coaches as instructed by GDR State Security, the Stasi. Unlike many of her teammates she testified against sports officials such as Manfred Ewald (former president of the East German NOC) and Manfred Höppner (former head of the GDR Sports Medicine Service) in their 2000 trial.