DOCUMENTARIES / FEATURES
Doping Top Secret: Dirty Games
ARD - July 27, 2024
The ARD revelations about the suspected case of mass doping among top Chinese swimmers and the questionable role of the World Anti-Doping Agency have plunged the sporting world into a crisis of confidence three months before the Olympic Games in Paris in 2024. But it is not only the "China files" that is casting a shadow over the sporting spectacle on the Seine. In the documentary "Doping Top Secret: Dirty Games", Hajo Seppelt and his team from the ARD doping editorial team show how deeply the Olympic movement is stuck in the doping swamp and how little the "Lords of the Rings" are doing about it.
Doping Top Secret: The China Files
ARD - April 21, 2024
An unpublished suspected case of mass doping by 23 top Chinese swimmers and a mysterious secret document are the focus of the documentary "The China Files". The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is under massive pressure as a result of the publication. The gripping research was carried out together with the New York Times.
Doping Top Secret: DEALER
ARD - March 31, 2023
While researching this documentary, EyeOpening.Media tracked down a key figure in the international doping trade. The authors, led by Hajo Seppelt, prove that the Dane Jacob Sporon-Fiedler illegally imported anabolic steroids into the European Union. Sporon-Fiedler pulls the strings with his company Alpha Pharma from Mumbai, where EyeOpening.Media tracked him down.
Doping Top Scret: NO LIMITS - When football knows no limits
ARD - December 1, 2022
The pressure in football continues to rise. Players raise the alarm and regularly resort to painkillers. At the World Cup, they are even allowed to use a highly addictive substance that even the WADA classifies as a performance enhancer.
Abused - Sexualized Violence in German Swimming
ARD - August 18, 2022
The German Swimming Association (DSV) is once again having to deal with serious allegations regarding its handling of sexual abuse. In this documentary by Hajo Seppelt and his team, Jan Hempel, one of the best German divers of the last decades, speaks for the first time about the serious sexual assaults he suffered as a young man by his coach.
Doping Top Secret: Human Trials – The secret experiments in GDR sport.
ARD - Feb 26, 2021
This documentary uncovers that GDR amateurs acted as "lab rats" for experiments that the regime did not want its stars and talents to be subjected to.
Countless amateur athletes were given trial substances with completely unknown side effects. Unscrupulous doctors experimented on these oblivious victims with dangerous methods, just like in animal trials. The goal was to research training methods, also to test the performance enhancing effects of doping substances before they were given to GDR top stars.
Billion-dollar amateur football game - When the money comes in an envelope
ARD - January 19, 2022
The core of the research for this film is the largest online survey to date on the payment culture in German amateur football. The results reveal a massive financial problem: in the leagues below professional football, possibly 500 million euros of undeclared money flows every year. A lot of money that is often paid in cash in an envelope - without the participants paying taxes and social security contributions.
Doping Top Secret: GUILTY - How Athletes Can Unintentionally Become Dopers
ARD - July 16, 2021
Positive through fleeting skin contact - this doping experiment calls the global anti-doping system into question and shocks athletes.
Researchers at the Institute of Legal Medicine at the University Hospital of Cologne administered small amounts of various anabolic steroids to twelve test subjects via the skin using a carrier substance - by briefly touching the hand, neck and arm. The initial analysis of the samples by the renowned Cologne doping control laboratory revealed a strong suspicion of doping in all twelve test subjects. Traces were detectable in the laboratory up to fifteen days after the extremely low dose of anabolic steroids had been administered.
Doping Top Secret: Human Experiments - The Secret Experiments in GDR Sports
ARD - February 26, 2021
This documentary reveals: GDR amateur athletes served as "guinea pigs" for experiments that the stars and talents of the GDR should not be subjected to .
A number of amateur athletes were given unexplored substances, the effects and side effects of which were often unknown. Unscrupulous doctors experimented on these unsuspecting people using sometimes dangerous means and methods similar to those used in animal testing. The aim was to research training methods, also with the aim of testing the performance-enhancing effects of doping substances before they were used on the stars of the regime.
Doping Top Secret: Pass that Pill!
ARD - June 06, 2020
The research to "Doping Top Secret: Pass that Pill!" is a cooperation between EyeOpening.Media and the non-profit centre for journalism Correctiv. Together work on this project has lasted over a year. This film shows that in football - the number one sport among Germans - a "kick" of a different nature is often required. Many footballers are using painkillers, and they are doing it for one reason only: to enhance their performance.
More than 150 players in Germany’s top Bundesliga division have been interviewed, as well as former professionals, coaches, team doctors, scientists and managers. In total, 1,100 footballers took part in the survey. The results highlight a shocking trend: more than 40 percent of the reasons given for taking painkillers are related to performance enhancement, regardless of actual pain or injuries.
Doping Top Secret: Lord of the Lifters – The Destruction of an Olympic Sport
ARD - Jan 05, 2020
This documentary by EyeOpening.Media shows the unscrupulous way in which the sport of weightlifting is governed.
The authors are following the leads that lead them to the empire of the Hungarian Tamás Aján. For decades, he has been a valued member of the Olympic family. Since the year 2000 he is at the head of the International Weightlifting Federation IWF.
In weightlifting, athletes have little to no say, as this research shows. It is a world, in which the fight against doping is little more than a game of power.
This film explores the answer to the question as to how it is possible that under the guise of fair and clean sport, a system of cover-ups and corruption was able to flourish.
Doping Top Secret: Trace to North Africa
ARD - Oct 3, 2019
Is Morocco a paradise for sports cheats? This is the question that this film is trying to answer. One of the key figures: French middle distance runner Morhad Amdouni, European Champion in 2018.
Gender Battle: The Abandoned Women of Sport
ARD - Sept 3, 2019
Many international sports federations introduced a testosterone limit for women – among them the World Association of Athletics Federations, IAAF. To keep their right to compete, these federations are advising women like South Africa’s Olympic champion Caster Semenya to undergo hormone therapy or even have surgery.
Women who are feeling perfectly healthy, going under the knife for a dramatic procedure just for a chance to keep competing.
Often among the best in the world, feeding the hopes of their country to win an Olympic medal, only to vanish from elite sports shortly after, ruined physically as well as psychologically.
Doping Top Secret: Confessions – Inside the mind of a doper
ARD - Jan 01, 2019
The convicted doper and cross-country skiing star Johannes Duerr of Austria tells EyeOpening.Media exclusively about his methods of cheating. Austria's former medal hopeful had help from Germany to organise his blood doping. The release of this film has led to criminal investigations all over Europe – among others against Mark Schmidt, a general practitioner from Erfurt, Germany.
Doping Top Secret: Traitors – Fallout from the Russian Doping Scandal
ARD - Dec 02, 2018
Hajo Seppelt's investigations into the case of Russia has sent ripples through the world of sport: bans, exclusions from the Olympics, court rulings, fake news attacks, dangerous flights and global protests among athletes. Also hacking attacks from spies, disruptions in global politics and mysterious deaths have been linked to the publications on the Russian doping scandal.
This film is looking back on the four years since Russia's systematic state sponsored doping programme had first made headlines around the globe. It explores how, in many areas, little has changed.
Doping Top Secret: Brazil's Twelfth Man
ARD - July 01, 2018
Brazil's heart is beating for football. Millions are made through the sport in the country that holds the record for the most World Cup wins. Brazil's stars are highly sought after in top leagues all over the world. This film by EyeOpening.Media shows: It is a system in which dubious doctors play an active role.
Doping Top Secret: Russia's Football Friends
ARD – May 20, 2018
The system of cover-ups in Russia's state sponsored doping programme was also of benefit for the country's national football players. This film has been released just prior to the opening of the 2018 Football World Cup in Russia.
Doping Top Secret: The Olympic Conspiracy
ARD - Jan 29, 2018
The global anti-doping control system is unsafe and open to manipulation. Until the release of this film, the doping sample bottles were thought of as being absolutely fail safe. But this research shows: These containers, approved for use by the World Anti-Doping Agency, can be opened by unauthorised persons without leaving a trace.
That means, swapping samples in order to cheat is actually possible. Just prior to the Olympic Winter Games in Pyeongchang, this two-part documentary by EyeOpening.Media is once again uncovering explosive issues.