The NY Times has a piece on its sports page that really should have received Page 1 treatment. It's out of the Leon-Kass's-worst-nightmares bedside notebook.

Andreas Krieger opened a shopping bag in his living room and spilled out his past: track and field uniforms, a scrapbook and athlete credentials from the former East Germany.

The photos on the credentials looked familiar, but the face was fuller and softer, the hair covering the ears and draping down the neck. This was Heidi Krieger, the 1986 European women's shot-put champion, perhaps the most extreme example of the effects of an insidious, state-sponsored system of doping in East Germany.

The taking of pills and injections of anabolic steroids created virile features and heightened confusion about an already uncertain sexual identity, Krieger said, influencing a decision to have a sex-change operation in 1997 and to become known legally as Andreas.

Ah, East Germany and the Cold War -- the good old days. There's a funny scene in the movie "Top Secret" (with Val Kilmer as "Neek Reevers") where members of the East German women's olympic team parade by and they're all pumped up and have mustaches and beards and all look like dudes. After reading this story, it's not as funny. Now it's too real to be good satire.