Introduction: Contestation in the East German Sports System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The German Democratic Republic (GDR) ceased to exist over 20 years ago (1990) and few of its legacies live on. One legacy that survives, albeit implicitly rather than explicitly, is the tiny state’s extremely successful sports system. Today, no sport official or manager, no politician or athlete would point to the GDR as a useful ‘template’ for emulation the world over; look more closely, however, and the key characteristics of the leading sports models are not so very different from those of the GDR. Such leading sports models in advanced capitalist states in the 21st century are characterised by their Olympic-driven sport policies, youth development, talent identification systems, professional coaching schemes and full-time, paid athletes. 1 There appears compelling evidence that, at a structural level at least, we are witnessing a convergence of sports models among the leading sporting nations and Barrie Houlihan’s description of part of the Soviet model of sport in 1997 as ‘… the subordination of domestic [sports] governing bodies to government policy and the use of public money to support elite athletes’, would characterise the current sport systems in the UK, Australia, Canada and a number of other countries besides. 2 Beyond the structural similarities of modern sports models there also exists a gradual convergence around the raison d’être for investing increasing resources into sport: elite sport success — especially Olympic success — is thought to bring with it international prestige, aid the building of national identity and engender a ‘feel good’ factor among the population. 3 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".