The Bronze Syndrome; Germany revamped the way it picks and rewards its team after a slim gold haul in Sydney.(Cover Story)

Byline: Stefan Theil

The swimmers were bickering and unmotivated, finishing far slower than their personal bests. The track-and-field team watched medal after medal fall to small-country upstarts such as Ethiopia or Belarus. That was four years ago in Sydney, where the once mighty German sports machine fell to fifth place, barely leading a large pack of middling nations--after coming in an easy third in the two prior Games. The fact that Germany took almost as many total medals as

third-place China, yet only half as many gold, seemed a particularly acute sign of malaise. Were German athletes missing a "victory gene"? asked Bild, a mass circulation tabloid, at the end of the Games. The president of the German Olympic Committee diagnosed a case of bronze-medal syndrome, commenting that Germans "have no problem winning medals but a problem winning the gold."

Now Berlin is revamping the Olympic program in ways that mirror its attempts to attack the "German disease" of an underperforming economy. Free-market competition and incentives are challenging the bureaucratic inertia of this egalitarian society. Germany's unofficial Olympic motto--"Being there is everything"--has been jettisoned in favor of a new focus on winning. Funding for athletes is increasingly awarded on the basis of international results, with bonuses for winners. Even athletes who meet the tough performance standards the International Olympic Committee sets for participation in the Games aren't guaranteed a slot on the team if they don't have a chance for a medal. "The selection process has gotten supertough and will get tougher in the future," says Jorg Ziegler, Olympics coordinator at the German Sports Federation in Frankfurt.

Despite European Union pressure to rein in budget deficits, Germany has held federal subsidies for Olympic-level sports steady at a respectable $140 million a year. One of the first quick post-Sydney remedies was a new state-financed center at the University of Heidelberg to investigate performance anxiety and team dysfunction. The swimmers are now monitored by psychologists, as are most of the other teams. As a result, star swimmers like Antje Buschschulte and Franziska van Almsick have emerged from slumps and are back to ...