Even today, many sports officials and sports politicians consider the children's and youth sports schools of the GDR as exemplary and worth emulating for unified Germany. In the GDR, they were seen as an important building block of the sports wonderland, with its extraordinary successes at the Olympic Games as well as World and European Championships. René Wiese presents in this book the first comprehensive, scientific study of the structures, mechanisms, and conflicts of the legendary sports schools based on previously unexamined sources.