Hajo Seppelt

Hajo Seppelt (born 1963) is a German journalist and author.

In 1981, he obtained his college preparatory degree (Abitur) at the Beethoven High School in Berlin's Lankwitz neighborhood.

He studied sports, social studies, journalism and French at the Free University of Berlin for a few semesters but did not complete a degree.

Seppelt was born in West Berlin, and is the son of Alfred Seppelt, who was the head of the Berlin Chess Federation from 1984 to 2004.

Since 1985, Seppelt has worked as a sports reporter for Germany's premier public broadcaster ARD.

Das Erbe des DDR-Sports'' (Indictment child-doping: The Legacy of East German Sports) in 1999.

It also dealt with the topic of state doping in Communist East Germany.

He has also worked for the Berlin public broadcaster Sender Freies Berlin and its 2003 successor Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg.

After working for many years as a live commentary for swimming events for ARD, he was stripped of this duty in the early summer of 2006.

Seppelt said that this was in reaction to a private email, in which he criticized ARD's uncritical reporting on doping, becoming public.

Since 2006, he has worked as a freelance journalist for ARD and has made a number of reports and documentary films about doping.

Together with former Canadian swimmer Karin Helmstaedt, Seppelt made the documentary film Staatsgeheimnis Kinderdoping (State Secret Child Doping) about the perpetrators and victims of doping in East German swimming.

It was broadcast by ARD.

Together with Holger Schück, he published the book ''Anklage: Kinderdoping.

In 2006, Seppelt reported extensively about the doping problem in cycling.

Among other things, his research led to the identification of the German physician Markus China as a member of the doping network organized by Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes.

In November of that year, he was awarded the Leuchtturm für besondere publizistische Leistungen (Lighthouse Prize for Special Journalist Achievement) by the journalists' association Netzwerk Recherche for his research, reports and exclusive revelations about cyclists Jan Ullrich and Floyd Landis and Eufemiano Fuentes.

In the documentary "Mission: Clean Sport" Hajo Seppelt and Jo Goll documented the work of German doping control officers.

The film highlighted flaws in Germany's doping-control system and caused heady public discussions, which contributed to structural changes in Germany's National Anti Doping Agency (NADA).

The report won the Silver Chest Award 2007 at the International Television Film Festival in Plovdiv and the international Sports Movie and TV Award 2007 in Milan.

The film was also nominated for the German Television Prize and the Prix Europa.

In mid-January the German Skiing Association (DSV) took legal action, and a Hamburg court issued an injunction against Seppelt for refusing to make a cease-and-desist declaration demanded by the DSV about suspicions that German cross-country skiers and biathletes had engaged in blood doping in a Vienna laboratory.

A superior court in Hamburg overturned that ruling in Seppelt's favor, concluding that DSV had no right to demand the cease-and-desist declaration because it was not affected by the journalist's reporting.

The ruling was based constitutional guarantees of journalist freedom in cases of anonymous sources.

The judgement also overturned an injunction from 21 October 2008.

Seppelt's suspicion could not be proved after extensive investigations.

Parallel with the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, ARD broadcast the 45-minute-documentary Olympia im Reich der Mittel: Doping in China (Flying High in the Middle Kingdom: Doping in China), which Seppelt made with Jo Goll.

The film reported about doping and doping controls in China, in particularly above proven case of stem-cell manipulation carried out on top athletes.

At the International New York Film Festival, it won a world gold medal for long-form reporting.

It was also awarded the main prize at 2009 Sportfilm Liberec 2007 – World Facts Challenge festival.

In January 2012 Seppelt and colleagues from the Western German public broadcaster WDR had reports featured on ARD and WDR sports programs about the blood of thirty athletes being exposed to ultra-violet radiation by a sports doctor in the Eastern German city of Erfurt.

Several of the athletes concerned were named.

In the wake of the broadcasts, a discussion arose as to whether such procedures were banned according to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) code.

WADA itself considered them to be.

Anti-doping investigations of the athletes ended up with discontinuations and acquittals due to extenuating circumstances, and a criminal investigation of the doctor concerned was also discontinued.

Nonetheless, many experts declared that blood treatments were banned in principle by the laws governing sports.

The doctor tried to get a superior court in Cologne to issue an injunction against WDR, but the broadcaster won out, and the report was allowed to contain references to "forbidden blood treatments."

In the spring and summer of 2012, Seppelt and Kempe reported for the first time about doping among Kenyan track-and-field athletes.

The focus was primarily on practices among doctors in the background.

One athlete told of widespread doping among Kenyan long-distance runners.