Ben Johnson's moment of triumph, legacy of disgrace

The ticket, if there ever was one, reserving a place in the press seating area, is lost in the clutter of a career’s worth of souvenirs.Anyway, the seat never got used for long. By the time Ben Johnson reached the mid-point of the 100-metres final of the Seoul Olympics, a guy perched 30 or so rows up, maybe 20 yards beyond the finish line, was standing, his heart pounding, the words “Holy s--t!” escaping his mouth.
It was if Johnson had thrown a switch at 40 metres and by 60, it was over. When Ben raised his fist in the final metres, the guy up in the stands of Chamsil Stadium laughed the kind of laugh — of nervous release, of wonder, of our guy beating their guy — he didn’t think sport could ever bring out of him, any more.
A quarter of a century later, nothing else has come close to replicating that feeling.
Donovan Bailey’s gold in Atlanta, the Canadian relay team’s stunning upset of the Americans? Too late. By then, the scales had fallen from everyone’s eyes, and the already battered concept of trust was dead of unnatural causes.
It’s not that there hadn’t been plenty of rumours. It’s not that we were so naive as to think the world of track was squeaky clean. It’s not that we believed utterly that drug testing would have caught Ben Johnson if he’d really been on steroids.
We could all see the stretch marks on his skin as it strained to contain the spectacular musculature of his shoulders and chest and thighs, the yellow tinge to the whites of his eyes, the pimples. It just wasn’t polite to speak of these things in the absence of proof.
The race had taken place at 1:30 in the afternoon, Seoul time, on the second Saturday of the 1988 Summer Olympics, Sept. 24, and the Canadian writers — still waiting for the first medal of any colour by a Canadian athlete — were all hard up against deadlines, for on the other side of the international date line, we could still file our stories barely in time to catch Saturday’s newspapers.
There was no internet then, so it was odd to have written a piece about an event that happened “today.”
“With a fist in the air, and a final glance at his beaten rival, Canada’s Ben Johnson flashed across the finish line in the fastest time in 100 metres history today to capture the gold medal in the Race of the Century.
“Johnson, running with stunning power and uncharacteristic stamina in the late going, clearly outclassed American Carl Lewis and lowered his own world record to an incredible 9.79 seconds — 4/100ths faster than the 9.83 he ran at the world championships in Rome last August.
“‘The gold was for my mother, for Canada, for everyone,’ said an ecstatic Johnson.”
What came the next day, and the day after, were the reverberations of Johnson’s amazing run — the buzz back home, the expressions of awe, the adulation. Reading it now, it seems so ... credulous.
“The Race of the Century? It was a race to give you goosebumps on a warm, sunny afternoon. A race to put a lump in your throat and a tear in your eye. A race no one who was there, and maybe no one who saw it on television, will ever forget.”
And stuff like this ...
“Please, Mr. Webster, is that the best word you’ve got? Run? Not nearly good enough. Where Ben Johnson’s spikes dug into the dragstrip of Seoul’s Olympic Stadium on Saturday, there should have been scorch marks, at least. Maybe divots.
“Where he left the field gasping at 40 metres, there should be a small monument erected. Something tasteful, something like: ‘Here lies Carl Lewis, who tried his best. Sept. 24, 1988.’”
Lewis, ever holier than thou, had run a 9.92, Britain’s Linford Christie 9.97. No race had ever had three sub-10-second runs in it before.
Phrases like “9.79 seconds of terrifying power” were written. When IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch presented the gold medal — Ben wore team leader Diane Clement’s ladies’ size large track suit to the ceremony, because he’d forgotten to bring his own — Johnson was described as “glowering.”
“I didn’t care about the world record,” said Johnson. “I just wanted to beat Carl Lewis.”
He talked about the hamstring injury he had suffered in the spring, and said, “I was lucky the Games were this late. It gave us enough time to prepare.”
Few saw anything overly ominous in that statement.
Other events were buried under the avalanche of Ben. That same Saturday, East German swimmer Kristin Otto won her fifth of the six gold medals she would take home from the Games. Later, when the systematic, state-administered doping of East German athletes was revealed, Otto’s medals would be tainted, too. But she kept them.
On the Sunday, the story of Edmonton sailor Lawrence Lemieux, who had sacrificed his chance to win a medal in the Finn class to leap into the sea and rescue a Singapore competitor whose yacht had capsized — Lemieux would later receive special medal from the International Olympic Committee — got scant play in the papers while Johnson’s triumph remained Page 1 headlines.
And then the phones started ringing in the middle of the night Monday, amid . rumours of a failed drug test, and an IOC news conference hastily scheduled for 9 a.m. Tuesday. By then, Johnson was already on a plane bound for New York.
The scene at the morning news conference was surreal. The Canadian Press story by Helen Branswell that morning led with: “One of Canada’s greatest sporting triumphs turned to personal tragedy and national disgrace today when sprinter Ben Johnson lost everything.”
And that, truly was the emotion of the moment.
“It’s a disgrace not just for Canada, but for the whole Games,” said Sport Canada director Abby Hoffman. Canadian officials claimed Johnson had been tested eight times in the previous 18 months, and passed them all.
IOC spokesperson Michele Verdier delivered the official verdict on Johnson, whose post-race urine sample was found to contain stanazolol. He had been informed early Monday that he had failed the drug test, and suspended by the IOC that night.
“At 3:30 a.m. (Seoul time, Tuesday), we received Ben Johnson’s gold medal back, and I then had the unfortunate task of removing him from the Canadian Olympic team,” said Canada’s chef de mission, Carol Anne Letheren, who looked the very definition of the expression “shocked and saddened.”
“It is a very sad day in the Olympic Village, and for all Canada, and for Jamaica, who rejoiced in Ben’s victory. The heartbreak is shared by all of us.”
It’s not true that amid all the “Hero to Zero” reaction, Canadians turned on Johnson and pretended he had never been more than a stuttering Jamaican kid who was some other country’s problem.
He was ours, all right.
“He pulled Canada’s pants down in front of the world. Shame on us,” wrote the same guy who had watched the race in such wide-eyed awe four days earlier.
But as the fallout ensued, the tone began to change, and quickly.
Looking at it now, 25 years later, it is still shocking to hear the voices.
“It’s just dumb luck that somebody, his coach or his doctor, made a mistake in telling him about when to take the drugs, and that he got caught. That’s the amazing part,” said Lewis’s coach, Tom Tellez.
“There is a certain sadness to all of this, and it’s a sad day for athletes as a whole. Because anybody who gets caught is at the end of the road,” said Linford Christie, whose bronze was elevated to silver by Johnson’s positive test, but who would eventually be nailed for his own drug transgressions, while Lewis, who inherited the gold, would be implicated in a U.S. conspiracy to bury positive test results by its athletes.
You’ll notice Christie didn’t say “anybody who does drugs.” Just “anybody who gets caught.” That was the gist of the international reaction. Not: “How could Ben be so unethical?” but “How could he be so stupid?”
At a meeting of the IOC Athletes’ Commission, the highly-respected American Olympian Edwin Moses said: “Athletes who use drugs know all the ways to avoid testing positive. It’s common knowledge among athletes that the guys who get caught simply made a mistake.”
For the real truth about the Race of the Century is that it came to be known as the dirtiest race in history. Six of the eight runners in that final failed drug tests during their careers.
Johnson’s agent Larry Heidebrecht briefly tried to suggest that his client had been sabotaged by someone slipping steroids into a drink prior to the race, but no one took that very seriously.
Back in Canada, the acting director of the Canadian Centre for Doping Control, Dr. Robert Masse, said that Johnson’s sample revealed natural testosterone levels 15 times lower than they should have been, indicating a prolonged pattern of steroid use.
All of it came spilling out eventually in the Dubin inquiry, most poignantly through the unflinching testimony of coach Charlie Francis, who had been the godfather of a steroid program that stained an entire generation of Canada’s top sprinters. He had help (if you call that help) with Ben, from the mysterious Dr. Jamie Astaphan, but it was Francis who laid it all out on national TV: names, dates, brands, injections.
By the time he was done, we were naked before the world, and Sept. 24, 1988 had come to represent a tragic, probably long overdue, loss of trust, of innocence.