Christie almost quit before he struck gold
As British sprinting legend turns 60, Foster reveals the chat that changed his career
BRENDAN FOSTER has revealed on Linford Christie’s 60th birthday how he talked Britain’s greatest sprinter out of quitting before he had made a name for himself.
The Jamaican-born Londoner was the first man to hold the Olympic, world, European and Commonwealth titles at 100m.
A career brought to an end by a drugs ban, long after he had finished competing seriously, featured 24 medals and a British record which still stands.
Yet Foster says none of that would have happened had Christie made good on his pledge to leave the sport after finishing fourth in Tokyo at the 1991 world championships. Foster, the Olympic bronze medallist turned voice of BBC athletics, said: “Linford was obviously upset. He’d just run faster than he ever had and finished outside the medals. “It was my job to interview him after the race and he said, ‘Well that’s it, I’m finished. I’m 31 and that’s the last race I’ll ever run’.
“He started to walk away. In front of my eyes this brilliant athlete was announcing his retirement. Quick as a flash I was like, ‘Linford, hey, hang on a minute’. I grabbed hold of him and brought him back.
“I said, ‘You can’t just retire like that, you’ve just clocked 9.92. You can’t chuck it all in because you’re disappointed. That’s not you’.”
Foster’s persuasive powers won the day and 12 months later Christie powered to Olympic gold in Barcelona, adding the world title in Stuttgart a year after. But he was disqualified when defending his Olympic title in Atlanta in 1996 after two false starts.
Foster, above, still considers the sprinter “one of the greats”, even if he is unable to make sense of the positive test for nandrolone in 1999 after a low-key indoor race in Germany that Christie ran only to win a bet with athletes he was coaching.
Others are less comfortable with such a conclusion given his urine sample contained almost 100 times the legal limit of nandrolone and the British Olympic Association banned him for life. Christie has always maintained his innocence.
Katharine Merry, who Christie coached to Olympic 400m bronze in Sydney in 2000, said: “I believe in what Linford did on and off the track. Some will say I’m blinded by loyalty. Of course the ban clouded his legacy in some minds. But I’ve known him since I was 13 and his career was stellar. He is a special, generous person. “He’s gone on to do what a lot of others haven’t and coach. And for no other reason than he loves it.”
Christie has been an outsider to the establishment since his ban but when he was a coach in Barcelona at the 2010 Europeans, he was asked to give the eve of championships British team talk.
A decade on he is no less an enigma.