Johnson’s story is worth revisiting
Sprinter was undeniably a doper, but new book considers whether he was sabotaged in Seoul
If you are old enough, you remember where you were when you heard. Ben Johnson’s fall from grace was seismic, and more than three decades after covering it for the Star the great Mary Ormsby wanted to do it again, but better. She had covered Johnson in 1988: the gold medal at the Olympics in Seoul, the positive steroid test, the aftermath. There have been massive doping moments since, but Ben Johnson was the end of the innocence. Nobody else can say that.
“Only one can be the first to fall,” says Ormsby.
In her new book, “World’s Fastest Man,” Ormsby tried to delve back into Ben’s story with a closer look that included the process of how he lost his gold medal at the 1988 Seoul Olympics after running a then world-record 9.79 seconds in the 100 metres. At its heart, a question emerged. As she puts it: “Is it possible to railroad a guilty guy?”
It’s a fascinating question. The book paints that primitive moment in the evolution of doping and antidoping: a hurried hearing in Seoul, where Canadian IOC heavyweight Dick Pound was enlisted as Johnson’s representative because he was the only Canadian lawyer with sports experience available; no copies of the doping tests; German chemist Manfred Donike, who chaired the hearing, unexpectedly claiming that endocrine profiling of Johnson’s sample (a non-approved method under IOC regulations) showed a history of doping. Ormsby also got ahold of Johnson’s doping test, which was rife with irregularities — as was the lab, apparently.
It all raises questions of due process, and whether in a more regulated time Johnson could have beaten the rap. The man who ran the Russian doping program in Sochi, Grigory Rodchenkov, once claimed Johnson had tested positive for the same steroid, stanozolol, at the 1986 Goodwill Games. Johnson’s two post-Seoul positives don’t help.
But rival Carl Lewis’s friend Andre Jackson was given a pass to get into the doping control area in Seoul.
And in the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary “9.79*” Jackson didn’t deny sabotaging Johnson’s sample, saying off camera: “Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t.” Besides, Johnson’s camp, led by coach Charlie Francis, knew about glow times — how long it took a drug to clear your system — and their story has always been that they stopped 26 to 28 days before the Games. But Johnson got busted anyway.
Ormsby spent a lot of time with Johnson. She is an accomplished journalist, and a shrewd judge of people.
“If it wasn’t sabotage, it was something else,” Ormsby says. “I really, truly believe that he didn’t take anything close to the Games. He’d been using the stuff for eight years. (His camp) knew what they were doing, they were relatively sophisticated, and I believe him when he says he didn’t take anything for three weeks before. And I really don’t think (doping doctor Jamie) Astaphan touched him. They were all going to make a lot of money with Ben when he had the gold medal in hand.
“So why him? And why nobody else?”
Ben was a doper, but there’s a chance his great public original sin was for something he didn’t do. Had Johnson beaten the rap in Seoul he would have officially been the fastest man alive, if tarred with the spectre of doping. He may have gone faster; he was only 26. The course of sports and doping would have changed. Someone else could have been the embodiment of the end of sporting innocence. Ben could have kept running.
Instead, he ran from that test into the rest of a messy and diminishing life detailed in the book. Pound became co-founder of the World AntiDoping Agency in 2000, and the half-doomed war on sporting drugs truly took off. We almost expect doping now. We’ve lived through baseball’s steroid era, Marion Jones and Lance Armstrong, and the Russian state-sponsored doping scandal that still hasn’t concluded 10 years after the perversion of the 2014 Olympics in Sochi.
And then there’s Ben. He’s 62 now and wants to spend more time in Jamaica. He hasn’t read the book — “I haven’t read it because I lived it,” he says — but what does he want from it?
“Well, I hope that the public can see the real truth,” says Johnson over the phone. “And (that) the public who supported me throughout the years, and even good times and bad times, is now considering that the government of this country, or the federation also, didn’t protect me at all, and (I hope people) find out what the real truth is. I knew they didn’t give me due process.
“It would mean a lot to me. I just want to clear my name, so to speak, and for people to see me in a different way. I’m carrying the whole world on my shoulders, on my head. It’s not right.
“It’s sad what they did to me. But by the grace of God, I’m still here.”
As the book notes, he still insists he went into Seoul clean and came out dirty. And at the least, Ben Johnson doped like almost every other sprinter at the time, but was the one who got caught. That 9.79 was mystical. Johnson has said he thought he could have hit 9.72 had he not stared down Lewis, and nobody actually hit 9.72 until Usain Bolt in 2008, several generations of sprinting later. As Ben says, “The reason why this thing happened is because I’m too great. I’m too fast. I was way ahead of my time. Way ahead of my time.”
He was, which is part of the tragedy of it all. It’s probably too late for Johnson to be even partially exonerated, because after the fall he kept falling until he became this iconic pariah — a historical moment rather than a person — and it would take something like a full confession of malfeasance and sabotage to unfreeze him from our memory. But it’s worth asking what could have happened and remembering what did, and Ormsby did it all again, and did it better. Ben probably wishes he could, too.
‘‘ If it wasn’t sabotage, it was something else. I really, truly believe that he didn’t take anything close to the Games.
MARY ORMSBY AUTHOR OF ‘WORLD’S
FASTEST MAN’