Jamaican-born Canadian Ben Johnson speeds to win the Olympic 100m final in a world record 9.79 seconds, on Sept. 24, 1988 at Seoul Olympic Stadium. Carl Lewis (right) from USA took second place.ROMEO GACAD/AFP/Getty Images
After winning the 100-metre final at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, now remembered as “the dirtiest race in history,” Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson failed his drug test and was stripped of his gold medal. He later admitted to steroid use and has lived in ignominy ever since. In her new book World’s Fastest Man*: The Incredible Life of Ben Johnson, author Mary Ormsby raises serious questions about the science, procedures, and prejudices that led to Johnson’s disqualification. This is the first of three excerpts: tomorrow, “Trouble in the Lab.”
The Monday morning of September 26, 1988, dawned fresh and cool in Seoul. At the Hilton hotel, clattering breakfast trays were being wheeled along halls by room service staff when Charlie Francis banged on the Olympic sprint champion’s door.
Ben Johnson, who had set a world record of 9.79 seconds while winning the 100-metre gold medal, answered the knock. He froze when he saw his coach’s stricken face.
“You tested positive.”
Johnson stared in disbelief. Waves of icy dread gripped his insides, alarm and gorge rising. Staggered, he backed into his room, sat on the edge of a sofa, and buried his head in his hands.
“No, no,” he moaned softly, shaking his head. “They finally got me.”
Not quite yet, but the process was rapidly unfolding. The previous night, a preliminary ‘A sample’ screening of Johnson’s urine sample was red-flagged for a performance-enhancing drug. It was the first of two anti-doping tests to be conducted on the 75-millilitre specimen he had provided after the Saturday race. Neither Johnson nor Francis was told about the nature of the illicit substance, but they had a good idea: an anabolic steroid.
They were genuinely shocked. They believed they’d perfected steroid clearance times and, as an added precaution, left a roomy margin of error before race days. Based on their years of experience, Johnson’s system should have been flushed clean nearly a week before he won the gold medal.
“There has to be some mistake,” Johnson said, bewildered.
His reaction was understandable. Weightlifters and shot-putters were the type of athletes who failed steroid tests, not world-class sprinters, even though Johnson believed many of his rivals secretly doped.
Anabolic steroids, synthesized versions of the naturally occurring male hormone testosterone, were lab-developed in the 1950s. By the 1970s, this artificial sporting enhancement had been deemed cheating by scientists, who drew up lists of banned substances for amateur sports federations. The Montreal Summer Games in 1976 were the first Olympics to test for steroids. But the new anti-doping rules weren’t much of a deterrent. By the 1980s, steroid use was pervasive at the elite level across many amateur sports, including weightlifting and track and field. A former sprinter described that era as “the Wild West” of doping in track.
Drug testing in the 1980s was limited largely to the amateur sports world and almost always conducted during competitions, meaning users could load up on steroids worry-free during the off-season when the heaviest training workouts occurred. This practice gave dopers the exact dates they were likely to be tested. All they had to do to beat the system was stop using the banned drugs early enough to excrete all chemical traces by competition day, a period called the clearance time. Positive tests were relatively few and due to clearance times too short for the dosage taken.
Johnson had passed every anti-doping test he’d taken, dozens of them, since starting his steroid program in late 1981. As far as he and Francis knew, the steroid they’d most relied on in recent years, known generically as ‘furazabol,’ was undetectable in sports labs. They believed they were doubly safe going into Seoul: Johnson had plenty of clearance time – more than three weeks before race day – for a steroid invisible to testers.
In addition, Johnson had benefited from a free pass or two along the way, knowing some meet directors would deliberately choose other runners for testing or somehow bypass him in random post-race selections. He had not been selected to provide a urine sample after winning the 100 metres at the 1988 Canadian Olympic trials, nor after capturing the 1987 world championship in Rome.
The track-and-field circuit, where top runners were paid appearance fees by meet directors to boost tickets sales – Johnson could command US$40,000 just to show up and run – had no incentive to test its stars. Francis had told Johnson that at one indoor competition, he was paid a smaller appearance fee by a meet director who quietly ensured that the runner would not be selected to provide a testing sample after his race. Incidents like these bolstered Johnson’s confidence that the sport’s power brokers, besotted by his escalating rivalry with Carl Lewis and the profits it generated, would protect him. So, in 1988, a Johnson bust was unimaginable. No champion of his stature had ever failed a steroid test.
“In our sport, a positive drug test was the ultimate horror,” Francis wrote in his 1990 memoir, Speed Trap. “It was like a fatal car crash: You knew it could happen at any time, to almost anyone, but you never believed it could happen to you.”
Back at the Seoul Hilton, just after 7:30 a.m., Francis was about to leave Johnson’s hotel room for an emergency meeting in the Canadian Olympic Association office with Team Canada chef de mission Carol Anne Letheren.
She’d had a hand-delivered letter from International Olympic Committee medical commission head, Belgium’s Prince Alexandre de Merode, slipped under her hotel door around 1:45 a.m., informing her of Johnson’s result. Stunned, she wandered around the Olympic Village alone. When the sun rose, she broke the news to key personnel. One was track-and-field team manager Dave Lyon, who had alerted Francis around 7 a.m. It was going to be an agonizing day for all involved.
Johnson glanced at a small black bag that held a box containing his gold medal. His name was engraved on it, as was the event he won and his world record time of 9.79 seconds. He’d owned the medal and been feted for it for less than 48 hours. Such a short span of glory.
Going forward, time would seem to tick unnaturally fast; before lunch, he and Francis would face Olympic officials, including two from the IOC’s all-powerful medical commission whose members were tasked with testing, prosecuting, and passing judgment on athletes.
There would be another test of Johnson’s B sample. Prior to Seoul, rumours had circulated for years that well-connected amateur athletes had their doping violations disappear when the bottles containing their B samples were ‘accidentally’ dropped to shatter on the floor, spilling the urine contents. Or stomped on by a quick-thinking entourage member who grabbed it off a table. Or flung hard to break against a wall before lab workers could react. When there was no intact B specimen to test, there was no way to confirm a positive A finding. Sometimes, money changed hands to make a doping matter go away, or so the rumours go.
At the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, the lab detected nine positive A samples over the final two days of competition. However, those results could not be matched to the athletes who provided the flagged specimens because the coded list of names was stolen, lost, or fed into a shredder shortly after the Games ended and before lab staff realized it was gone. Nine suspected doping athletes walked free. In Seoul, no one intervened for Johnson. The results of his B sample test were also positive.
It remained to tell Ben Johnson. Charlie Francis drove back to the Hilton with Carol Anne Letheren and Dr. William Stanish. Francis asked for half an hour alone with Johnson to break the disqualification news to him. They agreed. While in Johnson’s room, Francis reassured him that the conspiracy of silence would remain intact. They’d meet back in Toronto and quickly get a united message of innocence out to the public. “Charlie said, ‘Do not talk to anybody. Go home. We’re all going to go home, and we’re going to sit down and figure things out, what to say to the media,’ ” Johnson said.
Letheren knocked on Johnson’s hotel room door. She was accompanied by Ottawa-based RCMP inspector Larry Comeau, who supervised Canada’s security detail in Seoul with the assistance of Korean law enforcement. Gloria Johnson was now at her son’s side, as was his sister, Jean. They’d been crying.
“Carol Anne came in and said, ‘Ben, this is a hard thing I have to say, but I need for you to give me the gold medal back,’” Johnson recalled, noting she was crying.
“I reached down to get it. I had tears in my eyes. She said, ‘I’m sorry I have to do this.’ I looked up and gave it to her.”
Gloria sobbed. Johnson hugged her, told her not to worry and that “nobody died.”
He’d never told his mother he was using steroids, but he sensed she’d known. Two years earlier, Gloria Johnson began warning of potential danger when he became the world’s top-ranked sprinter. She would tell him, “Son, they can’t beat you on the track, they can only beat you in the doping room.”
Excerpted from World’s Fastest Man*: The Incredible Life of Ben Johnson, now available from Sutherland House.