ATHLETICS:The truth about the use of drugs, if not the whole truth, always comes out in the end, writes IAN O'RIORDAN
‘THE KNOCK came at my dormitory door at 7:30 in the morning, rousing me from my sleep. It was Monday, September 26th, 1988, in Seoul, South Korea – about 42 hours after my life’s greatest moment. On the previous Saturday, Ben Johnson, the sprinter I’d coached for the past 12 years, had won the Olympic gold medal in the 100 metres, breaking his own world record. His time: 9.79 seconds.
“My caller was Dave Lyon, a manager for Canada’s track and field team. ‘We’ve got to get over to the Medical Commission,’ he told me. ‘Ben’s tested positive.’ With those few words our nightmare began. In our sport, a positive drug test was the ultimate horror. 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.”
I was struggling for an intro yesterday so I dug up my old copy of the Charlie Francis autobiography, Speed Trap– and that's how it begins. Francis wrote it in 1990, two years after what was and probably still is the biggest doping scandal in the history of sport. The book is definitely one of the biggest confessions of drug use in sport, about Ben Johnson willingly and regularly consuming industrial amounts of anabolic steroids, about Francis knowingly and carefully feeding him, and I was re-reading it yesterday wondering if over 20 years later anything has really changed.
Speed Trapreads like a bible of sporting credibility – or rather lack of it. Francis had a simple and unapologetic attitude towards doping, and the use of performance-enhancing drugs, or Peds, as he called them. Peds were no short cut. They didn't even give you an edge. Success in sport was built on hard training, proper recovery, and peak performance. Peds merely levelled the playing field, gave you proper credibility. Essentially, Francis brought the old East German regime to Canada, because that was the regime he'd trained and competed in himself, most notably in the 1972 Olympics in Munich, where he reckoned 80 per cent of the top athletes were on Peds (which, by the way, weren't actually banned at the time).
“As I saw it, a coach has two options,” he wrote. “He could face reality and plan an appropriate response, or he could bury his head in the sand while his athletes fell behind.”
Francis not only thought Peds were completely necessary, but completely fair: “Anabolic steroids were banned on the basis of two false rationales – that they offered an unfair advantage, and that they represented a severe danger to athletes’ health. Steroids were not banned because they were unethical; they became unethical because they were banned.”
As it turned out, Johnson’s positive test for stanozolol in 1988 didn’t simply occupy a turning point in sport. It was that turning point, when so much credibility in sport was suddenly lost. Before Johnson, you could still believe most things. After Johnson, you had to be more careful. When both Johnson and Francis confessed to using drugs things changed irrevocably. At Canada’s Dubin Inquiry, a year after Seoul, Francis decided the best way to restore some of that credibility was to explain in great detail the hypocrisy he saw, and participated in, where athletes and coaches and officials were typically universal in denouncing doping, yet at the same time were either practising it themselves or else aiding it.
Perhaps that’s what Floyd Landis had in mind when he circulated those astonishing emails regarding his own drug use in cycling, and allegations against team-mate Lance Armstrong. Landis believed by finally coming clean he might get some of his credibility back. So I dug up his book yesterday too, Positively False, which he wrote in 2007 – the year after he had his Tour de France title stripped for failing a drugs test.
Positively False is essentially a 320-page account of why Landis believed he won that Tour without doping. He wrote about laboratory errors and flawed interpretive protocols and said he was doing it with the same honesty with which he would eventually clear his name.
Well, it was zero surprise then when Armstrong refuted Landis’s claims by talking about credibility – or again, the lack of it. “It’s our word against his word,” said the seven-time Tour winner. “I like our word. We like our credibility. We have nothing to hide. We have nothing to run from. I can give you one word to sum this all up. It’s credibility. Floyd lost his credibility a long time ago.” And there’s certainly no denying that.
If Armstrong does in fact have something to hide – and plenty of people believe he does – then who knows if someday he too might want to get some of his credibility back. Although I doubt it.
Over the course of a long cycle in Clare last summer with another American Tour de France winner, Greg LeMond, the subject came up in a slightly different form, when LeMond told me about the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of a family friend, some time around 1974. LeMond kept it secret until 2006, when, in a slightly twisted way, he was convinced to speak out after a phone call from Landis, who was about to be stripped of his Tour title. LeMond pleaded with him to tell the truth. That keeping it secret, like he did his abuse, could destroy him.
“I know the riders don’t want to be doping,” he told me. “They’re like lab rats. That’s why I’ve likened it to somebody who is being abused. They think they’re willing participants, but they’re not able to make that adult, long-term decision. And when they’re 45 or 50 they’ll look back and go, God . . .”
Armstrong doesn’t believe in God. But I was wondering if the knock on Armstrong’s door on Thursday morning to say Landis was spilling beans all over the cycling shop, might ultimately restore some credibility in sport. I was wondering what Francis would have said about these latest revelations. I was wondering what Francis would have thought about Usain Bolt opening his 100 metres season by running 9.86 seconds, after a brutal start, and easing up across the finish line. I was wondering if like me Francis would have at least seen some credibility in that.
It’s a little late for that now because Francis was buried in Toronto last Tuesday. He was 61 and died after a five-year battle with lymphoma. Ben Johnson helped carry his casket. Dr Jamie Astaphan, who supplied Francis with steroids, died in 2006 and Charles Dubin, who headed the 1989 Dubin inquiry, died in 2008. Francis died with nothing left to hide and maybe therefore with some credibility, at least in his own mind.
Johnson is thus the last survivor of the speed trap. He's 48 years old and relatively successful, with his own line of athletic clothing, and a part-time personal trainer at York University in Toronto. But he's also putting the finishing touches to his own autobiography, which he's calling Seoul to Soul. "The time has come to speak the truth about my own career, to set the record straight about what happened," says Johnson, perhaps realising himself the truth, if not the whole truth, always comes out in the end.
