is the great prize in track and field, and the winner
is an instant god and rich man.
The lives of big track stars have been documented
since ancient Olympia. However, now, the
100 metres has, in particular, a bad reputation
because of the belief that runners will do anything,
including drugs to win that prize. It's like human
nature.
New drugs come along to boost
performance, and so they're the first to line up.
and it takes years for any drug to be
tested chemically.
This is why the IOC, or the anti-doping agency
have the biggest collection of old piss since
your favourite pub started cleaning the toilets.
I would hate to think that Ussain Bolt is guilty
by association. He has been a genuine
character and a star whom everyone likes,
despite the lederhosen.
But back in the Cold War days of 1988, the
drug war was a well-hidden secret; hidden
from public view.Some coaches new the score.
The IOC had also developed tests for steroids
and had regulations about a lot of chemicals.
It just didn't enforce them all evenly.
I personally am finding the old story
"I took a cold medication" as a bit of a farce
because everybody knows they go for that
excuse. Indeed, those medications may
be covering up even heavier chemicals,
or blood doping.
The following story claims, convincingly,
that those med stories don't hold water, but
the IOC accepted them in 1988, changing
history.
The order was:
1 Ben Johnson (Canada)
2 Carl Lewis (US)
3 Linford Christie (UK)
4 Calvin Smith (US)
Who knew that the fourth guy would be
the eventual "winner" , by default, and unrecognised.
Even the story below shows him little
kindness. They talk about his clean "record time"
but they don't say what that 100-m time was.
Maybe one day he'll get respect. Go Calvin!
It just shows you how famous the winners are.
Everybody is still saying "who dat? Calvin who?"
the story below also has implications for Jamaican
runners, and the latest big names in 100 m running
who were caught.
Checkit: Reuters
Athletics
- Smith true winner of 'dirtiest race' in history
If
anti-doping regulations had been strictly enforced, Calvin Smith, a gifted
American sprinter with a distinctive upright style, would have left the 1988
Seoul Games as the Olympic 100 metres champion and world-record holder.
Eurosport
- If anti-doping regulations had been strictly enforced, American Calvin Smith
(fourth left) would have left the Seoul Games as 100m champion.
On
the day that changed the face of the Olympics and his sport forever, Smith
finished fourth behind Ben Johnson, Carl Lewis and Linford Christie. Today he
is the only man among the first five finishers in Seoul untouched by a drugs
scandal.
"I
should have been the gold medallist," Smith has said of a race that has
been variously described as the dirtiest and most corrupt in history.
"Throughout
the last five or 10 years of my career, I knew I was being denied the chance to
show that I was the best clean runner,"
he told journalists. "I knew I was competing against athletes who were on
drugs."
Canadian
Johnson was infamously hustled out of Seoul after testing positive for the
steroid stanozolol following his
victory in a world-record 9.79 seconds.
Lewis, who clocked 9.92
seconds, was promoted
to the gold medal ahead of Britain's Christie who then took the silver in front
of Smith. Lewis's time was eventually
recognised as the official world record when Johnson's mark of 9.83 seconds, set at the 1987 Rome world championships, was also erased.
Johnson's time in Rome was an astonishing
tenth of a second faster than Smith's then world record of 9.93 seconds set at
altitude in 1983. Smith won consecutive world 200 metres titles but never a
global 100 gold.
In the popular mythology of the time Lewis, a
glorious sprinter and long jumper who won four gold medals at the 1984 Los
Angeles Olympics, was the clean-cut hero
and Johnson a scowling villain.
It was an image Lewis was keen to foster.
"In the old Westerns they had the guy in
the white hat and the black hat," Lewis said years later. "I felt
like the clean guy going out and trying to win, I was the guy in the white hat,
trying to beat this evil guy."
Not everybody warmed to Lewis and his
incessant self-promotion coupled with a holier-than-thou
attitude to drugs offenders. The sceptics felt vindicated when it was
revealed in 2003 that Lewis had failed
three drugs tests for stimulants during the 1988 Olympic trials.
Under the rules of the time he should have been banned from the Games
but the results were covered up by the
US Olympic Committee after it accepted his plea that he had innocently taken a
herbal supplement.
Christie failed a test for the stimulant pseudoephedrine after the final but was cleared on a split decision by the
International Olympic Committee (IOC) medical commission when he argued that he
had taken it inadvertently in ginseng tea.
If Lewis had been banned from the Games and
Christie disqualified, Smith would have been next in line for the gold medal and his world record would have stood once Johnson's times were
scrubbed from the books.
The noise and furore at Seoul airport when
Lewis and Johnson arrived for the Olympics resembled the frenzy associated with
a world heavyweight prize fight featuring Muhammad Ali.
At the opening media conferences, Lewis was as
articulate as always. Johnson, whose natural
shyness was exacerbated by a stutter and an accent showing traces of both
his native Jamaica and his adopted
homeland, said little.
Johnson's coach, the intense and ambitious
Charlie Francis, was both fluent and relaxed while continuing to conceal an
explosive back story which shocked the world when he revealed all to a Canadian government inquiry in the following
year.
During the 1976 Montreal Games, Francis realised drugs were a vital ingredient in
the East German success story and, after
the fall of the Berlin Wall, formerly secret documents showed he was right.
Francis also knew that drugs, which allowed
athletes to train harder and longer,
were only one element in a sophisticated programme but at the elite level,
as he explained to Johnson, a one percent difference in performance meant a
one-metre advantage in the 100 metres.
"Steroids
could not replace talent, or training, or a well-planned competitive
programme," Francis said. "They could not transform a plodder into a
champion. But they had become an essential
ingredient within a complex recipe."
In Seoul there were those who thought a bigger
cheat than Johnson had gone unscathed.
Florence Griffith-Joyner, who died 10 years
after the Games at the age of 38, had been a glamorous and successful sprinter
in the years leading up to Seoul but had always finished among the minor medals.
In 1988, her physique noticeably altered and her voice deepened dramatically,
both signs of possible steroid abuse. "She sounds like Louis Armstrong," exclaimed one
journalist at her news conference in Seoul.
Of more enduring significance were the times she
set in that unreal year. No woman, even 2000 Sydney Olympics triple champion Marion Jones who eventually
confessed to years of systematic doping, has even come close to Griffith-Joyner's times of 10.49 and 21.34
seconds for the 100 and 200 metres respectively.
Griffith-Joyner announced her retirement in 1989, the year mandatory
random drugs test were introduced. Eleven women's world records in Olympic
events remain unchanged since the
1980s.
Since Seoul, athletics, in general, and the
sprints, in particular, have been battered by drugs scandals and the central
sport of the Olympic Games has suffered increasingly in credibility as a
result.
At the 2004 Athens Games, Justin Gatlin won the 100-200 double for the United States after
serving a one-year ban following a positive test for amphetamines. The
sentence had been halved when the world governing body accepted he had taken a prescribed medicine for attention deficit
disorder.
Two years later he again tested positive, this
time for excessive levels of the male sex hormone testosterone, and was banned for eight years, later reduced to four.
Gatlin worked with Trevor Graham, the coach who initiated a drugs scandal equivalent
to the Johnson furore when he sent a
syringe containing an undetectable steroid called THG to the U.S.
Anti-Doping Agency.
A test was quickly devised for the drug
manufactured by the BALCO laboratory
in California and a number of prominent athletes in track and field and baseball were implicated, including Britain's European 100 metres champion
Dwain Chambers.
Jones, who won three gold medals in Sydney
after announcing she wanted to go one better than Lewis and Jesse Owens by
winning five titles, was the biggest victim of the BALCO scandal.
After years of denial she finally confessed
she had been on a drugs regime similar to Johnson and was imprisoned for lying to federal investigators. Other sprinters
banned as a result of the BALCO investigations were her former partner Tim Montgomery, who was the first man to run faster
than Johnson's Seoul mark, and double world women's sprint champion Kelli
White.
To its credit, the International Association
of Athletics Federations (IAAF) has consistently uncovered drugs cheats over
the 25 years since Seoul. It has also pointed out that other prominent Olympic
sports, notably weightlifting and cycling,
have been bedevilled by doping.
However, the positive tests keep coming and
this year has been a bad one for the world of track and field.
Former 100 metres world-record holder Asafa Powell of Jamaica and former
world champion Tyson Gay from the United States both missed last month's Moscow
world championships after positive drugs tests which were revealed on the
same day.
Jamaica, the Caribbean island which currently
dominates world sprinting, was struck by another doping scandal when twice
Olympic 200 metres gold medallist Veronica
Campbell-Brown was suspended by her national federation after a positive
test for a banned diuretic....
