Twenty Years Later

This article resonated with me. I
was especially interested in the comments of Andy Higgins and Doug Clement, two
coaches that I really respect.  I think
this article summarizes the all the issues in a very succinct and concise
manner.

Questions continue to surround sprinting

By BEVERLEY SMITH AND JAMES CHRISTIE , From Monday’s Globe and Mail

September 21, 2008

Twenty years after Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson’s epic drug
disqualification at the Seoul Summer Olympics, the sport remains cloaked in
skepticism.

Perhaps it’s just fatigue after a rash of doping positives in the years
since. Or innocence lost after Johnson’s dramatic fall from grace.

“I’m not sure there has been an athlete so identified around the world with
such glamour – before the positive test,” Canadian track coach Andy Higgins
said.

That made the plunge all the more momentous.

Now, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt could not rouse a crowd at the 2008
Beijing Olympics without a spectre of doubt hanging over the finish line.

Was he really clean? Could anybody so dominant – gold medals in both the
men’s 100- and 200-metre events, plus the 4×100 relay – really have run like
that without chemical help?

It is Johnson’s enduring legacy.

“I hate it,” Higgins said. “I’m essentially, by nature, an optimist. I have
a positive view. … I am seriously pissed off because [tainted coaches and
athletes] have made me to a degree a cynic.”

Higgins watched Bolt drop his arms 20 metres from the finish line during the
100-metre final in Beijing and still run 9.69 seconds.

“He’s an immense talent. No discussion,” Higgins said. “He’s 6-foot-5 and he
comes out of the blocks like he’s 5-foot-6. He doesn’t get left in the blocks.
Then, he runs away from them with that immense stride length and power. And
he’s completely innocent of whatever can create pressure.

“But all I have are questions.”

The questions surrounding Bolt “are a sad outcome” of the Johnson legacy,
said Bruce Kidd, dean of the faculty of physical education and health at the
University of Toronto.

“I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. I was electrified by his
performance. But it is true that the prevalence of drugs in all aspects of
society makes this a question in people’s minds.”

Charlie Francis, the architect of Johnson’s drug-supported training regime,
said last week he believes drugs weren’t the reason Bolt ran world-record times
in Beijing. Rather, it is the Jamaican practice of training on grass surfaces,
which is easier on joints and affects the connective tissue in a positive way.

“Now, it’s not my job to speculate who is doing what,” Francis said. “I’m
sufficiently satisfied that the playing field is level, enough to enjoy watching
races at the highest level.”

Does that mean Francis, once known as Charlie the Chemist, thinks sprinters
are clean now? Or that no athlete is lacking of chemical assistance? What does
it mean to be on a level playing field now?

Francis said during the federally ordered Dubin inquiry into doping that
Johnson had to take steroids to remain on a level playing field with the rest
of the athletes. And six of the eight Seoul 100-metre finalists were eventually
pegged with drug infractions of some sort, causing experts to call it “the
dirtiest race in history.”

“Sick. Shallow,” Higgins said of the drive to get onto “a level playing
field.”

Higgins was the only Canadian track coach to show up outside the athletes
village in Seoul wearing the team uniform the morning after Johnson’s positive
test. The rest of them didn’t want to deal with the media.

He told the media that Johnson’s positive test wasn’t a sport issue, but a
values issue. Athletes should be directed to learn solid values, Higgins said,
so the effort to be your best holds the most meaning and that solid values
serve you for the rest of your life.

Johnson didn’t learn those values in the race to win at all costs, Higgins
said, and he sees Johnson’s story as a tragedy.

“He was a young man who was used by a very smart man [Francis] for his own
ego purposes, and he’d been taken advantage of,” Higgins said. “That should
never have happened.”

One of the resulting tragedies of the Dubin inquiry is that people see
Johnson as the bad guy and Francis as the good guy for revealing truths about
the drug culture in track, Higgins said. In his mind, however, Francis deserves
to be held responsible.

In the end, Johnson has come through with questionable values, like the cult
of celebrity. “He has nowhere to go,” Higgins said.

He said Johnson’s demise has affected sport twofold in the two decades
since:

*It has cost the sport in Canada immensely in terms of financial support and
limited the opportunities for track athletes that followed.

*It has cost the sport credibility and turned people into cynics.

But it wasn’t just Johnson’s positive test that caused it, Higgins said. It
was the ensuing Dubin inquiry, which featured Francis’s revelations.

“Charles Dubin became fascinated by Charlie’s bright mind,” Higgins said.
“And the man is very bright. He has strong opinions, tons of them related to
justifying what he did. And that kept getting aired. It was an amazing public
seminar on doping. … It gave Charlie a forum.”

After the hearings, the doping hotlines in Canada and the United States lit
up, with athletes asking for confirmation of what they had heard – so they
could use the information for themselves.

“It added to the justification in a lot of people’s minds that the only way
to the top was to take drugs,” Higgins said. “It missed the entire point, which
was … that it was cheating.”

Only he and fellow coach Doug Clement used the word “cheating” in their
testimonies, Higgins said. “It didn’t get clearly defined, because the
justifiers have all kinds of other words.”

He says he has not seen a huge positive impact from the Dubin inquiry in
Canada. The World Anti-Doping Agency wasn’t born for another 10 years, until
after the Festina cycling scandal, when a manager was found with large
quantities of doping products in a team car on the France-Belgium border.

Kidd thinks that, with the efforts of WADA, drug use is less prevalent today
in sport, although during the years after the Johnson positive, other countries
were “just sweeping doping under the carpet.” Now, he says, there is a very
strong worldwide consensus that doping is “antithetical to the value of sport
and should be strongly policed.”

Higgins is not so sure track and field is as tough as it should be on the
doping issue.

“There’s too much money to be made on world records,” he said.

He questions the move by the governing International Association of
Athletics Federations on tagging seven female middle-distance runners with
doping infractions just before the Beijing Games, to send a message to any
Olympic competitor considering cheating.

But why not target sprinters, who are the major marketing attraction at any
event?

“Would it be smart for a huge sport to go in and create a scandal, and
destroy illusions one more time?” he pointed out.

In the 20 years after Seoul, it’s become clear not all infractions were made
public.

Former Canadian high-jumper Milt Ottey says Johnson was used “as a
scapegoat” for a dirty track scene “and the IAAF knew it at the time.”

“My suspicion was that a lot of Americans were caught but that was
squashed,” Ottey said. “[The IAAF] had a chance to make a real statement, but
they let it be believed it was a single event … it was Ben. Now, anyone who
does anything great is suspected. That’s sad.”

Asked if anything has changed, Ottey says people are now more tolerant of
performance enhancement. “I think the public is more understanding of the Ben
Johnson incident, though, and they think it’s time to forget and go on.”

Angella Issajenko, Canada’s fastest female sprinter who never tested
positive but admitted to drug use at the Dubin inquiry, has always said
Johnson’s treatment following the doping scandal was unfair.

“He didn’t sodomize somebody’s child, come on, he took … stanazolol a few
days a week; big deal,” she said.

Kidd said sport never had innocence, embedded in society as a whole.

“Sport is always thought to create a high moral standard,” he said, adding
Johnson’s positive test was a reminder that it didn’t.

Higgins said Johnson blasted an illusion of innocence. In reality, coaches
and athletes knew about rampant doping in the days and years before the
infamous test result.

“You knew that the Eastern Bloc was into it,” he said. “You knew what you
were competing against.”

Now, Higgins says, there are more than a few people performing at the highest
levels that are starting “to get very nervous,” but what remains of the former
Eastern Bloc hasn’t changed. However, he still sees too many suspicious things.

“The human physiology just cannot do the work needed to perform at the
highest levels and stay there week after week through an unbelievably long
season,” he said. “It’s not possible.”

Sadly, the Ben Johnson-born cynicism is just one more aspect of a huge
all-pervasive cynicism about almost anything, Higgins says.