The time difference between Britain and South Korea made it difficult to follow the 1988 Olympics live on TV. When my dad and my sister decided to get up early in the morning to watch the final of the men’s 100m sprint, I preferred to stay in bed. “You missed out”, they told me. “It was one of the most amazing sporting achievements ever seen. We wouldn’t have missed it for the world.” Ben Johnson had beaten a world class field, including the great Carl Lewis, by a clear distance: smashing his own world record. Days later, it was revealed that Johnson had been using steroids, shattering the illusions of my family along with millions of others.
The following week, I got up early on my own to watch the women’s 200m final. On this occasion, Florence Griffith-Joyner was the winner. Again, the margin of victory was emphatic; again, a world record was broken. But Flo Jo never failed a drugs test, so I had the satisfaction of knowing that I watched the result of human endeavours unaided by pharmaceutics, right? Well, maybe. The sudden improvement in her performances (setting records that are almost unchallenged 20 years later) and her hasty retirement from the sport, along with her death at the age of 38, mean that there has been persistent speculation over whether Joyner took drugs.
20 years on from Ben Johnson and Flo Jo, the recent furore over Dwain Chambers’ attempts to compete in Beijing are a reminder that drugs are still a problem in sport. The fact that young sportsmen like Chambers or David Millar feel that they have to take drugs in order to reach the top is quite depressing for a sports fan like me.
But there are encouraging signs. There were some high profile positive drugs tests at the recent Tour de France, notably that of the promising Italian climber Ricardo Ricco, but the silver lining was that Ricco thought he could beat the testers by using a brand new drug. He couldn’t. Increasingly, the testers are one step ahead of the cheats. Also, cycling teams like Millar’s Garmin-Chipotle are imposing strict anti-doping policies and being successful. That gives me a lot of hope.
Perhaps we should give Flo Jo the benefit of the doubt and just enjoy her gold medal performance as one of the greatest moments in athletics history.
