EXCLUSIVE: Ben Johnson claims to be the victim of an American conspiracy
Last updated at 11:17 PM on 30th May 2008
By JEFF POWELL
From the depths of that black night in Seoul which scarred Olympic history for all time, the fastest man on Earth made a solitary phone call to the other side of the world and broke the devastating news that he was being stripped of his gold medal after testing positive for drugs.
Ben Johnson's father, a lawyer who had watched on Canadian television 62 hours earlier as his son obliterated the legendary Carl Lewis as well as the world 100metres record, responded with just one word: "Americans!"
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Ben Johnson
Ben Johnson (right) of Canada crosses the finish line to win the Olympic 100 meter final in a world record 9.79 in September 1988. Johnson was later disqualified for failing to pass a drug test.
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Later that day Johnson dialled his mother, who told him: "Just come home, Ben. They could have murdered you." They? "Someone from the Lewis camp,' is Johnson's astonishing claim, though he does not suggest Lewis was personally involved.
"The Americans can't allow themselves to come second. That's their mentality and I'd beaten Carl three times on the run-up to the Games. So they spiked my drink with enough stuff to kill a cow. Unlucky to test positive? I was lucky to get out of Seoul alive."
To most of us, this will seem like just another outlandish conspiracy theory. JFK, Princess Diana, Dr David Kelly . . . and now Johnson.
Johnson, of course, lived to tell the tale - unlike those others - and talks bitterly of how his father died of the heartbreak three years later, aged 64, and his mother, with whom he lived until her death last year at 69, "was killed by what they did to her boy Ben".
He lives to tell us that now, after 20 years of exhaustive investigation, he claims to have the proof of what they did. At last. On tape.
Johnson has declined all invitations to go to Beijing and will not watch this summer's Olympic Games. "Not one minute," he insists. "Not one second. Definitely not those hypocrites who are doing the same things I did but keep saying they are clean so they can still go on making millions of dollars."
Johnson does not deny using drugs. How could he when they found him pumped full of rocket fuel on the biggest sporting stage of all after he had scorched 100m of South Korean earth in 9.79sec, a time so fast that the world blinked and almost missed it? His world was torn apart and it was years before he recovered fully from the shock.
He served a two-year suspension, but in 1993 was banned for life by the IAAF after testing positive for excess testosterone.
Yet he maintains: "My crime was being honest. Like your Dwain Chambers, they had to get me out of the Olympics because I told the truth. Athletics is big business so they can't afford to have us tell it like it is."
So how is it? "They're all at it," he says. "Well, the same 30-40 per cent use steroids as in my day. But it's the top 30-40 per cent, the percentage who matter.
"How shall we put it to avoid being sued by everybody? OK, virtually all the big names, the winners, the stars all the fans come out to see . . . they're on drugs. Nothing has changed as a result of all the controversies because without steroids it's not humanly possible to keep producing the performances."
While the denials of so many champions, such as Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery and Justin Gatlin, were exposed as a sham by the BALCO trials in California - the man cursed with the reputation as the biggest cheat of all actually owned up.
Not to the sensational offence for which he was convicted in 1988 but to being sucked into the Olympic drug culture. "It was 1976 when I came to Canada from Jamaica and I watched those Games and was inspired to go running," says Johnson.
"Going fast was in my genes. Six years later, when I went to the Pan-American Games in Caracas, I knew nothing about drugs until suddenly all the Americans and some other athletes got up from the table one morning, left their breakfasts and walked out of the village.
"I asked what was going on and someone told me they knew the testers were coming. That was America's idea of a random drugs test.
"The fastest man in the world that season won the 100m gold in 10.14sec. I was a kid but I made the final in 10.5, running clean. That's how fast I was. I know that I am naturally the fastest man ever. Carl Lewis and the Americans got to know it. That was the problem."
Charlie Francis and Dr Jamie Astaphan, the Canadian coach and West Indian doctor who took him into their laboratory and on to gold medals and world records, knew it also. They recited to the impressionable young man the mantra of the track: If you don't take it, you won't make it. The intensity of their training left him in no doubt as to what had to be taken.
"The work we were doing was very hard," he recalls. "We were training flat out up to 40 hours a week, at least five hours a day. No athlete can survive that without using something. The body would tell you to stop.
"You would break down after six or seven weeks. Everybody is right believing that steroids enable the body to recover quickly so you can train more. Everybody is wrong thinking that steroids in themselves are bad."
Arguing the case for drugs at the Olympics is hardly calculated to accelerate Johnson's rehabilitation. Still less so when he lets slip the astonishing revelation that he wanted to marry U.S. athlete Marion Jones, who has been imprisoned as well as stripped of her Olympic medals.
Johnson is painfully aware of that but knows honesty is his best hope of redemption. Not that telling the truth is always easy and it is when the pressure is at its most intense that the boyhood stutter comes back to nag at him.
"C-c-c-cocaine and heroin are the bad drugs," he says. "They're the ones that k-k-k-kill people. Steroids are not bad. Not if they are controlled. People ask if I blame my coaches for everything that happened but Charlie knew what he was doing. He gave me only what I needed to level the playing field against the rest.
"There is talk about what steroids do to the body but it is the wrestlers who push up the casualty rate in Olympic sports. It's not the drugs that damage their kidneys and other organs, it's the continual crashing down on to the mat that has killed 200 of them in recent years, that and mixing in alcohol.
"There is talk of steroid rage but I never attacked no one and I never beat up women. If I felt anger, I focused it on to the running track. My only problem was that I knew I was the fastest ever but without help I might not be able to prove it.
"The Americans and others were going under 10 seconds almost every time they ran. How can that be possible without taking something? I could have done it once, maybe twice a year.
"Running clean, pacing myself, timing my training to peak exactly at the Olympics - and that's difficult - I could have beaten 10 seconds in Seoul."
Let us think about the implications of that for a split second. Carl Lewis, who inherited the gold, was not the only beneficiary when Johnson was stripped of his medal. Britain's Linford Christie was promoted to silver, America's Dennis Mitchell to bronze.
Since Mitchell clocked 9.99 and Christie 9.97, Johnson is certain he would have beaten both without steroids. What about Lewis, at 9.93? "Probably," he says.
"But I knew Carl had tested positive three times before Seoul and the Americans had let him off because they were terrified I would take their precious gold."
(Lewis was cleared after claiming he had innocently taken a cold medicine containing banned stimulants.) Those fears were justified and Johnson knows he could have done it by even more than the record margin which shocked the world.
"Had I not glanced back to check I had the race won, had I not raised an arm to celebrate, had I not been shutting down, I would have gone under 9.79," he says.
So where does that leave the men who climbed higher up the podium when he was knocked off its summit? Johnson despises Lewis, who recently belittled Chambers as "an untalented cheat" and called for steroid abuse to be criminalised: "He's the biggest hypocrite of them all."
Johnson is more forgiving of the other Americans, even though Mitchell was subsequently banned for four years for drug abuse. Of Christie, caught by the steroid police years later, he is ambivalent. Christie also tested positive in Seoul but successfully argued he had taken the substance inadvertently while drinking ginseng tea.
Johnson says: "I don't buy into that ginseng thing but I still like Linford. Even though he denied taking drugs he's not as bad as Carl because he never pointed the finger at me."
Even so, the pair had not spoken in the two decades since Seoul, until last February. Then they did so by chance. Johnson explains: "A cousin of mine was on a trip to London. He drove into a gas station and saw Linford at the next pump. He said: 'Hey man, let me call Ben'.
"He put Christie on his cellphone. Linford asked how I was doing but he sounded a little awkward. I asked for his number but I've not called it yet. Maybe I will, maybe I won't."
Meanwhile Johnson's world record, which was struck off along with his gold medal, has been lowered to 9.74sec by Jamaica's Beijing favourite, Asafa Powell.
Johnson breaks into that sunniest of Caribbean smiles: "Given today's hi-tech training techniques and the benefits of modern sports science I would be quicker than that."
So given that steroids are still out there, how fast might he inhumanly have run? "Nine . . . point . . . five . . . seconds," he says slowly, deliberately, to let it sink in. "Don't forget it was 20 years ago that I ran 9.79 and the track in Seoul was only 60-80 per cent as quick as those in Qatar and Japan where they are recording their times now."
Johnson remains proud of his achievement. "Regrets?" he asks himself. "In the back of my mind, maybe. But then again without the stuff I could not have proved to my father I was the fastest ever. I won the gold. I smashed the record. People still come up and tell me I did all that by winning the greatest race of all. They can't take that away from me."
We talked at the Toronto Track and Field Center, located within the grounds of York University in Johnson's home city.
This is where he trains a dozen or so young Olympians of the future. He does so privately without seeking approval from the Canadian authorities, whom he accuses of failing to support him when he was set up in Seoul, then betraying him subsequently.
So what does he tell these youngsters about drugs? "Nothing," he replies. "It's not for me to order kids not to use steroids. They come here. I train them to be faster. Some are going to the World Junior Championships next month.
"I've got one of them a scholarship in the U.S. We chat, we joke, we never talk about drugs. They go home to their parents." Several of the likely Canadian team for Beijing call out to Johnson as they circle the track. One Flo-Jo lookalike trots over, leans foxily on his shoulder and asks: "When are we having that lunch, Big Ben?"
"When you bring that medal home, baby.' She kisses his cheek and he says: "It was only the officials who called me a national disgrace. I still have the respect of ordinary Canadians."
Further evidence of that came later when the maitre d' of one of Toronto's most fashionable restaurants overrode another booking and showed us to the best table.
What he does not have is the multi-million dollar fortune he would have made but for the Seoul scandal. Almost all the speculators who offered to set him up in business "just spent my money".
He adds: "I take nothing from coaching the kids. If they win, I win. I still draw the interest on some investments I have left. I do a little media work."
Then there is a retainer from Colonel Gaddafi, the Libyan leader who once hired Johnson as fitness trainer for his wannabe footballer son. Young Al-Saadi Gaddafi, who found his true vocation as a dedicated playboy, still likes to visit Johnson in Toronto, where they go to ice hockey matches together.
Johnson lives modestly in a middle-class suburb, but says he is happy: "I spend a lot of time with my daughter (Makela, 20) and granddaughter (Jeneil, three next month). They give me great joy"
The man who once drove a Ferrari at characteristically high speed along Canada's freeways runs out of petrol as we are riding in his old Mercedes. Luckily, we are close enough to a filling station to coast on to the forecourt. As we do so a new Maserati roars away.
"My next car," he says. Then that smile and a shrug: "Maybe next year." By then, he hopes to be married for the first time. To Marion Jones, currently serving six months in prison for perjuring herself about her steroid use?
"Hey, I would have married Marion in a heartbeat. That's some lady. But she got pregnant by Tim Montgomery (another disgraced U.S. sprinter) just as I was about to make my move."
Instead, at 47, he has has begun a long-distance courtship by telephone with a 27-year-old Croat beauty with whom he had dinner just once on a recent coaching visit to Zagreb. "You know me," he says. 'I do everything fast."
The young lady in question is a former sprinter turned Olympic bobsleigher who wants to go back to the track. "She's promised to wait for me," says Johnson. "I'll bring her to Toronto soon to see if she can make it. Then I want more kids before I'm too old. Hopefully we'll marry next year."
By then he plans to have overturned the two steroid convictions, as he will explain in an imminent autobiography.
Canada's athletics chiefs banned him for life after one of three tests, following his comeback from suspension, was alleged to contain traces of testosterone, although Johnson insists he never used steroids after Seoul.
He showed me documents which appear to indicate that his urine sample was mishandled by random truck drivers in near 80 degree heat. If Johnson is to be believed, the alleged Seoul conspiracy is mindblowing.
Di-anne Hudson, formerly a legal consultant to a Toronto newspaper, has taken up what many would regard as a hopeless case.
She says: "Ben has not been well advised in the past. He's so honest I just feel he deserves some real help." In reconstructing Seoul in all its murky confusion. They are certain they have tracked down the much rumoured "Mystery Man" suspected of spiking Johnson's drink before he gave that fateful urine sample.
Johnson says: "As the man who admitted using steroids, believe me when I say I had stopped taking all drugs six weeks before the Games. I know the world was shocked when I tested positive but no one was more shocked than me.
"Because not only was my system cleaned out but I never touched the drug they said they found. I used Farazobol. My coaches had told me that Stanozobol was no use to sprinters because it tightened the muscles, yet they said they found a dose in me so massive it could have killed me. Someone slipped something into my drink. Who? As my father said, the Americans. Someone close to the Lewis camp.
"There was a man in the testing room no one knew. Later I recalled him getting a drink from the refrigerator and handing it to me in a rather odd way. What was he doing there? Ask Di-anne."
Ms Hudson found a photograph of that incident, then she helped Johnson trace the mysterious figure in the picture. Reports at the time suggested it was an American football player who was a friend of the Lewis clan. How did such a person come to be accredited to be in that high security area?
Lewis's agent denied any wrongdoing but was reported as admitting they wanted to check whether Johnson took a masking agent before giving his test.
Last year Johnson received an anonymous phone call from a man claiming to be the drink spiker. "We arranged to meet but he didn't show," says Johnson.
Earlier this year he called again. This time Johnson and Ms Hudson flew to Los Angeles and met a man they have identified as someone known to Lewis.
"Ben was wired for sound," says Ms Hudson. "The man admitted interfering with the drink. It's on the tape. We're preparing our case. It seems he has also done some funny business in Africa and now has his own diamond mine."
Johnson chuckles: "I don't own no diamond mine." So what was the Mystery Man's motive?
"The Americans had to win," says Johnson. "So they had to stitch up Ben.There were reports that NBC (America's Olympic broadcast network) would pull out their hundreds of millions if any Americans tested positive.
"The IOC talk a lot about drugs but they don't really want to know. They stand to lose all those big bucks. If they banned everybody who tested positive they would ruin their industry. I know six sprinters who tested positive in Seoul. Some were in my final, some were in the 200m.
"They were all protected. Some by high contacts. Some had big-brand shoe and kit sponsors while I was with young guys trying to build a new company. So Ben had to get shafted."
The motive? "The Americans were paranoid about me. I'd been beating Lewis regularly. He'd been pointing the finger at me even though he had tested positive three times."
American Olympic champion Evelyn Ashford went public with her disgust that the ban on Lewis competing at Seoul was set aside on the grounds that he had inadvertently taken over-the-counter medication, even though three separate substances, including the contentious ephedrine, had been found in his samples.
"Yet Carl keeps saying I'm the one who shamed track and field," says Johnson. "That was convenient for everyone." The journey from perdition to redemption has been long, hard and not without its humiliations.
Ben Johnson is getting there by looking the world in the eye. Innocence is not a word you expect to be using in conjunction with the man who has come to symbolise cheating in sport; an athlete whose resort to steroids lifted the lid on a drug-filled world from which you instinctively recoil.
Is he deluding himself? What you have read here is his truth as he will tell it in that autobiography. If nothing else, not least for the future of athletics and the Olympics, it would be a crime not to listen.
BEN JOHNSON'S ROCKY ROAD
Born on December 30, 1961, in Jamaica.
Emigrated to Canada in 1976, where he lived in Scarborough, Ontario. Joined the Scarborough Optimists track and field club under Charlie Francis, Canada's national sprint coach for nine years.
Won two gold medals, two silvers and a bronze at the 1982 and 1986 Commonwealth Games.
In 1985, after seven consecutive losses to Carl Lewis, Johnson finally beat the American. Repeated the success at the 1986 Goodwill Games.
Held five fastest times over 60m indoors, including 1987 world record of 6.41sec.
Ran 100m in Rome World Championship in world record 9.83sec, then beat it with 9.79sec in 1988 Olympic final in Seoul. Later stripped of both medals and his records expunged when engulfed by Seoul drug scandal.
Reached nearly 50km per hour in fastest run.
After first drugs ban, Johnson returned for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 but failed to make the 100m final.
He retains two bronze medals from the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles for 100m and the 4x100m relay.
Francis claimed that after breaking the world record in 1987, Johnson earned $480,000 a month in endorsements.
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