BEN JOHNSON is a lonely man. Always with him are the harsh judgments and sustained mockery of those who condemn him for testing positive for steroids after he won the 100m dash in a record shattering 9.79 seconds at the 1988 Olympics. He did not sink into hopelessness after Seoul, but he remains wounded.
The emotional scars run deep and Johnson’s relationships with others are filled with mistrust. He rarely goes out. He has hardly any friends — “all gone after Seoul” — and spends a lot of his free time jogging and lifting weights at York University to keep in shape.
He left his girlfriend over a year ago, and has since continued building a wall around himself and his family. “Everybody wants something from me,” he said. “Like thieves, they rob and leave. That’s enough. I’m not a circus freak.”
He doesn’t hold anything against Charlie Francis, his former trainer, who admitted to the Dublin Commission, a panel that studied the use of drugs in Canada by Olympic athletes, that Johnson had been using steroids since 1981. “Why should I hold it against him?” Johnson asks now. “He told the truth.”
Johnson has rarely spoken to the media since Seoul, where he was implicated in the greatest scandal in the history of the Games. Everyone remembers: on September 26 1988, after an anti-doping control test found stanozolol, an anabolic steroid, in his system, Johnson became the embodiment of disgrace. His medal was taken away and he was sent home.
Johnson does not look at Seoul as the most humiliating experience of his life, but rather as the moment he established himself as the fastest sprinter in the world. `No one ever ran the 100m dash in 9.79. No one. And it’s going to take years before it can happen again. I am the fastest man in history.”
Johnson has no remorse. He is convinced others in the 100m dash were steroid users as well. “They know it. I know it. That’s all that counts. Yes, I was taking steroids,” he said, “but so were others on the starting line that day,” an accusation that has been vehemently denied. “Good for them if I was the only one disqualified, but the fact remains: I was the fastest.”
The bitterness he felt when he left South Korea under the evil eye of the public hurt him more than the loss of his medal. “If people are naive enough to believe that athletes don’t take drugs, that is their problem, not mine,” he said. “A cheater goes around the rules to win. That is not what I did. I followed the same rules as the others. Those who treated me as an outcast are hypocrites.”
ENDS