Vivek Chaudhary
It is perhaps still the most memorable 90 minutes in the history of female athletics. Under a bright Seoul sky, Florence Griffith- Joyner’s dazzling running suit glistened like silver foil in the afternoon sun as her talon-like fingernails, immaculately painted red, white, blue and gold, stretched out in front of her as she crouched on the running track.
Just more than 21 seconds later, Flo-Jo, as she had become known, had run her way into the 200m final of the 1988 Seoul Olympics and into the record books by smashing the world record down from 21,71 seconds to 21,56.
Ninety minutes on, she was at it again. Griffith-Joyner took gold and broke her own time, a world mark that had barely been entered into the record books, by completing the 200m in 21,34 seconds. It was, and still is, one of the most astonishing races in athletics history.
Bursting through the finishing tape, Griffith-Joyner, a devout Christian, sank to her knees and looked up to the heavens and prayed. Her husband Al Joyner, who was also her coach, rushed over and embraced her in a suffocating bear-hug.
But the celebrations that afternoon remained strictly a husband and wife affair. Not one of the other seven runners in the race felt moved enough to offer her the most perfunctory of congratulations – most unusual at the end of a race in which a world record had been broken. And it wasn’t just a case of sour grapes. The chorus of doubt and disparagement had begun.
Brazilian Joachim Cruz said afterwards: “In 1984 in Los Angeles Florence was an extremely feminine person. Today she looks and runs more like a man than a woman. She must be doing something that is not normal to break these records.”
Linford Christie said after she broke the 100m world record during the American team trials for the 1988 Olympics: “No woman can run that fast. I know how difficult it is to get under 10,5 seconds for the 100.” Carl Lewis has also suggested that drugs could have played a role in her performances.
Griffith-Joyner returned to the United States at the end of the Seoul Olympics with three gold medals, one silver and two world records, which still stand, but the criticism had begun. And it still resounds today, after her premature death at the age of 38. Did Griffith-Joyner pay the ultimate price for her success?
There seems little doubt that there was a period during which Griffith-Joyner’s life changed. John Rodda, the former athletics correspondent of The Guardian newspaper, has covered every Olympic Games since 1948. He was at the US trials before Seoul and felt he identified it. “You could see it in her appearance and hear it in her voice. There was no doubt in my mind that she had been taking steroids. I also analysed the jump in improvement in her running times and there is no doubt that that improvement was not down to totally natural causes.”
Griffith-Joyner became an accomplished college athlete, graduating from the University of California in 1978 with a degree in psychology. After leaving college she combined working in a bank with running to help support her family. But there was nothing in her early running career to suggest that she had the makings of a world beater.
Until her emergence at the Seoul Olympics and those team trials two months before the Games, her running record was barely impressive by world athletics standards. She was better known for her long finger- nails and flamboyant appearance than for her clinical running on the track.
In the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games she won silver in the 200m. The year before that she secured a place in the American team for the World Championships in Helsinki but returned home without any medals.
But it was the change in her appearance in the run-up to Seoul and her dramatically improved running times that led to questions being asked over how she had managed it. The rumours over her alleged drug- taking began circulating around the world of athletics, whispers fuelled by her phenomenally improved running times.
Before breaking the 100m world record, her time a year earlier for the same distance was just over 11 seconds. It was that dramatic drop that caused serious questions to be asked.
Lorna Boothe, a former international hurdler who trained regularly with Griffith-Joyner in the run-up to the 1988 Olympics, said this week that she had been told that she regularly visited a Los Angles hospital to take a five-part cocktail of drugs, including steroids and testosterone.
However, like many of the rumours, it is based on hearsay and not firm evidence.
If Griffith-Joyner did take steroids – and she never tested positive for them throughout her career – she was not alone. The athletics world of the 1980s had become a murky, secretive environment where the use of drugs was common among many athletes. It was the way to win.
With the rewards in the sport increasing, a little bit of steroids with a lot of training could go a long way to ensuring success. Besides, it was relatively easy to get away with. Until 1989 there was no mandatory drug testing of athletes – they were only ever tested at competitions. So in between events an intelligent athlete could take steroids as part of a training programme, lay off them in the run-up to a competition and, if tested, the chances are that it would prove negative.
Athletics officials knew there was a drugs problem in some areas of the sport and mandatory testing was seen as the most effective way of combating it. In February 1989, on the eve of the introduction of mandatory random drug testing, Griffith- Joyner retired. She said soon afterwards: “I’d already accomplished my goals in athletics, and I didn’t know if the doors of opportunities would remain open forever.”
Her retirement, however, did not signal an end to the rumours, merely reinforcing them. Why would an athlete quit at the peak of a career that looked set to go from strength to strength? But maybe she had achieved everything she had ever wanted.
Griffith-Joyner’s ambitions had been nurtured on the streets of Watts, a Los Angeles suburb, where she had first began running at the age of seven. They were born out of poverty and a desire to provide for her large family of 11.
And she had everything. There was the Flo-Jo Doll, Flo-Jo false nails, Flo-Jo clothes and Flo-Jo fitness videos all generating hundreds of thousands of dollars as the first lady of athletics cashed in on her fame.
She made her fortune, but was it all worth it? The post-mortem into Griffith-Joyner’s career and what was behind it will continue no doubt for many years, but for the moment the world of athletics will feel some sadness at the loss of a flamboyant, charismatic winner. As well as her two world records, Florence Griffith-Joyner has taken the secret of her success to her grave.