After Ben Bashing, Johnson Deserves the Chance to Run

The tale grows stranger and stranger.

It started with a runner, Ben Johnson, who won a race and flunked a test.

The latest development in the Ben-Gate scandal takes us to a farm on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. Johnson’s doctor, according to testimony in a Canadian drug inquiry, once purchased huge quantities of steroids intended for cats, dogs, horses and beef cattle. The doctor, Jamie Astaphan, reportedly bought the ‘roids for the owner of a ranch on St. Kitts.

To what end? Who knows, maybe the rancher wanted to own the world’s fastest T-bone.

That must have been some crazy farm. Surly, aggressive collies. Cows standing in front of mirrors all day, flexing. Cats with acne and receding furlines.

This latest bizarre testimony is good news for Ben Johnson. The man needs all the sympathy he can get, and the farm story tends to paint Ben as an innocent kid who fell into the clutches of a demented doctor bent on steroidizing the world.

Ben isn’t innocent, of course. He used steroids and he got caught.

But let’s give the guy a break.

We stripped him of his gold medal, of course, because his incredible run was a fraud. We shipped him home and held him up as the symbol of all that is evil and depraved in the world of sport.

Now it’s time to let him run again. Granted, Johnson still has several years left to serve on his lifetime ban from track and field, but even Charles Manson gets parole hearings.

Despite the lifetime Ben ban, the Canadian Olympic Assn. has indicated it will consider reinstating Johnson in time for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, and the International Athletic Federation’s ban was for only two years.

Why not drug-test Johnson regularly now, and let him back on the track this summer?

That would be with the proviso, of course, that he not hang around with unsavory characters, i.e. coaches, doctors, lawyers, Olympic athletes and St. Kitts barnyard animals.

Already Ben has been punished more than any celebrity ever involved in substance abuse. Movie stars live on drugs and booze for years, spend a week at Betty Ford and write best sellers about their titanic struggle to sobriety. Major league athletes wallow in cocaine, rehab for a month and return to their teams as heroic figures, their fans dewy-eyed and proud.

In American sports, the steroid user is slapped on the wrist and patted on the butt and sent back into the game.

Why are we so tough on Ben, then? He tried to deceive us in the most glamorous event of the Olympic Games, and that’s not cool. But I have to think we would have gone a lot easier on Johnson if he weren’t such a scowling, glowering, smug and menacing figure.

Were he cute and sincere like Sugar Ray Leonard, or obnoxiously charming like Brian Bosworth, or handsome and pious like Carl Lewis, already there would have been a clamor to let Ben back into running.

But he flunked his personality test.

Now he’s the centerpiece in a theater of the absurd in Canada. The inquiry itself should result in positive changes in sport, but Ben has taken a beating.

Several half-baked conspiracy theories have been presented by Astaphan and by Johnson’s apologists to explain how those doggone steroids came to be lurking in his bloodstream. They were rubbed into his skin by a vengeful masseur, they were slipped into his beer by a mysterious stranger, they were given to him disguised as pain pills.

Yeahhh, that’s the ticket.

Johnson’s own attorneys devised the inspired strategy of presenting their client as a simpleton who wouldn’t know a steroid from a hemorrhoid. As if Ben didn’t already have a mammoth image problem. If Johnson wants to help persuade the panel that he is indeed a dimwit boob, all he has to do is point to the legal team he hired.

It’s enough for us to know that Johnson was a relatively unsophisticated kid from the wrong side of the tracks who got hooked up with a coach who probably waxes his car with steroids.

How many among us can say that if given a chance to take a pill that would elevate us to world prominence in our chosen line of work, we would decline? What if many of our rivals were already on the pill?

So far, that magic pill is available only to athletes, and we’re starting to see how very few of them resist the temptation.

Johnson didn’t, he cheated, but we’ve done enough tongue-clucking and Ben bashing. Now we should let the guy run.