Commentary : Drugs in Spotlight Year After Scandal

It is exactly a year later, and Ben Johnson is still not old news.

He is to track and field what Shoeless Joe Jackson is to baseball. But Johnson’s parallel of the Black Sox Scandal rests on a higher (lower?) plane. His was international. Or, if you will, Olympian.

Say it ain’t so, Ben.

Say that your sport of track and field, or any sport, will be quite the same, even after that fateful Sept. 27, 1988, in Seoul, South Korea.

Say that the men and women in the white coats with their little test tubes and the M.D.s behind their names will not play bigger roles in your sport, and many others, than the men and women who call themselves coaches or athletes.

Say that the public that pays the money to attend the events or buys the products advertised during the televised sports events will, someday again, view winners and losers with the same freedom from cynicism.

Say it, Ben, if you can.

In Seoul, during the Olympics, the phone calls started just after midnight. The news was shocking.

Ben Johnson, Canadian sprinter who had reached the height of his success and acclaim just days earlier with his unheard-of 9.79-second 100-meter dash to the gold medal, was going to have his number taken down. The sources were reliable. This was the real thing.

The dreaded S-word floated everywhere. One of the greatest athletes in the world, certainly the fastest therein, had tested positive for steroids. So the athlete wasn’t an athlete, after all, but a chemically sculptured robot.

No, this wasn’t some weightlifter from Uganda or a hammer thrower from Czechoslovakia with an unpronounceable name and negligible public interest. There are a few of those caught at each Olympics with banned drugs in their systems, and their transgressions are dutifully reported on Page 20 of sports sections around the world.

No, this was Ben Johnson. The Ben Johnson. This was an athlete whose arrival at the airport before the Games caused a Springsteen-like mob scene.

Ironically, in Johnson’s one press conference in Seoul before the track competition started, the airport mob scene was the biggest controversy touched upon.

“There was a little old lady that got in the way and got pushed and shoved and could have been seriously hurt,” said Charlie Francis, Johnson’s coach.

In retrospect, that was all so much trivia. What was about to be seriously hurt was the very sport that Johnson and Francis had lived off, whose ethics they had paid lip service to, for so long.

In retrospect, their arrogance was understandable. Why, when your shell game has worked for so many years, would you expect the rubes in this audience to be any different from all those in the past who hadn’t been able to find the pea?

The official announcement was to be made in the large press conference room of the main press center. In the half-hour or so before it began, reporters of all ages and nationalities milled about, dodging television cameras, stepping over yards and yards of newly positioned cables.

There was a nervous energy in the air. What is the real story? How much will be revealed? Will Johnson be here, too? What will the official stance be?

But there was something else in the air, too--a feeling of history in the making.

There was no circus atmosphere here. This was not George Steinbrenner announcing yet another managerial firing in time for prime play on the back page of the New York Post. That kind of stuff is 80% show biz and 20% sport.

This was well beyond sport and deep into ethics, morals and long-term significance.

So when the Canadian contingent finally marched in and sat down behind a long table, and Michele Verdier of the International Olympic Committee confirmed the rumor, the hush before the onslaught of questions deepened.

It was such a strange moment, so memorable for its juxtaposition of people and its contrast of leading characters. Here was Verdier, a tiny French woman with a little known public relations background and a low profile in the IOC, bringing one of the biggest, strongest, most recognizable stars in the history of the Olympics to his knees.

“The drug is known to be called stanozolol,” Verdier said, as matter of factly as if she were announcing the team handball competition being moved to another building.

The journalism that followed in the hours after that press conference was generally laudable, though frantic.

Reporters scrambled to find appropriate people to interview: other sprinters; other Canadian athletes; rival sprinter Carl Lewis, who had inherited Johnson’s gold medal; Lewis’ coach at Houston, Tom Tellez. The reporters reported, the columnists columnized and the millions of words that flowed over phone lines and broadcast outlets to every corner of the world in the next eight to 10 hours must have been staggering.

The pursuit of Johnson himself took on new dimensions. Where was Ben? Would he meet the press? Would the Canadian officials who had faced the music and handled themselves so well at the press conference take things a step farther and persuade Johnson to face, via the press, the sports world he had just let down?

USA Today, in hot chase, conned an airline official into telling them that there was a Ben Johnson set to fly in the first-class cabin on a flight from Seoul to Tokyo to New York. So a reporter was dispatched with instructions to get on the plane and close to Johnson.

The reporter bought a first-class ticket, got on the plane, found where Ben Johnson was to be sitting, and came face to face with a middle-aged white man. When asked, the man confirmed that his name was, indeed, Ben Johnson, saying that although he had never taken any steroids, he had once had hemorrhoids.

The reporter, fairly well embarrassed by then, tried to leave the plane, but was turned back by the stewardess, who said, citing reasons of security, that he would have to stay on the plane. He was able to call his office later. From Tokyo.

So where was Ben Johnson?

He had taken the course of least resistance. He had run. He had boarded another plane to New York City and was not heard from again, in any real substantive way, until his testimony a few months ago in the Canadian inquiry into the entire situation.

It is becoming more and more prevalent in sports these days, that our heroes take their bows but duck their downfalls. Somehow, the idea that people are responsible for their actions tends to be glossed over when it comes to athletic stars.

One of the more meaningful moments in the long and complicated Dubin Inquiry into the Ben Johnson case occurred when sprinter Angella Issajenko took the stand. She told the inquiry panel that, had it not pressed the investigation, all the athletes using performance-enhancing drugs “would have gone to their graves” with the secret.

“That is standard procedure--when an athlete gets caught, you deny, deny, deny,” she said.

It is hard to know these days who is simply denying, since that’s the “smart” thing to do, and who is telling the truth.

But the recognition of a drug problem in track and field--and elsewhere in the world of sports--remains a hot topic, because of Ben Johnson.

A German magazine named all sorts of names a week ago in an article that, using questionable checkbook journalism, stirred once again the pot that Johnson got boiling a year ago. That resulted in an extraordinary network TV confrontation between Olympic champion Florence Griffth Joyner, one of the accused, and former sprinter Darrell Robinson, the accuser.

It was great theater, but more significant, it kept the issue alive.Which isn’t bad at all, assuming truth finally will prevail and all the cheaters will become casino pit bosses or politicians, where perhaps they’ll feel more at home.

In his lead on Ben Johnson’s epic 9.79-second 100 Sept. 24, Randy Harvey of The Times wrote that lots of things had been said about Johnson going into the race: He was injured, past his peak, he couldn’t beat Lewis, etc.

But in this race, Harvey wrote, “Johnson had the final say.”

How ironically wrong that turned out to be.

Johnson, a cheater, was caught. Since then, some other cheaters have ‘fessed up. Others may do the same.

So Ben Johnson didn’t have the final say, as it turns out. Perhaps truth and ethics will.