To Relief of Sport, the Winner Is Clean

World’s fastest human is a catch phrase invented by a journalist in the 1920s to hype sprinting and promote USC runner Charlie Paddock into a bona fide gate attraction in the “Golden Age of Sport.”

It was an era of hyperbole, and sports pages were in full flower with it--the Sultan of Swat, the Manassa Mauler, the Iron Horse, the Four Horsemen. There was even the original Dream Team or, more accurately, a Dream Backfield. Why not a world’s fastest human?

It was not to be confused, to be sure, with the world’s fastest ocelot or even the world’s fastest bear, if he were hungry enough. The world’s fastest ostrich would have eliminated Charlie Paddock in the heats.

Charlie eventually became a world record-holder, but in 1920, he wasn’t even the world’s fastest Olympian. His 10.8 seconds at Antwerp that year was no faster than the winning time of American Ralph Craig at Stockholm eight years earlier.

Still, the Olympic champion is, by common consent, held to be the fastest of the genus Homo sapiens . To run a world record at a pressure-less meet in Modesto, or Ulan Bator, for that matter, is hardly to be compared with doing it against the greatest assemblage of sprinters from the six continents and in front of the cameras beaming the event back to a billion people or so.

So, thanks to that forgotten scribe of 70 years ago, the Olympic sprint is now one of the glamour events of Olympic track and field. The mile--the metric mile that is, 1,500 meters--is the other. Everything in between is just a race. No one can become the world’s fastest human jumping over a hurdle, a hedge or even running 26 miles 385 yards through gasoline fumes. You get less than 10 seconds to become the world’s fastest human.

But the Olympic champion this year is not the world’s fastest human for a change.

The world’s fastest human, in fact, is a barrel-chested, iron-muscled Jamaican-turned-Canadian who ran a world record in the hardest place to do it--the Olympics--at Seoul in 1988.

But this Olympics’ worst nightmare was that Ben Johnson might do it again.

Ben Johnson is the unfrocked world’s fastest human. Ben ran a 9.79 in the 100 at Seoul. That’s leopard time. That’s more than a 10th of a second faster than anyone ever ran the Olympic 100 and 7/100ths of a second faster than anyone else ever ran it anywhere. On two legs.

But Ben Johnson is nobody’s “world’s fastest human.” Ben, you see, is the bad guy. In the movies, he would wear the black hat and have to be thrown off a building by Sylvester Stallone in the last reel.

But he had help. Like Joe Hardy in “Damn Yankees,” he had, so to speak, sold his soul to the devil: Steroids.

He cheated. He was like a fighter who sneaks brass knuckles into his gloves, a ballplayer with a corked bat, a jockey with a buzzer in his hand.

Johnson had gone to an island in the Caribbean for his own study of track and field voodoo, a product called stanozolol. It can make you run faster than having a lion chasing you.

Everyone knew what Ben Johnson was doing. World marks kept tumbling--a 9.83 at Rome in 1987, blistering heats. Ben’s body bulked up to a weightlifter’s configuration. His eyes were as red as a Chinese dragon’s and his calves looked like braided ropes. The great Carl Lewis wallowed hopelessly in his wake.

But when Ben got caught, the condemnation was cacophonous. Garbage was dumped on his lawn. The Canadian press thundered about the national disgrace he had brought to the Dominion. They gave his gold medal and his Olympic record to Carl Lewis. They recommended everything short of public flogging.

Except, instead of banning him for life, as the Canadian track federation might have been expected to do, it gave him two years. Sort of like giving an ax murderer community service. They approved his eligibility for the very next Olympic Games--these at Barcelona.

Ben had spent the intervening four years lecturing youth groups about the evils of drug use. He graciously told a German newspaper, “I cheated and knew I did. It was unfair. I’m glad I got caught.”

Some people held their noses. This was so out of character for the Ben Johnson everyone knew that the press believed the whole campaign was masterminded by a lawyer named Ed Futerman. When Ben spoke, you could see Ed Futerman’s lips move, they said.

Still, Ben reached these Olympics. He blew about $15 million in commercial endorsements, but he made these Games.

He was about as welcome as a tarantula in a bunch of bananas. You would have thought they had let Charlie Manson out.

When Carl Lewis didn’t make his country’s sprint team, the irony drew hisses from the anti-Johnsons.

But morality had one thing going for it: Ben Johnson, sans steroids, looked lighter, slower, weaker--and, yes, older at 30. His eyes were a nice clear white.

Still, he qualified for the Games. Then he ran second in one heat, fourth in another. The Olympians held their heads and groaned. Could a man who was the biggest villain in track history, in effect, serve two years and come back and reclaim the gold medal he had so callously disgraced.

The purists can rest easily. Justice has been served.

Ben Johnson stumbled at the start of his semifinal heat and hit the tape here Saturday night dead last. His 10.70 would barely have beaten Charlie Paddock’s 1920 mark. It wouldn’t have won the 1924 Olympics.

So, the world’s fastest human is not the bad boy of racing, the convicted embezzler of gold medals. It’s another Jamaican, this one turned Brit. Linford Christie has been sprinting since the Queen’s coronation, it seems. At 32, he’s the oldest man to win an Olympic 100. The previous oldest was Scotsman Allan Wells, who was 28 when he won at Moscow in 1980.

Linford is a kind of boring character, as matter-of-fact as a London bobby. He showed up for his news conference not wearing his gold medal--he had it stuck in his pocket. He was asked what his race strategy was--and he allowed as how it was to get there from here in the fastest possible time. Fair enough--but hardly grist for the London tabloids.

He was asked if he found himself looking around for Carl or Ben. One of the lessons to be learned from a 32-year-old victor is that the 31-year-old Lewis would not have been too old.

“I beat the Americans who beat Carl in the American trials,” Christie said. “And I beat Ben in the semis, didn’t I?”

He sure did. And for that the Olympic committee should add a few oak leaf clusters to his gold medal.