The dirtiest race in history: It's the glamour moment of the Games, but will we ever forget the stain of Seoul

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UPDATED:

22:48 GMT, 2 August 2012

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It remains arguably the greatest ever men’s 100 metres final, or perhaps the worst. It is certainly the most famous. And infamous.

On September 24, 1988, the world tuned in to see Ben Johnson face Carl Lewis in the 100m at the Seoul Olympics. Like this Sunday’s final in London, which should see Usain Bolt take on the upstart Yohan Blake, the excitement and hype had been building for months.

But there are two significant differences. Unlike Bolt and Blake, Johnson and Lewis were not training partners and friends. They despised each other — and one was a drugs cheat, while Bolt and Blake are clean.

‘In the old Westerns they had the guy in the white hat and the black hat,’ said Lewis, years later. ‘I felt like the clean guy going out and trying to win, I was the guy in the white hat, trying to beat this evil guy.’

The final was at 1.30pm Seoul time. As the eight warmed up, Johnson settled into his blocks, holding the set position, bursting briefly forward and almost immediately slowing down — a controlled explosion.

Three lanes to his left, Lewis walked up the track, turned and walked back, hands dangling by his hips. Johnson removed his tracksuit top to reveal a pale yellow T-shirt, then exchanged a high-five with his Canadian team-mate Desai Williams. But as he returned to his blocks a figure approached from behind. It was Lewis, offering his hand.

‘I don’t shake nobody’s hand,’ Johnson would tell me, still disgusted, 24 years later. ‘We’re not friends. I’m coming here to win. Carl is just trying to soften me up.’

As they lined up, Lewis shot Johnson the briefest of glances, then, almost in the same movement, scratched his ear.

There was a self-consciousness about Lewis, a self-containment about Johnson.

Between them, Linford Christie wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and Calvin Smith bounced up and down on the balls of his feet. Johnson inhaled deeply, shook out his arms and legs, and stared down the straight.

Pulling away: Ben Johnson begins to dominate the race

They’re called to the line. Johnson and Lewis hang back, but Lewis concedes and steps forward, followed by Johnson. An eerie hush descends: the kind of silence that can only be made by 70,000 people. It endures for the 18 seconds that it takes the runners to settle in the blocks.

In the set position, they hold for two very long seconds. And then it takes Johnson 0.132 seconds to react to the starting pistol.

‘When the gun go off, the race be over,’ Johnson liked to say. He starts as though leaping forward; then he lands like a cat, on his feet, fully erect, perfectly balanced. Lewis, in his first few strides, is bent at the hips and slightly off-balance as he picks up and drives forward.

Apart from the sight of his gold chain being tossed violently from chest to chin, Johnson is a picture of muscular grace. After 10 metres, he is six-hundredths of a second up on Lewis. Over the next 10 metres it expands to nine-hundredths. At 20, Lewis steals his first, furtive glance towards Johnson.

Between 30 and 40, Johnson gains another three-hundredths on Lewis, whose face is beginning to betray the first signs of panic. Johnson continues to accelerate between 40 and 60, and the gap to Lewis and the others expands to its maximum: now there is a gap of two metres between the leader and the pack. Johnson appears to be floating above the track, his feet dabbing the ground.

Finally, Lewis begins to emerge from the group, hunting down Johnson and almost imperceptibly drifting towards him. In the last 20 metres, to his coach Charlie Francis’s horror, Johnson relaxes a little, stops pumping his arms.

Now Lewis looks across at him again, for a third time, wide-eyed with anguish. He has fifteen- hundredths of a second to make up. It’s impossible. Five metres from the line, his arms relaxing by his body, Johnson finally looks at Lewis and, with his head cocked to the left, his right arm shoots straight up in the air, finger pointing decisively skyward. Take that.

Sideways glances: Carl Lewis attempts in vain to pull Johnson back

The clock stopped at 9.79. A new world record.

The verdict was immediate: it was the greatest race in history. But 52 hours later came the bombshell: Johnson had tested positive for an anabolic steroid. In the words of one senior IOC official, it ‘stopped the Olympics dead’.

Johnson and Lewis symbolised the new, professional era of a sport that had, until very recently, clung doggedly to its amateur roots. When Lewis emulated Jesse Owens by winning four gold medals at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, his manager predicted he would be ‘as big as Michael Jackson’. Johnson, meanwhile, drove a Porsche and a Ferrari. After Seoul, he stood to make over $10m — until the bombshell.

The two sprinters were polar opposites. Lewis was lean and graceful, perhaps the most stylish and admired runner in history, while Johnson was all about brute strength and power. If Lewis was Michael Jackson, Johnson was the Incredible Hulk.

Johnson emerged as a rival to the self-styled King of the Track after LA, first beating Lewis in Zurich in 1985. The balance tilted over the next two seasons as Johnson claimed Lewis’s crown, most dramatically by beating him at the World Championships in Rome in 1987 in a time, 9.83sec, nine-tenths of a second faster than the old world record. But in the build-up to Seoul the balance tilted back towards Lewis as Johnson struggled with a leg injury.

Then Johnson fell out with his coach, Francis, and disappeared to the Caribbean island of St Kitts, where he spent seven weeks on the beach. ‘I needed a rest,’ Johnson said. ‘I gained about 25 pounds but it was the first time I ever enjoyed myself. Just eating, drinking and having fun.’

Lewis, meanwhile, recaptured his best form. ‘All I know is that I’m running better than ever,’ said Lewis, ‘and (Johnson) isn’t running at all.’

It was all set up perfectly for Seoul. And then the impossible: the race didn’t live up to its hype; it surpassed it. After Johnson’s blistering sprint he carried on running and, in a re-run of the ritual before the start, Lewis chased him, hand out-stretched. Johnson half-turned, accepting his hand.

After his lap of honour, he was asked what he treasured most: the gold medal or the world record ‘The gold medal,’ he said, ‘because they can’t take it away from you.’
Only they could — and they did. When the news broke of his positive test it was, in its own way, even more dramatic than the race.

Now it is virtually impossible to separate the race from its aftermath. The images that followed, of Johnson being bundled out of Seoul and back to Toronto, and to headlines peppered with ‘Shame’, ‘Disgrace’ and, more directly, ‘You Bastard’, heightened the drama.

Johnson was no longer the fastest man in history, who, the evening of his race, donned a white suit and headed to the Seoul Hilton, where he signed his autograph for an ever-lengthening line of admirers: ‘Ben Johnson, fastest man in the world’. Now he was a sporting pariah, de-humanised, and described as ‘a monster created by drugs’.

Shaking up the world: Johnson celebrates a tainted victory

But Johnson’s vilification detracted from — perhaps even camouflaged — the wider story, and the bigger scandal. He was not the only cheat in Seoul. Six of the eight finalists from the men’s 100m would eventually be implicated in doping scandals. They included Lewis, who tested positive for stimulants at the US Olympic trials. He was exonerated — as were many others in the 1980s — by the US Olympic Committee.

There remains another mystery about what happened in Seoul. That Johnson cheated is not in question — he later admitted he had used steroids for seven years. But the fact that Johnson had been using drugs, and passing tests, for so many years raises another question. Why was he caught in Seoul

He maintains to this day that he was sabotaged; that a ‘mystery man’ sat beside him in the anti-doping room in Seoul; that this man was connected to the Lewis camp; and that he spiked his drink.

It sounds unlikely. And yet, when I interviewed Joe Douglas, Lewis’s old manager, he admitted he did indeed arrange for this mystery man to sit with Johnson in the anti-doping room. ‘We wanted to make sure that he didn’t take . . . any . . . masking agents,’ Douglas told me. ‘That everything was done legal and fair. That he was gonna be tested, etc.’

How did Douglas manage to plant this man in the supposedly secure anti-doping room ‘I played some games,’ he smiled.

I tracked down, and spoke to, the mystery man. He is Andre Jackson, a diamond executive in Angola who is also chairman of the African Diamond Council and African Diamond Producers Association. I invited him to set the record straight. He could state, once and for all, that Johnson’s allegation that he spiked his drink is untrue.

‘Of course I can say I didn’t,’ he replied. ‘But I can also say I did, too. What’s the benefit’