By Bryan Burwell, St. Louis Post-Dispatch –
Sometimes when you’re in the midst of a tumultuous moment, it’s difficult to peer outside the storm and consider what a particular event will mean in the long run. This was definitely not one of those moments.
A little more than 24 years ago, Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson came blasting down the red-hued artificial track surface at the Seoul Olympics, muscles rippling, eyes blazing in contemptuous anger, the scoreboard clock announcing the ungodly world record time of 9.79 seconds in the men’s 100-meter finals.
There wasn’t a soul in the sold-out stadium who didn’t know how big and bad this all was. Big and bad. That’s what Johnson was. He destroyed the Olympic 100-meter field by nearly two yards, and the collective gasp of 70,000 witnesses inside the Olympic stadium greeted the result with equal parts breathless awe and uneasy skepticism.
It was a seismic event that would hurtle track and field into a lengthy decline to the fringes of relevance among the American sporting public. It was also the landmark event that shoved American sports into an ugly, uncomfortable darkness — more than two decades worth of raised eyebrows and jaundiced views about every bit of greatness we would see.
Now we’re less than a week away from the start of another Olympics. In these London Games, the marquee stars are basketball players and swimmers, gymnasts and soccer players. That simple fact reminds us just how long it’s taken for track and field — once among the premier sports in American culture — to recover from the damage that Ben Johnson inflicted on it.
Three days after his otherworldly triumph, Johnson was run out of Seoul in shame. He had tested positive for a banned steroid, stripped of his Olympic title and his world record, and banned from his sport.
“What Ben did changed everything,” said Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the most decorated American woman Olympic track and field star and winner of two gold medals in Seoul. “You have to remember, the Olympic Games have always been the pinnacle for us as so-called amateur athletes. Particularly in track and field, this was our time in the spotlight.
“But for it to happen in the first (track and field) finals of the Olympics, in the most glamorous event of track and field — the men’s 100-meters — that’s what sent it all downhill from there. After what Ben did, it put speculation on everyone. No matter who you were, no matter how hard you trained or what you did to convince people otherwise, there was this cloud hanging over our sport that everyone was using drugs. From that day in Seoul, it was always there and put a damper on everything we did.”
Joyner-Kersee, the pride of East St. Louis, earned a healthy living in the sport. She was a golden girl for American track and field in the 1980s and ‘90s, winning three golds, one silver and two bronze medals in four Olympic games. But it wasn’t without cost.
In the summer of 1988, the Olympic world still was in a much different place, riding precariously on the cusp of naive innocence and cold reality. Casual American sports fans had no idea that their concept of the purity of amateur sports — particularly when it came to track and field, the headline event of every Olympic games — was about to be altered in ways they never imagined.
On Sept. 24, Johnson won his gold medal. But two nights later, an unsettling buzz was spreading across the Olympic Village that the International Olympic Committee would be holding a news conference the following morning to announce that a major star of the Games had tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs and would be expelled.
The athletes heard the same rumors the reporters had, but no one knew who is was.
“But the thing was, we all knew that whoever it was that was caught already had to know they’d been busted,” Joyner-Kersee said. “If they caught you, you’d have already been notified.”
As it turned out, Joyner-Kersee was right. The morning of Sept. 26th, Johnson was notified by an IOC drug testing official that his “A” sample had come back positive.
By that afternoon, Johnson and the Canadian delegation were told that his “B” sample came back with the same result.
By the time the rumors were spreading that someone had been busted, Johnson was advised by Canadian officials to get out of town. He was booked on a flight to New York about the same time reporters flocked to the main press center for the IOC briefing.
Everything in our sports world had changed. All that we readily accepted as fact was now colored with skepticism.
And even as she kept winning Olympic medals and world titles, and even as she passed every drug test administered to her in and out of competition, Joyner-Kersee said it was never enough to remove her from the collateral damage of Johnson’s mess.
“Oh yeah, you deal with whispers,” she said. “After (Seoul), that whole cloud was there for a very long time. The innuendo was there on a lot of people, and that wasn’t fair. Hard work didn’t matter. Winning didn’t matter. Breaking records didn’t matter. The more successful you were, the more accusations there were.
“But I think now it’s finally changed,” Joyner-Kersee said. “For whatever reason, people felt it was good for the sport that it had to go through this. We went through it and cleaned things up. But in the process, it stained our sport because anyone who did well was always covered in question marks, But in other sports people could do extraordinary things and no one questioned their efforts.
“I feel like it was never a time where they would give the athletes in our sport credit for their hard work and what they accomplished.”
Eventually, the questions and second doubts would sweep through every American sport, too. No one was immune from suspicion.
Institutions and heroes were toppled. Records were doubted. Raised eyebrows and jaundiced views became standard fare for any sports fan with a hint of reasonable intelligence.
It took two decades of scandals, congressional and federal investigations, well-publicized suspensions and countless tearful admissions and bogus denials from numerous embarrassed superstars, but finally it seems like we’re on the other side of the storm.
But can it ever go back to the way it was? Can we sit in front of our TV sets when the London Games begin and finally be sure that everything we’re seeing now is on the up and up?
“No one was appreciating the fact that some of our greatest (track and field) stars were doing amazing things and they weren’t doing it like a one-and-done thing,” Joyner-Kersee said. “To me, that’s how you judge their validity. It’s through persistence. It’s with consistency. Who’s doing it over a long period of time? That was my whole thing when I was competing. I wanted to keep on doing it at the same high level for as long as I could. Over time, you can prove what you’re doing is legit.”