Seoul 1988: The show would go on, but it would never be the same

Sports columnist

Wednesday 25 July 2012

Although falling just short of an intimation of the end of civilisation as we know it, the phone-call in the middle of the night was nevertheless shocking enough to induce temporary paralysis.

Ben Johnson wins 100m gold in Seoul, but would lose his title after a positive test that shook the world and tarnished the reputation of the Olympics. Picture: Getty

That the voice at the other end, in the early hours of Tuesday, April 27, 1988, in Seoul, sounded so bland, simply added a sinister quality to the message, which like evidence of a parasitic cynicism within, surfaces unfailingly at the first strains of the anthem at each succeeding Olympiad.

"Ben Johnson has been tested positive for drugs," it said. "Would you go out to the village and see if you can get any pictures of him or interviews with anybody."There was as much chance of achieving that as penetrating the minefield at Panmunjom and planting the Stars and Stripes in Pyongyang, as I knew the Canadian would have been whisked out of the country in a vanishing act commensurate with his crime. Nevertheless, the assembly of world media camped outside the village was as close you could get at a sporting jamboree to the sort of muted incomprehension which you associate with a pit-head crowd after word of a disaster in the bowels of the earth. For without anybody needing to articulate it, the mood was that the Games had just died. Morally, that is. The show would go on, of course. But it would never be the same for any of us there that morning. That the Blue Riband event had been traduced and that somebody thought they could get away with it seemed like the ultimate confirmation that the modern Games had been debased by commercialism and that Johnson, unlikely to have ever scored well in verbal reasoning tests, was both a culprit and a victim of that. Perhaps, admittedly, the feelings within our group might have eased off a little had it not been for subsequent events.For the following day another call intensified the gloom. It was from the late Ron Pickering, a massive figure in the athletics world, and whose antics of arm-wrestling with David Coleman, to see who could get command of the microphone at important moments during a race, was an Olympic event in its own right."If you like malt whisky come next door," he called from his hotel room. "You'll need a dram or two after what I have to tell you."For such a large man he was in a state of shock. "Linford's tested positive as well," he told me. "I'm the only one who knows that at the moment."The sorrows which we had to drown, and did, were magnified by the fact that only hours after the Johnson disclosure I had talked to Linford Christie, who, to me and others, launched into a tirade against the Canadian, telling me he should be hounded out of the business. And now his own dilemma. In a sense there was an undercurrent of suspicion about Christie, exacerbated by the fact that he could be aloof and arrogant and, at times, treated the media like they were filth. It was almost as if some of the press would have been gleeful at such an outcome. He was cleared of that charge. It was established that his test result may have been affected by his drinking the local ginseng tea. However, when the disciplinary committee voted only 11 to 10 in his favour after an accusation of him taking a banned substance after the 200 metres, and amid rumours that two members of that committee had been asleep when the vote had been taken, the sense of suspicion permeating almost every event was only heightened. You began to feel that gold medals should have been moulded in the shape of question marks. Twenty-four years later I have still to find the antidote for the feeling that there are still people on the make and that medical science is exploitable by anybody. Perhaps some of that feeling stems from the fact that the laurel wreath is now just an historic joke. The commercial culture is so intense that in Los Angeles, when I was fortunate enough to witness the opening ceremony, the vast American public watching at home did not see the entry of the torch because one of the sponsors had a commercial running at the same time. This is just one example of the dynamic Games culture of gain, profit and greed, which might incur temptation to transgress by individuals, thinking not merely of the gold medal, but, in the aftermath, the gold cache.There is also the feeling of transcendence when you are at a Games, the belief that the ordinary world simply does not exist. That could itself induce odd behaviour. It swamps you. It swells and swells and the thought of Tiger Woods spurning his driver yet again, this time in the vicinity of Copacabana when golf returns to the Games in four years' time, is like thinking that the Olympiad is heading right out of bounds. I thought exactly that when I had to cover the baseball in LA and then went to the Orange Bowl, part of a crowd of more than 100,000 watching Brazil playing France at football. And what was that biggest crowd of that Games doing? They were chattering like they were in a massive diner and devouring hot-dogs and betraying not the slightest interest in this strange game which had been imposed on them and which never should have been accepted back into the Olympic movement. Too big, too self-important, too far out of the reach of the man in the street and offering too many temptations to seek out artificial help in athletic performance. These are the thoughts I am left with after witnessing the corruption of Seoul and the lurid commerciality of LA. Its legacy will leave me marvelling at the spectacle in London, but at the same time wondering what is genuine and what is not.

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Seoul 1988: The show would go on, but it would never be the same

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