How Russia has restored the Golden Age of Drugs Cheats – Kevan Christie

Where Ben Johnson led, Russia, Maradona and a son of Libyan dictator Gaddafi, among others, followed, writes Kevan Christie.

Ben Johnson stunned a world-class field of sprinters, including Carl Lewis and Linford Christie, with a performance at the 1986 Seoul Olympics that raised eyebrows even before his positive drugs test

Ready, steady... bananas! I see our close friends the Russians have been slapped with a four-year ban from international sports events this week after a series of false starts.

The good folks at the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) have finally decided it’s time to act after 40-odd years of sustained cheating and a state-sponsored drug operation that would shame Mexican drug lord El Chapo.

The ruling means that Russia’s flag, name and anthem will not appear at the Tokyo Games and the country could also be stripped of hosting world championships or Olympic sports.

Bizarrely, for football’s 2022 World Cup, Wada said the Russian team will play under its name in qualifying.

However, if the team then qualifies for Qatar, the name will have to be changed to something neutral that would probably not include the word “Russia”.

Early contenders for a new moniker include – Dynamo Mince, The Moscow Globetrotters and the Tsar’s XI. I’ve always had my doubts about Russian sport, dear reader, having first being alerted to foul play during a late-night screening of Rocky IV at the ABC cinema on Lothian Road in Edinburgh.

Rocky’s opponent, the Russian Ivan Drago, can be clearly seen receiving steroid injections while Balboa, who is grieving for his dead rival Apollo Creed, relies on more traditional training methods, like vandalising trees with an axe in the snow.

The upshot of the film sees Rocky put Drago on his arse in front of Brigitte Nielsen and Mikhail Gorbachev who doesn’t look best pleased but, as we all know, soon comes to see the error of his ways and decides to end communism.

Lance, Marion and Tim

Of course, America doesn’t have drug cheats, well they don’t if you discount cycling sweetheart Lance Armstrong, five-time Olympic medalist and world champion sprinter Justin Gatlin and fellow athletes Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery, to name but a few.

All this talk of the old Bob Hope has me hankering for the Golden Age of drug cheats, a gentler time when you could be guaranteed that nine out of the ten sprinters in any Olympic final would be ‘oot their face’.

Step forward onto the podium Benjamin Sinclair Johnson, the daddy of all drug cheats and – for the time it takes a sprinter to pee in a cup – 100-metre Olympic champion and two-time world record holder.

Ben Johnson was higher than the sun that shone on September 24, 1988, at the 100 metres final at the Olympics in Seoul.

The Canadian sprinter left a world-class field including the legendary Carl Lewis for dead while storming to gold and lowering his own world record to 9.79 seconds.

Johnson would later remark that he would have been even faster had he not raised his hand in the air just before he hit the tape. “Are you on drugs mate?”

However Johnson’s urine sample contained the steroid stanozolol and he was disqualified three days later. He also admitted having used steroids when he ran his 1987 world record which was rescinded.

Hired by Libyan dictator

Ben later said he used doping in order to remain on an equal footing with the other top athletes he competed against and I suppose there is a kind of perverse logic to that argument.

Johnson would later go on to act as a personal trainer for like-minded individual Diego Maradona and once ran against a thoroughbred race horse, a harness racing horse and a stock car in a charity event.

He would finish third, although no records exist of the horses or indeed the stock car being drugs tested at the time.

Johnson made the headlines again in 1999 when it was revealed that he had been hired by cuddly Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to act as a fitness coach for his son, Al-Saadi Gaddafi who wanted to join an Italian football club.

The young Gaddafi’s dream came true when he joined Serie A team Perugia where he employed Maradona to work alongside Johnson as his ‘technical consultant’.

However the dream turned sour after he made only one fleeting appearance as a substitute before surprisingly failing a drug test.

A subsequent article in la Repubblica said of the young Gaddafi that “even at twice his current speed he would still be twice as slow as slowness itself”.

‘Seoul to Soul’

But Johnson managed to escape that shadowy episode and would go on to release his autobiography, the gloriously titled Seoul to Soul in 2010 that to my knowledge doesn’t include a testimonial from Jazzie B of ‘Back to Life’ music fame.

Another scandal from a bygone era concerned the swimmer Michelle Smith de Bruin, from that hotbed of swimming talent Ireland, who won three gold medals and a bronze at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta making her the country’s most decorated Olympian.

Smith, who married her Dutch coach Erik de Bruin, a former Dutch discus thrower and shot putter, never tested positive for any banned substances and has always denied using them.

However, she was banned in 1998 by the Fina swimming authorities for four years for tampering with her urine sample using alcohol – the famous ‘Whisky in the Jar’ case.

Smith’s success in Atlanta was a dramatic improvement on her 1992 performance and it could be that Erik had her doing things like diving for a black rubber brick in her jim-jams or seeing how long she could hold her breath for in the bath – but whatever they were doing it worked.

Erik, for his sins, was banned for four years around the time he started training with Michelle, having failed a drugs test and then in 2003 was convicted for shoplifting vitamin tablets, cod liver oil capsules and a packet of chicken breasts from a supermarket in Kilkenny.

So, the Russians have been captured and a little piece of Cold War nostalgia has died with their ban but let’s spare a thought for the victims in all of this folks – the hundreds of clean athletes who lost out to these cheating bar stewards.