The ugliest story of the 22nd Olympics began in a bathroom in the basement of Seoul's track-and-field stadium. There, on Sept. 24, a smallish man with a fabulously muscled body and rage-filled eyes had to perform the indignity of champions. A master of explosive, almost inexplicable starts, he had already propelled his body down the 100-meter track faster than anyone before. Now his legs had ceased churning, he had relinquished the flag of his adopted Canada, which he had waved around the stadium, and the applause for the seemingly guileless sprinter who had dethroned the all-too-sleek Carl Lewis had died. Only a urine sample stood between Ben Johnson and a nightlong celebration for the happiest day of his 26 years.
It took just 9.79 sec. to run the 100, but it took Johnson nearly an hour and six cans of low-alcohol beer to fulfill his requirement. At the Doping Control Center of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, it took twelve hours more to assay the day's samples, to run them through the mazy innards of the lab's instruments. When the last sample left the hair-thin glass tubes of the gas chromatograph and the mass spectrometer, where all molecules have their fingerprints taken, just one positive result had turned up.
The result was reported to Prince Alexandre de Merode, the Belgian chief of the International Olympic Committee's Medical Commission, and he then checked to determine whose sample it was, for it was identified only by number. Frantic meetings ensued, and a second portion of the original sample, which had been stored in a locked refrigerator, was tested. The results were the same: Ben Johnson, the fastest man on earth, had cheated.
After Canadian officials were notified that he had tested positive for the anabolic steroid stanozolol, a substance that is supposed to help build lean muscle mass, they hustled the Jamaican-born sprinter out of Olympic Village, the cockpit of his glory, and checked him into a Seoul hotel under an ignominious pseudonym. There, at 3:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Carol Anne Letheren, chef de mission of the Canadian delegation, stripped Johnson of the medal he had already given to his mother. "He was in a state of shock," said Letheren. "He still did not comprehend the situation." A few hours later he was bound for New York, a runner who had stumbled into a future stained with disgrace.
Positive drug tests, stripped medals and two-year suspensions from play are the familiar furniture of contemporary sports competitions. In the 1983 Pan American Games, 19 athletes were disqualified and an additional dozen from just the U.S. track-and-field squad scuttled home before their events. In the 1984 Olympics eleven athletes, two of them medalists, were ejected from the Games for drug abuses. Before the Seoul Games began, several Americans, including '84 cycling gold medalist Steve Hegg and national swimming champion Angel Myers, were bounced for banned substances. But no disqualification has ever rocked the sporting world the way the Ben Johnson scandal has.