Ben Johnson, the Ultimate Symbol for Doping

Would a drug cheat like Ben Johnson who got caught, is lesser of an athlete and his contribution to sports nullified compared to other great athletes, who was a suspect in drugs involvement but never caught but adored by millions.

Where is the justice & logic in that. Well I read an article that foray into drugs in sports, the celebrity status of athletes and the fine line between morality. Read on

By Simon Barnes

These days we admire Daley Thompson, who boasted that he trained twice on Christmas Day. We relish his sacrifice of social and family life after all, he made the sacrifice for us, so we could make him a hero. We salute the great coaches. We do not begrudge Paula her millions.

We relish our heroes and we relish their sacrifices. Steve Redgrave swapped all frivolity and fun for icy mornings on the river, so we could roar him home for his fifth gold medal. But Johnson risked his liver and his virility and his psychological health for us, and we don’t relish that at all.

And what about Flo-Jo? She sacrificed her life for us. Well, no one has ever proved that Florence Griffith Joyner did take drugs, but massive circumstantial evidence points that way. She made the ultimate sacrifice and we don’t admire it at all. We find it troubling, frightening. We like to make sure that everyone associated with drugs is a Johnsonesque demon.

Before Johnson, the world governing bodies of the at-risk sports — track and field, swimming, weightlifting, rowing, cycling — concentrated their attentions on the image of the sport. Prevaricate, keep things going from day to day, and if it looks all right, there is nothing to worry about.

Johnson blew that sky-high. With the Johnson bust and the subsequent Dublin inquiry, there was no escaping the fact that drug-taking went on at the highest level. The appearance of cleanliness, the talk about small minorities, simply wouldn’t wash any more.

And so, instead of looking at the image of the sport, the administrators had to turn to the substance. Instead of a sport that looked clean, they had no option but to try to create a sport that was clean. Track and field and swimming are cleaner now than they have been for three decades and as a result they have a reputation for institutionalized corruption from top to bottom. That’s because cheats now tend to get caught.

All the at-risk sports provide a great spectacle and we still watch them. But we do so with cynicism. No drugs bust in track and field would surprise us. Not any more; not anyone — no, not even her. We have been conditioned to that level of cynicism: oh, yeah, someone spiked my drink at a party, never heard that one before.

The largely successful attempt to clean up sport has created a climate in which no one believes that sport is clean. Out-of-competition drug-testing has changed the face of sport in the countries where it is properly performed and reported. The most famous victim was Michelle Smith, the Irish swimmer, who offered a urine sample mixed with whiskey (just soda in mine, Michelle). She was banned for tampering with the sample.

There are two unpleasant side-effects from the War On Drugs. The first has been a proliferation of positive tests for negligible amounts of substances that give negligible help. The most pathetic is Andreea Raducan, the 16-year-old Romania gymnast, who was stripped of a gold medal after testing positive for a cold cure prescribed for her by the incompetent team doctor.

Another was Alain Baxter, the Great Britain skier, who lost his unexpected bronze medal at Salt Lake City by testing positive for a nose-clearer that he had bought over the counter. Bloody fool and all that, but isn’t there just a spot of overreaction in all this? The second side-effect is the smug demonisation of drugs and drug-takers. Johnson was the perfect villain: muscle-popping, sullen-eyed, stammering, Canadian (would the benefit of the doubt gone the other way had be been American?) and, of course, black. Johnson is the world’s image of what a cheat should be.

Thus Johnson in general and sport in particular have become a convenient receptacle for the world’s terror of drugs. A drug, of course, can be defined as a mood-altering substance that other people take. By that definition, alcohol is not a drug, never mind that it is a depressant, a killer, a creator of killers, a life destroyer and the prime cause of accidents.

Our social lives are built around drugs. Our drugs of choice ”but we don’t call them that” are alcohol and caffeine. The Stimulant Morning is a staple of suburban life and so is the Cheese and Depressant party, where you can raise a glass and tut-tut over the latest sporting villain who got done for drugs. What drives a man to do such a thing? I wouldn’t do that in a million years. Another glass? Why not? Logic, please.

And if we feel off-colour, we can walk into a chemist’s and buy stuff that gets you banned from sport. We have a cold, but the athlete is a cheat. Logic, please.

Carl Lewis said that we will never have drugs-free sport until we have a drugs-free society. But mood-altering substances have been part of society since hunting and gathering began and it was found that certain fungi and leaves and rotten fruit gave their gatherers a buzz. The only question is, which buzz? Islamic cultures demonise alcohol; Western society demonises hashish. Logic, please.

But where drugs are concerned, there is no logic. Drugs have to be seen as universally terrible things. Alice read Drink Me and shrank; Dr Jekyll drank the potion and became Mr Hyde; the mugwump ran amok in The Naked Lunch, Hunter Thompson had the horrors in Las Vegas — and the ultimate symbol of this fear and loathing of drugs is the figure of Ben Johnson.

Sport in general and Johnson in particular have become a vehicle for our self-righteousness about the issue of drugs. Drugs is not what we do, it’s what people such as Johnson do. And, it is believed, they deserve everything that happens to them. And, by the same token, it proves that what we do is All Right.

I am deeply uneasy about all this. I am glad that so much of sport is cleaned up, glad that the state doping programme of East Germany has been dismantled, glad that Flo-Jo’s 15-year-old world records still stand. But practising athletes must pay the price for my gladness. Clean sport cannot continue without the threat of the midnight knock on the door, and no one can set a personal best without becoming the latest suspect.

Sport is more important than ever; television and newspapers and advertisers and sponsors see to that. There are greater rewards than before and success in sport is valued more highly than ever. It is inevitable that everyone will push the line as far as it will go; not to cheat, just to compete. The arms race between athletes and testers continues. Besides, when is it a nutritional supplement and when is it a drug? Answer: when it shows up on a test.

Where’s the morality of that? Sport has tried to draw a line and hold to it. And in doing so, it has punished the foolish and the innocent and made track and field and swimming bywords for drug-fueled corruption. When drug-taking was rampant, the sport looked clean; now the drug-takers get caught and the sport looks utterly defiled. I’d like to think that this was a period of transition from drugged sport to clean sport. But it is an uncomfortable time to live through.