Athletics: Ready, set ... start explaining

When a man who has become a public figure falls spectacularly from grace, there are only two ways to react.

One is to forgive him because of the towering nature of his achievements. The other is to dismiss him as a boundless hypocrite who deserves everything he gets.

In Carl Lewis' case, it is hard not to feel tugged in both directions.

To watch Lewis sprinting or long-jumping in his heyday, during the 1980s, was to behold extraordinary physical beauty.

His tall, loping frame had a grace and an awesome power that nobody came close to matching. Whatever it was that propelled him to his nine Olympic gold medals, it was never less than a pleasure to behold.

But off the track he came across as cocky, self-righteous, uncharitable towards his fellow-athletes and interested only in his own success.

He didn't just think he was the heir to Jesse Owens, the hero of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, whom he had known from early childhood. He thought he was better than Owens, and didn't hesitate to say so.

He didn't just set out to win, he wanted to be seen as the greatest athlete of all time.

He autographed Bibles as though he was himself imbued with some kind of divine power. And the way that he spoke out so insistently against drug use on the international athletic circuit always smacked of more than straightforward campaigning. Often, he was downright insufferable.

Now he appears to have received his come-uppance.

Former US Olympic Committee anti-doping chief Wade Exum has claimed that Lewis is an illicit drug-user. Exum also named more than 100 other athletes.

He said that in the summer of 1988, a few weeks before Lewis faced Ben Johnson in the race of his life, the 100m final at the Seoul Olympics, Lewis tested positive three times in a row for three banned substances - pseudoephedrine, ephedrine and phenylpropanolamine, which are among the most common illegal stimulants.

Lewis has this week admitted failing the tests after taking a herbal supplement which he says gave him no advantage.

The USOC kept the failure quiet, and told Lewis in a confidential letter that it regarded the tests as grounds for a warning, not a suspension.

Not exactly in keeping with the International Olympic Committee's policy of zero tolerance, but Lewis was the top track athlete in the world, and it would have been a terrible blow to America to lose him.

So the secret remained buried for the best part of 15 years.

It is hard to say when exactly Lewis sowed the seeds of his own downfall.

Perhaps it was 1987, the year before the Seoul Games, when he started criticising his fellow athletes about their drug-taking habits.

Perhaps it was an interview he gave to Britain's ITV around that time, when he said that he was willing to "pay a price" in the form of disapproval from his colleagues to preach the anti-drug message.

He commented later: "We couldn't afford to ignore the message because it had been buried too long. We needed to take a stand."

Or perhaps it was those fateful few seconds of the 100m final in South Korea, when Johnson crossed the line more than a tenth of a second ahead of Lewis, only to be disqualified three days later after the steroid stanozolol was found in his system.

Lewis was gracious at the time about coming second, and he was eventually awarded Johnson's gold medal anyway.

But in his autobiography, Inside Track, published in 1990, he described his less than charitable thoughts as he glowered at his rival: "I couldn't stop thinking about those yellow eyes. 'That bastard did it again', I said to myself."

Translation: cheats don't deserve to win, and the gold medal was all mine from the outset.

After Seoul, Lewis' holier-than-thou attitude seemed to have no limits.

In 1989, dubbed in his autobiography "the year of the steroid", he dropped less than subtle hints that he believed Florence Griffith Joyner to be a drug user - an accusation he was forced to retract under the threat of legal action.

(For all the rumours that followed her to her early death and beyond, Flo-Jo's name does not appear on Wade Exum's list of 114 drug offenders. Neither does that of her sister-in-law, Olympic champion heptathlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee.)

Lewis's humiliation, when it came, was no hundred-yard dash.

It started with Exum's attempt to gain revenge on the USOC for what he deemed to be shoddy treatment. First, he sued it for racial discrimination, figuring it might prefer to pay him off than face the negative publicity. But he figured wrong, and the courts sided with the USOC, throwing out his suit this month.

That left him with one bomb still to detonate - the list of athletes alleged to have tested positive for banned substances but who were shielded from public view and allowed to compete.

Lewis was the most prominent of a long roster of names covering 1988 to 2000.

Others were sprinters Joe DeLoach (who won the 200m gold medal at Seoul) and Floyd Heard, hurdler Andre Phillips, Olympic tennis champion Mary Jo Fernandez, eight members of the US Soccer Federation and 11 Olympic skiers.

The 100m final at Seoul now looks to have deserved its label as the "dirtiest race in history".

By bizarre coincidence, the main official figure who might have carried the can for this fiasco, USOC president Robert Helmick, who oversaw the Seoul Olympics, suffered a stroke on April 9 and died the morning that Exum went public with his information.

Nobody could have better embodied the corruption of the Olympic ideal than Helmick.

He was forced to quit the USOC presidency in disgrace in 1991 after allegations that he had accepted nearly $300,000, "trafficking on his Olympic positions", a polite circumlocution for taking bribes.

Then at the beginning of this week, Lewis crashed his new Maserati on a Los Angeles freeway in the dead of night, and was arrested on suspicion of drink-driving.

A friend had to bail him out of the "drunk tank" at the 77th Street police station, one of the roughest precincts in Los Angeles.

This was not the behaviour of the squeaky-clean, all-American track and field hero.

Several sporting myths have been exploded with Lewis's reputation in the past few days.

The first is the wishful thinking that drugs are something that foreign athletes do, not Americans.

The second is the (perhaps equally fanciful) idea that there is anything salvageable from the mess of modern Olympic glad-handing and public-image manipulation. As Charlie Francis, Ben Johnson's coach, memorably said: "If anyone is clean, it's going to be the losers."

Another casualty less significant in the grand scheme of things, but still telling in the context of the sports world's particular cult of celebrity, has been the public image that Lewis has cultivated for himself over the past 20 years.

Since the first criticisms of him surfaced in the media around the time of the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, he has taken care to rebut every rumour and show himself in the most positive possible light.

No, I'm not gay, he insisted (a rumour initially spread by an ex-girlfriend).

No, I don't think I'm better than everyone else.

No, I'm not in this just to hit up my sponsors for as much as I can fleece them.

And no, I don't do drugs.

What comes across in his autobiography and in the various self-inflicted embarrassments that only take away from his status as a great athlete is a tremendous underlying insecurity, an ego in constant search of self-justification and fear of humiliation.

One of the Inside Track chapters is called "Carl Bashing", devoted to denigrating those who have denigrated him.

One senses that there is going to be a lot more of this as the doping scandal unfolds.

And although he admitted that he could easily have been suspended under anti-doping rules that he himself has pushed for over the years, he also suggests that much has changed between 1988 and 2003.

"The climate was different," he said.

Could this be the same Carl Lewis who has always preached zero tolerance of drugs in sports? Sounds like he has a whole lot more explaining to do.

- INDEPENDENT


Race of shame:

1988 Olympic 100m

1st Ben Johnson (Canada)

Tested positive to anabolic steroids after the race. Stripped of his medal and banned for two years, then for life in 1993.

2nd Carl Lewis (US)

It is alleged that he should have been serving a two-year ban after testing positive for stimulants at the US Olympic trials two months earlier.

3rd Linford Christie (UK)

Tested positive for pseudoephedrine in Seoul but cleared by the IOC disciplinary committee who accepted his explanation that it came from ginseng tea. Banned for two years in 2000.

4th Dennis Mitchell (US)

Tested positive for high levels of testosterone in 1999. Banned for two years. Claimed that the result was because he had had sex and drunk six beers.

5th Desai Williams (Canada)

Implicated in the 1989 Dublin inquiry into use of banned drugs by Canadian athletes.