Mary Ormsby, "World's Fastest Man*: The Incredible Life of Ben Johnson" (SportsLit fan notes)

The author of an investigative character study of a sprinter and his country discusses the lack of due process Johnson received following his positive doping test during the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

World’s Fastest Man* author Mary Ormsby (Sutherland House, Toronto Star).

If not a requiem, it is a call for a reconsideration. Mary Ormsby has crafted the definitive Ben Johnson book, the one readers who did not desert him emotionally after his 1988 Olympics drug bust were aching to read.

Johnson is forever notorious as the culprit in the Olympics’ most enduring steroid scandal, the one that cost him the men’s 100-metre gold medal at the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul. Canada’s doping in those days was not as big as BALCO, or Russia’s state-run program that was exposed in the documentary Icarus. But Johnson was the first in Olympic track and field — and that created a notoriety.

In her first book, World’s Fastest Man*: The Incredible Life of Ben Johnson (Sutherland House, April 2024), Ormsby shows readers facts Canadian officials missed 3½ decades ago. It is a reminder about due process, something often forgotten in the court of public opinion.

“What Ben did, and whether he received due process — those are quite separate arguments,” Ormsby says in the latest episode of SportsLit. “I don’t think you should cheat, but as a Canadian and an athlete, Ben should have had more protections at the time.”

Around the 30th anniversary of Seoul, in 2018, Ormsby obtained the results of Johnson’s 1988 urine test for a Toronto Star Investigations piece. At that time, the International Olympic Committee did doping control internally, rather than entrusting the third-party World Anti-Doping Agency. Ormsby found sloppy paperwork, and had questions that Canada did not ask of the IOC.

“There were a lot of handwritten alterations and scratch-outs… that probably could have been questioned in Seoul if the Canadian team defending him had chosen to look at the evidence, which it didn’t,” says Ormsby, who had a three-decade career with The Star as a feature writer and editor before retiring in 2020.

“At the time in Seoul when it was so critical to defend him, what kind of due process was he actually afforded? So that got me more interested in it (revisiting the saga), and Ben started taking more interest in it. At the root of it all, I really felt there was an injustice, and I felt we could get closer to finding out the truth of what happened to Ben in Seoul.”

It’s a good reminder that multiple things can be true; if the authorities don’t respect the rules, then there are no rules. Athletes continue to be caught, of course.

Here are some follow-along fan notes that add context to the conversation with Ormsby about World’s Fastest Man*.

Intro

1:45 The phrase “the ultimate running machine” is sourced from a CBC-TV report in 1987 by Bob McKeown. The six-minute report is on YouTube and gives a glimpse of late 20th-century sports science. It never broaches doping, and I cannot second-guess a first-rank reporter thirty-seven years after the fact.

It is eerie that in the report, Charlie Francis throws out Pete Rose as an exemplar of an athlete who can “beat you with his mind.”

Two episodes ago, we interviewed Keith O’Brien about his Rose book.

2:00 In World’s Fastest Man*, Ormsby reports that Johnson once had a Ferrari Testarossa, a Corvette, and a Porsche at the apex of his wealth and fame.

3:45 Mary Ormsby thrived in volleyball for the Ohio State Buckeyes from 1977 till ’80, during the first decade post-Title IX. She was inducted into the university’s athletic hall of fame in 1995.

8:15 Relating my own experiences with The Scandal, the willingness of adults to go in on a mob mentality disappointed my 11-year-old Self. Later, came the Ben-wuz-duped defence. But Johnson had just as much agency about his doping as the next white weightlifter or shot putter. It flew in the face of common sense; even at age 11, I knew someone with a child-like intellect could not have (though I did not know the phrase) the executive function required of a big-time athlete. But people bought it.¹

9:00 The passage from Charles P. Pierce is from an essay, “Then the World Exploded,” published at Grantland in 2012.

12:00 That term, “tinsel teeth,” was coined by Will Eidam, writing in the Austin Chronicle in 2012.

Interview

15:00 Ormsby’s initial deep look into the evidence used to disqualify Ben Johnson was published by The Star on Sept. 28, 2018. It is entitled, “Ben Johnson’s 1988 Olympic drug test contains altered lab codes and hand-scrawled revisions. And almost no one has seen it until now.”

18:30 The second screening test was sprung on Canada by Manfred Donike (1933-95), whom the author describes as an “Olympic cyclist-turned-pioneering chemist.” Donike broke out hitherto unheard-of “endocrine profiling” that indicated “longtime steroid use.” Canada did not challenge the evidence, even though it was entitled to do so under basic discovery.²

21:40 Ormsby and I had our chat on April 24. That was two days after the Chinese swimming doping scandal hit the headlines. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) promptly “acknowledge(d) learning of positive drug tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers in June 2021 ahead of the Tokyo Games.”

Call me cynical, but the International Olympic Committee will never drop the hammer on China. Sure, it banned Russia for state-run doping and its war crime-ing. But the second the IOC comes down on China, the government of China will turn off the Olympics, and threaten the Olympic-sponsoring megacompanies’ business in China.

24:00 Some background learned through reading Ormsby’s book, and Johnson coach Charlie Francis’s Speed Trap. International track-and-field authorities did not ban steroids until 1975, but enforcement was lax, à la Major League Baseball before 2005. And out-of-competition testing was not established at the time of the 1988 Olympics, which enabled athletes and coaches to practise “clearance” to get the drugs out of their system.

The problem was the same as any con: it must be kept small, and you must not brag about it among outsiders. Instead, Johnson went to Dr. Jamie Astaphan, who did not know what he was giving to athletes — and yet bragged about it.

28:00 Again, you probably have to be middle-aged to know firsthand that Canada was once an Olympic underachiever in both iterations of the Games. At Montréal in 1976, the nation attained the dubious distinction of being the first host to fail to win a gold medal.³

A 14-year-old Johnson, less than three months out from relocating to Scarborough from Falmouth, Jamaica, did have a gold medal to celebrate. Jamaica’s Don Quarrie won the men’s 200 gold and added a 100-m silver.

31:00 Time for a reading. It felt key to have Ormsby remind us of when Johnson and Francis decided to start the sprinter on a dosage of steroids.

38:00 The Wayne Gretzky trade became official on Aug. 9, 1988, forty-five days before the Johnson-Carl Lewis showdown in Seoul. The race, and Johnson’s disqualification, occurred eight weeks before the 1988 Canadian federal election.

41:00 The Sports Illustrated long-form profile by Gary Smith, which Ormsby notes Lewis “hated,” was published in the magazine in the lead-up to LA84. It is entitled, “ ‘I Do What I Want To Do.’ ”

I read it after the interview. Only about 133 details that Smith included reported could have peeved Lewis.

Carl Lewis. (U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Museum.)

The rub, reading it for the first time in 2024, is that it seems like 1984-vintage Carl Lewis was Advanced. He was streets ahead⁴ on everything now normalized in the sportscape and North American life. For example, it mentions “request(s) for a photo session or interview must be prearranged through Lewis's manager.” All of that is now celebrated; athletes controlling their branding! Teams and leagues have created state-run media!

At one point in the S.I. piece, Smith calls Lewis “a true child of the age” who has “a remote-control big-screen TV, an electronic minitranslator he bought for traveling, USA Today on the kitchen counter. He hasn't read a novel since high school English class.” All of which would make him pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty normal in 2024.

However, my Ernestownness does not allow me to climb down the hill of loathing a celebrity just because a more talented writer humanized them. This is also referred to as The Jay Leno Rule.⁵

‘There was this guy in the room…’

42:30 This section covers Andre Jackson, the associate of Carl Lewis who was handing Johnson beers in the doping control facility in Seoul.

50:00 I had chill bumps when Ormsby described Gloria Johnson’s view that Ben was her “miracle child.”

57:00 This would never happen in today’s litigious society. Federal sports minister Jean Charest announced Johnson was banned from competing for Canada practically before the ink was dry on the newspapers.

1:03:00 I am still choked that Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty received only two seasons on HBO.

1:08:00 This is our seventh episode this season, and we have not had a hockey book yet. But maybe sometime in the middle of the summer.

1:10:00 Good endnote: “It’s stunning, and they deserve it,” Ormsby, an Ohio State volleyball alumna, says of the Caitlin Clark Effect and the welcomed boom for women’s sports.

Please put a WNBA team in Toronto like yesterday.⁶

Previously on SportsLit

Like it or not, Ben Johnson and Donovan Bailey are inextricably linked in the public consciousness. Is it fair to either sportsman? No!

Bailey told his life story in Undisputed: A Champion’s Life (Penguin Random House Canada, 2023). He discussed it on SportsLit last October.

Johnson hails from Scarborough, one of ‘The Six’ boroughs that comprise Toronto. Soccer great Dwayne De Rosario, who also hails from Scarborough, discussed his memoir on the show in 2022.

Johnson was extremely bonded to his mum, Gloria Johnson. Fellow Canadian athletics great Perdita Felicien also made that child-and-mother bond the thrust of her memoir A Mother’s Daughter: A Memoir of Struggle and Triumph (Doubleday, 2021). It focuses much more on how her mother, Catherine (Caity) Browne, struggled through racism, intimate partner abuse, and housing precarity to provide and protect her children.

And, of course, like Bailey and Johnson, Felicien has her own experience with repping Canada in international athletics and feeling unstinting pressure to win. It is always worth revisiting that when the Olympics are nigh.

That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind — especially to yourself.

Sept. 24, 1988-June 12, 1989; March 25-May 6, 2024
RR1 Napanee, Ont.; Hamilton, Ont.

1. Those adults did not include my parents, Dan and Kathie Sager. They both live in the real world, not media constructs.

2. Mary Ormsby, World’s Fastest Man*: The Life of Ben Johnson, pgs. 40-41.

3. And Canada failed to win golds in the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. Double-bronze alpinist Karen Percy won Canada’s only medals in non-judged sports. I only note this because I wanted to type “alpinist,” like I am some guy stringing for UPI from Grenoble in 1968. Live in the now, Sager!

4. If you have to ask, you are streets behind.

5. Late-night talk show hosts, ranked by how they came off in the Bill Carter book The War for Late Night: When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy (Viking, 2010).

1. Jimmy Kimmel: for playing all sides against each other;

2. Jay Leno: still a snake, but put some respect on the hustle and being a company man;

3. Conan O’Brien: my hero, but aloof and stubborn;

4. David Letterman: samesies, and just lucky that #MeToo did not get going for almost another decade;

5. Everyone who has never had a late-night talk show;

6. Jimmy Fallon.

Carter’s book had no in-depth depiction of Craig Ferguson and The Late Late Show, which seems like an unintentional meta-joke.

6. That happened. In the 2020 Olympics women’s football gold medal game, Sweden had a 2-1 edge after the fourth round of penalties. Sweden captain Caroline Seger (pronounced SAY-grr, not SEA-grr) would have clinched the gold with a successful conversion. But SAY-ger’s shot went over the bar (not off the crossbar as I remembered in the episode). Deanne Rose made her shot to keep Canada alive; Stephanie Labbé dove left to deny Jonna Andersson, and Julia Grosso buried the golden penalty.