SPORTS | Striving for excellence
16 April 2008
The “Greatest Foot Race” Goes to Dust
A drug scandal broke when the 1988 Olympics went to an emerging Asian city
James Mossop
James Mossop is a sports journalist with the London-based Telegraph who has covered the Olympic Games eight times and will also be on assignment at the Beijing Games. He received the British Press Award of Olympic sport writer of the year after his coverage of the 1992 Games in Barcelona.
The 1988 Games in Seoul stand out in his memory because of the way they changed the nature of sports reporting and Olympic competition.
I remember the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul as my arrival at a cultural and technological crossroads.
The Games began with a superbly choreographed opening ceremony that surpassed anything that had gone before. The main stadium and its architectural delights were hugely impressive, with a sweeping, curved roof and an array of innovations in light and information display. All the electronics in the venues, the timing and measuring devices, were ultra-modern, a demonstration of South Korea’s increasing sophistication and its status as a booming, cutting-edge economy.
More mundane matters affected those whose job it was to communicate events in the South Korean capital to media outlets elsewhere. Precious few of the Western television, radio, and written media personnel spoke the language.
That made traveling anywhere by taxi a novel experience. The vehicles were small, and the drivers all wore white gloves and insisted on grinning at you rather than looking at the road ahead.
It was especially unnerving because Korean drivers were not always aware of lane discipline to which we are accustomed in Britain. I was constantly bracing myself against impending collision. Taxi drivers in Seoul -- and possibly other parts of the country -- also had a habit of pulling up at bus stops and offering people lifts along the way to my intended destination.
The technological challenge came with the lap-top computer, the first time many of us had ever covered such an event with such a machine. Some of us had been given no more than a half an hour’s instruction on the basic Tandy computer and packed off to the Games, sensing that pencil and paper were no longer the tools of our trade.
Deep into the night in the Media Village, you could hear shouts of frustration from people attempting to file their stories to editors back home, as their computers refused to cooperate.
In the end, sections of the British press contingent threw their lap-tops back into the suitcase and reverted to the time-worn method of dictating copy to their offices. Given the time difference between Korea and Britain, this invariably meant more nocturnal work.
With events running from morning until late at night, most of the media fed themselves during the day from the pot noodle stall behind the media stand. Some of us remember the Seoul events as the “pot noodle Games.”
Despite the dining, the language, and the technological challenges, the greatest ruckus in the rooms and corridors of the media village came as people were awakened by the news, broken by the French news agency AFP, that Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson had failed a drug test.
The scramble for instant information was intense. Members of the International Olympic Committee were roused from their beds. Phone lines started to jam and the lap-tops that could have aided communication remained useless.
Two days earlier, everyone had written reams about the greatest foot race of them all. Johnson had been portrayed as a stunningly impressive athlete over the 39 strides that took him from the pistol to the line and the 100-meter gold medal. All that was now dust.
The hero had become a cheat who protested his innocence, but everyone knew he was guilty. Misconduct had tainted the Olympic Games before, of course. In 1976, a Russian fencer in Montreal was found to have a wired-up weapon bringing him an illicit haul of points. Looking back now, it is easy to regard Johnson’s malpractice as a new arena for cheating in sport and the overture to further drug stories to come.
Johnson had been caught because new technology in the drug-testing had advanced the science of detection. Since Johnson’s disgrace, the prevalence of drug use has grown at the same time technological advances in detection attempt to keep pace. The shamed list includes many famous, now infamous, names -- U.S. runner Marion Jones, U.S. sprinter Kelli White, and English sprinter Dwain Chambers. The Greek sprinters Kostas Kenteris and Katerina Thanou brought shame to their country when they avoided testing in Athens in 2004 and withdrew from competition mysteriously as the Games were about to start.
Twenty-four violations were discovered across all disciplines during the 2004 Athens Olympics, and no doubt others will try to beat the system in the future. Still the testing posse seems to be getting closer to keeping performance-enhancing drugs out of the Olympic Games.
