September 24, 1988, a day on which I saw a man run faster than a man had ever run before.
It was a cool and brilliant day in Korea, with great shards of sunlight slanting low as the afternoon slipped toward evening. The participants in the men's 100-meter final bent into the blocks. It was a shivery, dead-level moment, as if time were running on a very thin and quavery wire. There was Carl Lewis, the defending Olympic champion, all springy and elegant, his eyes narrowed and clear, and there was Ben Johnson of Canada, thick and muscular, his eyes fierce and wide and yellow. Time stopped, the gun went off, and the race poured itself through the explosive sunlight.
I have never seen anyone run the way Ben Johnson ran that day. He was molten. He covered the distance in 9.79 seconds, and he had time at the end to look back at Lewis, whom he had beaten. After the race, Lewis intimated that Johnson had been using illegal drugs. Johnson denied it under persistent questioning. There were rumors like that all over the Olympics--of athletes drifting off to secret laboratories in the Caribbean or receiving their juice from their homegrown coaches.
That evening, I fell in with evil company in a place called Itaewon, which is a sort of Six Flags over the Seven Deadly Sins section of Seoul that caters to American servicemen stationed in the city. By my clock, I got fifteen minutes of sleep before the editor of my newspaper called to tell me that Ben Johnson had flunked a urinalysis--a steroid called stanozolol had been detected in his urine--and that Olympic officials were preparing to take his gold medal away. I felt rather terrible until I got to the main press center and saw a tableful of my Canadian colleagues, who collectively looked like a medieval depiction of the arrival of the black death.
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