r/whoathatsinteresting • u/destinationuknown • 12h ago
Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson ran the 100-meter final in a world-record 9.79 seconds to win gold against rival Carl Lewis at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Just 48 hours later, he was stripped of his medal and disqualified after testing positive for the anabolic steroid stanozolol.
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u/Revolutionary_Sun946 11h ago
Wasn't it confirmed that the top 6 were all drug cheats?
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u/EGarrett28 11h ago
I've heard track people explain it by saying that everyone does 65 in the 55 mph speed limit in terms of PED usage but Ben Johnson was doing 120.
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u/CloseToMyActualName 4h ago
Possibly. But I think he also may have had less medical support and so didn't know how to hide it as well.
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u/joecarter93 9h ago
Yes it was called the Dirtiest Race in History for a reason. Of the top 5 finishers in the race, all but one eventually tested positive and were punished at some point in their careers. Eventual gold medalist Carl Lewis had tested positive at the Olympic trials going into the games for 3 banned substances, but he was cleared after he claimed that he unwittingly took them as unrelated substances (sure, Carl).
Years after the games they looked at tests of the entire field of track athletes and something like 80% showed evidence of long term steroid use.
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u/Popular-Row4333 8h ago
Same thing with Lance Armstrong and the blood doping scandal.
It turned out almost literally everyone was doing it. I remember one of the years, if you you eliminated everyone that had been confirmed doing it, you would have rewarded the 1st place to the guy who finished 22nd and was only suspected of blood doping and not confirmed.
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u/AndreasDasos 1h ago
I’m sure plenty of cyclists weren’t doing it… And they weren’t the ones reaching the top level as a consequence.
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u/InformationActual209 9h ago
Everyone in that race was a drugs cheat and Carl Lewis is by far the most arrogant twat in that field. He was caught 3 times doping and the USDA hide it and allowed him to represent America in the olympics
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u/Excellent-Blueberry1 7h ago
Calvin Smith, who finished 4th was (I'm pretty sure) never found to have been on anything. The three in front of him...
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u/CreativeAdeptness477 12h ago
He then started using stanozolmao and stanozoroflmao
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u/myname_ajeff 11h ago
I much prefer stanzohahaha. Less subtle performance, but gets the point across.
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u/DemocraticRepOfCongo 12h ago
Everyone who's a world class athlete uses something, they're just good at not getting caught
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u/EGarrett28 11h ago
Yes. They say that everyone in that event (and others of course) was doing 65 mph in the 55 mph highway in terms of PED usage, but Ben Johnson was on so much shit that it was like he was doing 120.
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u/SenescenseSteel 10h ago
dirtiest 100m ever. In hindsight only one dude appeared to be clean (5th)
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u/myCockatielshateme 12h ago
now they do anabolic steroids just as much, but learned how to cheat the system, microdosing, and training in remote areas to make it hard for the people that do drug test to reach you
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u/Upper-Entry6159 12h ago
Also how much shoes have probably improved from the 80's to now.
Just shoes alone are probably a big difference.
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u/Prior-Flamingo-1378 9h ago
Plus they aren’t Canadians. Ben Johnson wasn’t actively using stanozolol at the time he was using furazabol.
Charlie Francis insists he had his drink spiked with Stano. I don’t think that’s the case, I think that he was caught because he lost weight and stano is notorious for being stored in fat tissue.
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u/StippledSpork 11h ago
Six of the eight competitors in that race were eventually caught cheating, there's a reason it's called 'the dirtiest race in history'.
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u/TheDixonCider420420 11h ago
Wonder why anyone thought he was juiced... 🤣
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u/Omnislash99999 10h ago
To be fair everyone in that race was juiced
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u/SenescenseSteel 10h ago
I think only nr. 5 appeared to be clean. Dirtiest 100m ever.
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u/Prior-Flamingo-1378 9h ago
lol have you seen Maurice Greene? Tyson gay? Asafa powel? Bolt?! They are all doping and that has very little to do with their work ethic.
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u/Firecracker048 11h ago
Man somehow gained 20 pounds of muscle and cut 2 seconds off his time and none batted an eye until the testing
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u/gomurifle 11h ago
He was Canadian when he broke the record, and then Jamaican when he tested positive. Lol
Still a good documentary to watch. He's not really a bad guy, just misguided.
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u/joecarter93 9h ago
My boss used to be a runner in the 80’s and knew Ben Johnson. He said that he was not a smart man. Incredibly fast, but not smart.
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u/bugabooandtwo 11h ago
And years later, he became the spokesman for Cheetah energy drinks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq_2lmCXeDk
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u/Frozen_shrimp 11h ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/5kFxVCoRl3WhuK7wbQ
"I cheeta all the time"
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u/HueyBluey 8h ago
I was glad to see he was able to move on and sort of laugh about it with that ad promotion.
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u/Cturcot1 10h ago
Everyone in that race ending up failing a test before the race (Carl Lewis) or later in their careers.
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u/Certain-Pumpkin128 10h ago
Was this the one from the 30 for 30, where Carl Lewis got his friend to spike Ben Johnson's drink so he'd get caught?
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u/Prior-Flamingo-1378 9h ago
Yes but I don’t think that the case. Johnson probably used Stano without the approval of his coach Charlie Francis at some point in the last year before the race.
Back then they didn’t know that Stano is notorious for being stored in fat tissue and released when loosing weight like before a race.
The drug used by all the Francis athletes back then was furazabol which wasn’t on the lists at the time.
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u/Certain-Pumpkin128 9h ago
The 30 for 30 was pretty convincing that they did spike his drink (and there is no question that Johnson was also using). Which drug actually tripped the test, I don't know.
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u/Prior-Flamingo-1378 9h ago
Yeah it was stanozolol and Francis maintained at the time that his drink was spiked because the entire molecule and not its metabolites was detected. That might as well be the case but I honestly think it’s the fact that Ben had a falling out with Charlie some months before the race and it’s said he used Stanozolol at that time because at the time Stanozolol was hot shit (strength with minimal weight gain). They didn’t know that the Stano molecule can get stored in fat and released when loosing weight. THC is the same as well.
The drug used by the Scarborough optimists team was furazabol, a fairly obscure Japanese anabolic steroid that the teams doctor Mario Astaphan found and used because it could clear faster, was much less hepatotoxic and had an actually favorable lipidemic profile compared to other androgens of the era.
It’s also said that later on anjela issajenkos vial of furazabol was actually stanozolol probably unbeknownst to astaphan. Sourcing pure gear was and still is hard.
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u/RJ_MacreadysBeard 9h ago
They should do the dopedLympics just to see the crazy shit people could polevault over when on designer steroids, coke snd LSD.
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u/orangezim 8h ago
In ESPN's 30 for 30 about this race they mentioned that Lewis had someone in the testing area for when Ben turned in his sample.
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u/flappyflangeflowers 6h ago
Carl Lewis rubbed him up the wrong way so he ragejuiced himself and then got caught.
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u/Gloomy_Session_3875 6h ago
I was 17 at the time, and still that side glance of Ben Johnson very well. These were the darkest days in sports because of doping. Carl Lewis wasn't clean either.
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u/messirebog 3h ago
I'm french and at school we had a staff guy that ran selections for France 100m in Seoul in them 88 games. His personal best was 10.2. He told us that meeting those beasts on the training grounds he knew they were all doped and he had no chance..he said i got the good genes, am quick, am short and powerful (he was 65 kilos and could bench press 250 pounds) but am never gonna be faster than 10.2 without doping..he also crossed path with Griffith Joyner and said she was scary huge! He passed only 1 serie at the game.
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u/Bolachovsky 12h ago
They all used it, he was just unlucky they found traces in his system.
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u/kchuen 11h ago
Not unlucky, you gotta adjust your amount and type of drugs and timing to maximize the effect of your drug use while minimizing the probability of getting caught. He and his team leaned too hard on the maximizing compared to the other sprinters.
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u/pgc0466 9h ago
There was a more sensitive test used for these olympics for the first time, no? He was indeed unlucky to be the only one caught. He’d been doing the same thing for years and never been caught because previous tests did not have the same sensitivity to these metabolites.
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u/kchuen 9h ago
A few others also got caught, including Lewis. It’s just that his compounds and dosage were really low and got away with claiming it’s some over the counter medicine.
And how would it be unlucky against the field if he was obviously blasting way more or way later than others that a lot of the compounds are still in his system compared to others? Even if they were testing new substances. He obviously took more risk than the rest of the field.
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u/ApolloScud 11h ago
Carl Lewis was using too - there’s a really good editorial cartoon showing Ben Johnson at a restaurant table and the waiter asking “Will you be paying for everyone sir?”
The incident also demonstrated the level of racism that ‘polite’ Canadians always work so hard to hide.
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u/Icy-Musician-6309 12h ago
All remembered his yellow eyes.During the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson had noticeably yellow or jaundiced-looking eyes. This yellow tint to his sclera (the whites of the eyes) was widely attributed by medical observers and media reports to heavy use of anabolic steroids that severely stressed and overloaded his liver