In July 1986, we had scheduled a tune-up meet for about half of our national team in Birmingham. The rest of the team, which totalled well over a hundred people, planned to travel on ahead to Edinburgh and settle in early for the Commonwealth Games, to begin a week later. We were about to depart from London when Gerard Mach got the bad news: the Commonwealth Games Association of Canada would not pay to house any of our athletes before the meet officially began, which meant we had about 50 extra people to put up in Birmingham. At a rest stop en route, I found Gerard brooding in the back of the bus. I asked him if he'd called Andy Norman, the British Amateur Athletic Association (AAA) official in charge of the meet, about our need for additional lodgings.
He looked at me dolefully. "I can't call Andy," he said. "I haven't got a cent, we've spent it all-I don't have enough for lunch today. What if Andy turns us away-what if he says that he only wants five or six stars? We're just going to land on his doorstep and pray that he takes us all in."
At that point I grew even more worried than Gerard. I had first encountered Andy Norman seven years before, at the tri-meet in
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Gateshead with Britain and Kenya. My job at that time was to assist our team's head coach, John Redmond, an amiable high school principal and a Catholic priest. (To avoid making people uncomfortable, Father John rarely wore a clerical collar.) On the night before our competition, Norman came steaming toward us in the hotel lobby. With his dishevelled hair, a pot belly that peeked through an unbuttoned shirt, and lowslung pants barely clinging to his hips, he looked like a cross between Andy Capp and Long John Silver, with an attitude to match.
"All right, who's in charge of this bloody team here?" he snapped. "I am," said Father John.
"And what's your name then?" Norman barked. "John Redmond," my head coach replied.
"Then tell me, John, where are your goddamned throwers? What kind of bloody meet do you think this is?" Nobody asked me, but I knew what the problem was: Two of Canada's top throwers had ducked the meet because they knew it would be tested, and they wanted to stay on their steroids as close as possible to the Pan Am Games eight weeks later. I stood beside Father John, cringing.
"Who the hell are my people supposed to throw against?" Norman demanded. "I don't know," Father John said mildly.
"Well," Norman said, "you get on the bloody phone and tell those bastards back at the CTFA to get some throwers out here!" After expounding at length upon the parentage of said CTFA officials, he stormed off.
For years afterwards I considered Norman a man to be avoided, until his name came up in a conversation I had with Hasely Crawford, the Trinidadian who had won the 100 metres at the 1976 Olympics. "No, you've got him all wrong," Hasely told me. "He's a good man." In Birmingham, after we'd anxiously signed our entire team into the hotel register, Norman proved Hasely right-that his gruffness was a fa~ade. As soon as Gerard explained our plight, Norman agreed to pay for all of the rooms. He even volunteered to arrange for a recreational tour bus for our group. Then Gerard
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decided to push our luck a bit: "Some of our people would like to be paid for
running."
"Oh, yeah?" Norman said. "Let's not beat around the bush. Charlie, I want Ben-how much?"
With nothing to lose (it didn't really matter if Ben ran in the meet or not), I plucked a figure out of the air: "Ten thousand dollars." It was far more than Ben had ever gotten on the circuit.
"No way!" Norman responded, and we went on to negotiate lesser deals for Angella and some of the others. But I thought I'd give Norman one more chance on Ben, and fell in behind him at the hotel's salad bar. We stood silently for a time as we piled up our salads, and finally Norman looked over his shoulder at me and muttered: "Eight." I snapped it up; eight thousand would still be a new high.
I was feeling quite proud of myself when I told Angella that Ben would be running after all. "I know," she said. "I just heard it on the radio." In tme rogue's fashion, Norman had the last laugh. If I'd known he'd already publicized Ben's appearance, I could have held firm for the full ten thousand.
The more I saw of the vaunted British track "system," the more I came to realize that Andy Norman was its linchpin. In reality, the British had no system. The AAA was just as chaotic as the CTFA. British coaches were no more competent than those in Canada. Their athletes were successful because Andy had engineered a lucrative revenue-sharing contract with British television. (Many sponsors had turned to track and field after a series of stadium riots scared them away from soccer.) With substantial monetary incentives in place, a sprinter like Linford Christie could quit his day job and begin training full time in 1986. He was able to take the plunge because Norman's contractual coup rewarded British athletes on a preferential basis. (Although Ben was beating Christie consistently in 1986, Christie would be paid 50 percent more at meets within the United Kingdom. In Canada, by contrast, most meets would pay Canadian athletes less than they would get anywhere else.) Freed from distractions, Christie made huge strides that year. He went from unranked to fourth in the world in the 100,
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won the European championship, and confirmed my axiom: You don't get full- time results out of part-time athletes.
It was bitterly cold at the Commonwealth Games, but my athletes overcame the conditions to take 11 medals. Angella staged a comeback after giving birth to a daughter and won a gold in the 200, a bronze in the 100, and a silver in the sprint relay. She had resumed training the previous December but hadn't gone back on steroids until April, when she'd stopped breast-feeding. She travelled with her baby and more than 100 pounds of pre-mixed infant formula. Mter a meet that summer in Germany I'd lugged the formula through Checkpoint Charlie, the border crossing from East to West Berlin, at the risk of h~morrhage.
In 1978, Ben hadn't made our Commonwealth Games team. At the 1982 Games, he'd run second in the 100 to Allan Wells. This time around, Ben completed the circle. He won the gold in the 100 in 10.07, tying his own British- soil record, and added another gold in the 4x100 relay and a bronze in the 200. The triple duty in Edinburgh tired him and it showed immediately after the Commonwealth Games in Gateshead, where Ben finished fourth in a sluggish
10.53, his first outdoor loss of the year. When the news got out, Lewis arranged
to run in Zurich in August, tmmpeting that this race would tell who was best. He joined an imposing field:
Chidi Imoh, Calvin Smith, Linford Christie, Harvey Glance, Kirk Baptiste, Marian Woronin. No one was missing. We could hear the drums beating: Ben's weak;
let's get him.
I felt torn. I wanted Ben to run in Zurich and establish his supremacy, once and for all, but I didn't want to risk losing a near-certain number-one ranking if he were off form. "If you don't feel good," I told him the day before the meet, "you can run the 200 and skip the 100." But Ben insisted that he felt fine, and on race day he appeared ready to do battle. "I talked to my mom this morning and she prayed for me," he said.
For all its build-up, the race was no contest. Ben got a mediocre start, and Lewis was less than three feet behind after 50 metres, well within striking distance. But once again Ben surged, and by
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80 metres he had stretched his lead to 10 feet-and then he put on the brakes, raised his right arm (in a show of dominance that would foreshadow Seoul), and almost walked across the line. He finished in 10.03-into an 0.7-metre headwind. The race for second was won by Imoh in 10.23, with Lewis third at 10.25. (I learned later that Carl had been bothered by calcium deposits on his left knee, and required arthroscopic surgery after the season.) Ben had now beaten Lewis three straight times; the vote for number one would be a formality.
A full year before his glory in Rome, I knew that Ben was ready to run in the 9.80s. His grandstanding in Zurich had cost him at least a tenth of a second. His sub-optimal start and the headwind may have cost him another one. After the race, Wolfgang Meier ran down to the track to congratulate me. "He gave away a world record!" the East German coach declared. "If he were my athlete, I'd
strangle him."
Ben's speed came in handy in his perpetually crowded social life as well. A master of the broken promise and forgotten obligation, he was always in trouble with the women he dated. On some days two or three of them would come out to the track at York University to wait for Ben while he trained. On more than one of these occasions I saw him end practice by hopping a fence, running to his car, and roaring off to avoid an awkward scene.
For a time Ben was going out with one of his Optimist teammates, a woman with little patience for his shenanigans and farfetched excuses. One evening, according to the gossip, Ben spent a romantic evening with this woman, then left her for a late-night rendezvous with someone else. At the following day's practice, Ben's teammate would have nothing to do with him.
"But you're the only one for me, baby," Ben pleaded, in his heavy Jamaican lilt. "I don't care about her."
At that the teammate glared at the nearby parking lot and said, "Ben, that would be a lot more believable if she wasn't sitting in your car right now."
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In a distressing sidebar to an otherwise stellar season, I learned that Rob Gray, a top Canadian discus thrower and long-time friend, had tested positive for Deca- Durabolin at our national championships and (along with shot-putters Peter Dajia and Mike Spiritoso) would be suspended for 18 months. I had met Rob in 1978, when he was stalled in the 58-metre range. In 1984 he got serious about the sport. He found a full-time coach, asked to train with me for speed work (which offers power benefits to throwers), and went to Dr. Astaphan for a new drug program. Rob was always outspoken about the realities of steroids in his event and had never been discreet about his own use. "I don't see why he needs it," Gerard once told me, before Rob had come to us. "I had an athlete in Poland in 1959, and he was close to number one in the world, and he never took drugs."
But Gerard didn't understand how times had changed. In the late 1950s, a discus thrower could work like a dog-without drugs-and become a top contender with throws of 59 metres. But by 1983, the Canadian Olympic Association had set a qualtfi'ing standard of 64.50 metres. A thrower could put in his six or eight hours a day, but without steroids he'd have little chance of getting into the Olympics, much less of winning a medal-and what was the point of that?
In April 1984, Gerard phoned me to say he had heard "some stupid rumour" that Rob had thrown 63 metres. I told him he had been misinformed-that Rob had actually thrown 67.32 metres (more than 220 feet), a new Commonwealth record.
I was surprised to hear of Rob's positive test, since Astaphan advised all of his patients against using Deca and Rob had told him he'd never taken it on his own. Astaphan wondered whether the Deca metabolite might be a "rebound" product from other steroids-whether it might, in fact, have been produced by Gray's system. But Rob's appeal on this point was denied, and his athletic career was finished.
Projections
For Ben and myself, 1987 was the year we put it all together-far more gratifying than the Olympic year to follow. After years of revising and refining, I felt confident that my training system enabled my sprinters to perform at their best. In Ben I had a supreme athlete who'd remained free from serious injury. And while Ben's fame was beginning to encroach upon our training, the distractions were still limited and bearable.
We began the season with a two-week fall camp at St. Kitts, Dr. Astaphan's birthplace and Caribbean home. The Sprint Centre's budget had appeared to rule out any camp at all, but Astaphan told us he could get free plane tickets through British West Indies Airlines, and that a local professional association would find housing and cover food costs for the 11 of us at his mother's hotel. (I later found out that Astaphan had paid for our meals himself.)
The island had no track, and weightlifting facilities were primitive, but there were ample compensations. The sprinters ran on a grass field which cushioned their legs. They also trained every morning on the beach in waist-deep water for resistance work. Everyone seemed to be thriving-particularly Ben, who was staying
Projections 177
with Dwyer Astaphan, the doctor's younger brother. A local attorney, Dwyer loved a good time and knew where to find it. After Astaphan saw that the duo was out revelling more than the doctor liked, he moved Ben into his mother's hotel. The change of scene failed to SlOW the two younger men down, however. One evening I entered the hotel lobby to see three young women waiting there Un-escorted. I watched Dwyer approach them, motion to one, and say, "Ben will see you now." It was audition time-Ben was screening prospective companions upstairs in his room while getting a massage from Waldemar. He settled on a spectacular beauty and squired her around the island for the remainder of the camp. One evening Angella, who was staying down the hall, heard the sounds of passion as she passed Ben's door. "Oh, Ben, you're the best in the whole world," the woman sighed. "Me know, me know," Ben answered in his patois. Here was a man who strived to be number one in every endeavour.
Mazda had signed individual endorsement deals with Ben and Angella the year before, and in the fall of 1986, the company made the rest of my group an offer as well. (As the carmaker was an IMG client, Larry Heidebrecht could not talk to them, and I wound up representing my athletes.) It was agreed that Mazda International and Mazda Canada together would provide individual sponsorships for 14 athletes, to be paid into their trust funds, and would provide club membership dues for our junior athletes. From that point on, our club was known as the Mazda Optimists. Although Ross Earl continued to raise money for our travel costs, he'd surrendered his active role in the operation. Ross had been worn down by the CTFA's ceaseless paperwork and broken promises. He would remain a loyal and supportive friend, but from here on he would root for us from the background.
We'd begun the season's first six-week steroid cycle before breaking for camp: a total of 15 injections of Estragol, stacked with vitamin B 12 and inosine. Astaphan stayed in St. Kitts that fall to practise medicine there full time, and I overcame my needle phobia
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to inject Ben, Tony, and Cheryl Thibedeau at my apartment. (Angella injected herself at home.) Ben was casual about the program and occasionally missed an injection, to no apparent ill effect. He again stacked the Estragol with two- milligram Winstrol tablets, but stopped the latter after ten days when he began to feel stiff.
I was doing what I could to fend off the campaign within the CTFA for random, out-of-competition testing-a policy that I knew would remove Canada from the international picture. In January 1987, I arranged a private, hour4ong meeting with Jean-Guy Ouellette, chairman of the CTFA's board of directors, at a hotel near Toronto's airport. Unlike most of the sport's top executives, Ouellette was regarded as a friend to athletes.
While careful to conceal what my own sprinters were doing, I related to Ouellette the facts of life in our sport: how the East Germans and Soviets tested athletes for control purposes before their entry into high-level training groups, where steroids were prescribed under tight supervision; how I'd been told that a West German lab pre-tested samples for some of that nation's athletes; how the U.S. had instituted its own non-punitive testing program in 1984.
I was particularly thorough in describing the state of affairs in Great Britain, long the model for Canadian sport and a self-proclaimed paragon of "clean" competition. Although the Amateur Athletic Association. had pioneered "random" testing within Britain in 1986, its program had yet to yield a single positive, and performances there were better than ever. (In April 1988, in a belated stab at credibility, the AAA recorded its first positive random test. The unlucky example was Jeff Gutteridge, a middle-ranked pole vaulter who had already announced plans to retire after Seoul.)
Ouellette seemed shaken by my accounting. He said he would try to verify what I'd told him with meet directors in Europe, and then advise his board of the international situation.
I had shifted from a double- to a triple-periodization schedule, which seemed to keep my athletes fresher. Our first intensive train-mg block would run 12 weeks, from October through December,
Projections 179
and culminate in our indoor season. The second block would stretch another eight weeks from March to May, leading to the early outdoor events; the third block would consist of five weeks in June and July, and would point toward our national championships, Zurich, and the 1987 World Championships in Rome. The idea was to staircase our performances to peak at the most important events. Minor meets were selected by the calendar to fit into our training sched- ule; they were less ends in themselves than speed sharpeners for the bigger prizes.
In addition to the ten-day taper periods before major meets, my sprinters would rest for four or five days between training blocks. It was this overall plan- the three periods, the extended recoveries, the incorporation of minor meets into our training program, the limited steroid dosages and durations-that enabled Ben to compete more frequently than any of his international rivals, until he became