Film Review: The dirtiest race in Olympic history

Opening with a quote from the infamous Dr. Jamie Astephan, who managed Ben Johnson’s steroid program, the documentary 9.79* paints an incredibly human picture of the most disgraced athlete in Canadian history. “If you don’t take it, you won’t make it,” proved to be the motto for the Charlie Francis sprint group in the 1980s.

U.K. filmmaker Daniel Gordon includes retrospective clips from all eight sprinters in the 1988 Olympic 100m final, known as the dirtiest race in history. Six of the eight runners from that race — Brazil’s Robson da Silva and American Calvin Smith are the only exceptions — have been linked to doping. The film shows a softer side of Johnson, while portraying Carl Lewis, as a brash, arrogant American, who couldn’t accept losing, running mostly for a million-dollar paycheque.

Gordon’s documentary, which will air on ESPN’s 30 for 30 series this fall and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, has footage and in-depth interviews all of the key players. It shows Johnson sifting through a box of old medals in his Toronto home. Over the years, Johnson has been both vilified and victimized for his role in the worst drug scandal in Canadian and Olympic history. This film gets beyond laying blame and exposes the human side of the aging former world-class athlete. His journey from millionaire to bankruptcy seemed to happen almost as quickly as his rise to the top in Seoul. As Johnson recounts the culture and pressures of competing in the drug-fuelled era, it’s clear that he wasn’t the only one cheating. We now know that even Lewis tested positive for banned substances prior to the 1988 Olympics, but it was covered up by the U.S. Olympic Committee.

The film also explores new allegations put forth in Johnson’s autobiography, Seoul to Soul, in which he claims he was sabotaged in the drug-testing room in Seoul. Francis and Astephan had Johnson on a doping regiment consisting of the steroid estrogol, with the final dose happening 28 days before competition — enough time for it to leave the system before the test. “With no out-of-competition testing, avoiding a positive test meant nothing more than looking at a calendar,” the film states. But Johnson did test postive — for stanozolol — a substance he says was put in his drink while he was in the drug-testing room. The saboteur, he claims is an old friend of Carl Lewis’s, Andre Jackson. When the film’s crew tracked down Jackson, he refused to go on camera, offering an ambiguous non-denial of his alleged role in spiking Johnson’s drink: “Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t.” Johnson claims a subsequent positive test in 1993, which resulted in a lifetime ban, was also the result of sabotage. Given Jackson’s elusiveness, and that others have corroborated Johnson’s story, the sabotage angle might not be so far-fetched.

The film 9.79* succeeds in showing that Johnson wasn’t alone in all of this, and he doesn’t deserve to be the sole target of criticism. He was a key part of an elaborate scheme drafted by Francis and Astephan, a plan that also ended up bringing down other Canadian sprinters including Desai Williams and Angela Issajenko. Williams, still emotional, says he regrets joining Francis’s group in 1987. Issajenko says it was important to reveal the truth at the Dubin Inquiry, so Francis didn’t get thrown under the bus.

While Johnson has always been at the centre of the 1988 scandal, Lewis is exposed as a hypocrite: speaking out against doping, at the same time failing — and covering up — his own tests. Lewis claims that Johnson would never have been able to beat him had he not been on steroids. But 9.79* also suggests that Lewis showed some signs that he may have been on Human Growth Hormone (braces and dental issues in grown men could be evidence of HGH use), and he undoubtedly took banned stimulants. So could the same be said for the American and his nine Olympic gold medals?

For anyone with an interest in Canadian sports history and the biggest doping scandal of our time, 9.79* should be required viewing.

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