Sportswriter and investigative reporter Mary Ormsby shows in World’s Fastest Man*: The Incredible Life of Ben Johnson how the athlete was railroaded by doping officials and let down by Canadian sport officials. Her just published book, an Amazon bestseller, leaves no doubt the sprinter should have kept his gold medal at the Seoul Olympics in 1988 and still be the World’s Fastest Man — without the asterisk. Julie Carl, a friend of Mary’s, sat down for a chat about how the book came to be.
JC: You wrote a feature in 2016 when you were a sportswriter at the Toronto Star about the Ben Johnson case, a story that was nominated for a National Newspaper Award. What sparked your writing of that story?
MO: I saw a really great documentary by British filmmaker Dan Gordon that came out for the 25th anniversary of the Seoul Olympics. I thought I knew a lot about Ben’s story. But this documentary had two pieces of information that made me bolt upright.
One was Carl Lewis’ manager (the US runner who came second, then was awarded the gold after Ben Johnson tested positive), who said, ‘We snuck one of our entourage members into the doping control room to sit beside Ben and make sure he didn’t do anything funny.’ That was, to me, a stunning admission.
In the documentary, they spoke to that man via text or email. And they put it to him: Did you have anything to do with Ben’s sample? Because Ben said he was sabotaged and that a mystery man in the doping control room put steroid pills in his beer. In the documentary, the man answered the question in writing: ‘Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t.’
So those two items propelled me to look deeper into what happened to Ben Johnson. I was really curious. Did we miss anything? What can we learn about this?
And then the biggest story that got me going on this path was finding a copy of Ben’s drug test. That story showed there were handwritten, unsigned alterations to this document. And I thought, well, this is evidence any lawyer could have used to at least challenge it in the moment. After I did more research, I learned this test wasn’t even looked at when Ben was being defended in Seoul. The Canadian team just accepted the science in 1988 as true and unassailable.
JC: What was their defence of Ben Johnson?
MO: Their strategy was to rely on the mystery man in doping control who may have done this. They didn’t know who the mystery man was at the time, but that was their strategy, to not look at the evidence against Ben.
JC: So it was true that he had used steroids, and you knew that before you started writing the feature story and later this book. What were you hoping to achieve?
MO: His rights weren’t protected as an athlete, and they certainly weren’t protected as a Canadian. And he should have had those rights protected, robustly, if not in the moment, then in the days and weeks and months after.
There could have been some interventions, maybe look at conflicts of interest for the hearing panel. [Members of the panel were] in the lab during the testing. They’re doing the prosecuting. They’re sitting in judgment. They can make recommendations to have him disqualified from the Olympics. These guys were judge and jury.
They also singled out Ben with a secondary test. They said, ‘This test, we ran on his urine, you guys didn’t know about it. We didn’t disclose it to you. But it shows that he was actually a longtime user of the steroid.’ And the Canadians didn’t push back on that either. They just accepted it, didn’t challenge that they didn’t get any disclosure so they could get their own expert to push back on this secondary test.
There were a lot of issues in that hearing that just just got glossed over. And Ben was sent home in disgrace.
JC: Have things improved since then?
MO: Athletes are still testing positive for drugs. When Ben was disqualified, they held him up as their trophy catch. ‘The war on doping is over. Look, we got the biggest, hugest star in our celestial sports system. If we can take down Ben Johnson, we can take down anybody. So all the rest of you, you are on notice.’
Well, here we are, almost 40 years later, and athletes are still evading tests and still producing positive tests. I sometimes wonder what good was done, what has actually changed in trying to keep sports drug free.
JC: Tell me about the mystery break-in.
MO: When Ben Johnson was sent home from Seoul, his coach Charlie Francis phoned a trusted coach, who was also a doping control officer in Canada, and asked if she would do a second sample when Ben came home to Toronto. She did and tried to get the sample tested at an IOC lab in Calgary, but they refused to test it. So part of it was sent to the US to be tested.
The woman kept the rest of the sample in a locked freezer in her condo in Toronto where she kept a lot of her samples. One day, she came home and her condo had been broken into and the only thing that was disturbed in the entire condo was the lock pried off the freezer. Some samples were taken from the top of the freezer. But Ben’s urine sample was at the very bottom under some other packaged goods.
Why else would someone have broken into her apartment, into a locked freezer, other than to pick up Ben Johnson’s urine sample?
JC: I remember he quickly stopped being ‘Canadian Ben Johnson with a gold medal’ and became ‘Jamaican-born Ben Johnson disgraced at the Olympics.‘
MO: The racist backlash was overwhelming. He had not only disappointed the country as a Canadian, he was also painted as an ungrateful immigrant, which is just horrible stuff. But he was fair game for a lot of people who really wanted to scream their awful racist feelings at that moment.
JC: You waited to retire to write this book because the life of a sportswriter with four children is crazy busy, right?
MO: Sports writers do work strange hours. It’s not even shift work because you work when the games are. You work a lot of weekends. And of course, I married another sportswriter because who else understands your crazy life? So Paul and I had the four kids and the first three were mat leaves of six months. I went back to work after six months for the three. But for the fourth child, it was a year’s leave so that was a huge help.
JC: You had an 11-year-old, a nine-year-old, a seven-year-old and a baby and worked full time.
MO: At times, it was really difficult. I would be folding laundry, you know, at one o’clock in the morning, and Paul would be on the road with a team. I’d get up and shovel the snow at 6 a.m. so I could get out of the driveway. It was a difficult juggle. And then always working to deadline to write because sometimes your story just has to be done.
You know, the life of a journalist is, I gotta say, it’s addictive… Who doesn’t want to be in the middle of all this cool stuff going on in the world? I love the buzz of the newsroom. And, you know, when you retire, there’s these other things you can still do with all the tools you were able to acquire when you were a working journalist.
For all the women who are out there juggling jobs and children and relationships and trying to do well at everything, there is a finish line. You’re gonna get there.
JC: When you retired, you said you weren’t going to write a book.
MO: Ben asked me a couple of times while I was working to do it, and I was like, ‘Oh God, no, I’m so busy. Plus, I’ve never written a book.’ Quite frankly, I would say to Ben, ‘You should consider a writer of colour, maybe a Jamaican writer. Because you know, I’m a white girl from the east end of Toronto.’ The way he faced prejudice when he came here as a child and later in life, I wasn’t sure I could do that justice. Ben thought about it and came back and said, basically, ‘You know my story best. So why don’t you do it?’
I always felt it was unfinished business. I always felt he did get ripped off when it came to due process. This thing is still front and centre for me about your right to a fair trial. I just felt this didn’t happen, and his whole life story could have had a different outcome if maybe he’d had a better defence and better support from Canadian sports officials and government officials. Maybe kept his gold medal.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
