Athletics: On the wrong track

In his heyday, Carl Lewis was unbeatable on the track, and insufferably self-righteous off it. Now it seems that the Mr Clean of athletics had a dirty secret all along. Andrew Gumbel on an alleged Olympic cover-up, and the fall of a sporting icon

When a man who has become a public figure falls spectacularly from grace, there are really only two ways to react. One is to forgive him because of the towering nature of his achievements. The other is to dismiss him as a boundless hypocrite who deserves everything he gets.

In Carl Lewis's case, it is hard not to feel tugged in both directions at once. To watch Lewis sprinting or long-jumping in his heyday, during the 1980s, was to behold a thing of extraordinary physical beauty. His tall, loping frame had a grace, and an awesome power, that nobody came close to matching. Whatever it was that propelled him to his nine Olympic gold medals, it was never less than a pleasure to behold.

On the other hand, off the track he came across as cocky, self-righteous, uncharitable towards his fellow-athletes, and interested only in his own success. He didn't just think he was the heir to Jesse Owens, the hero of the 1936 Berlin Olympics whom he had known from early childhood; he thought he was better than Owens, and didn't hesitate to say so. He didn't just set out to win; he wanted to be thought of as the greatest athlete of all time.

He autographed Bibles as though he was himself imbued with some kind of divine power. And the way that he spoke out so insistently against drug use on the international athletic circuit always smacked of more than straightforward campaigning. Often, he was downright insufferable.

And now, he appears to have received his come-uppance. Thanks to the byzantine machinations of international sporting politics, a disgruntled former official with the US Olympic Committee (USOC) has claimed that Lewis, along with more than 100 fellow-athletes, as an illicit drug-user himself. According to the former official, in the summer of 1988, just a few weeks before Lewis faced off against Ben Johnson in the race of his life, the 100m final at the Seoul Olympics, he tested positive three times in a row for a trio of banned substances – pseudoephedrine, ephedrine and phenylpropanolamine – which are among the most common illegal stimulants. Lewis's alleged indiscretion, which he says was the inadvertent result of taking a herbal cold remedy, was, it is claimed, hushed up at the time by the USOC, which told him in a confidential letter that it regarded the tests as grounds for a warning, not a suspension. Not exactly in keeping with the International Olympic Committee's policy of zero tolerance, but never mind – Lewis was, at the time, the top track athlete in the world, and it would have been a terrible blow to the US to lose him. Thus the secret remained buried for the best part of 15 years.

It is hard to say when exactly Lewis sowed the seeds of his own downfall. Perhaps it was 1987, the year before the Seoul Games, when he first began to criticise his fellow athletes about their drug-taking habits. Perhaps it was an interview he gave to ITV around that time, when he said that he was willing to "pay a price" in the form of disapproval from his colleagues to preach the anti- drug message. He commented later: "We couldn't afford to ignore the message because it had been buried too long. We needed to take a stand."

Or perhaps it was those fateful few seconds of the 100m final in South Korea, when Johnson crossed the line more than a tenth of a second ahead of Lewis, only to be disqualified again three days later after the steroid stanozolol was found in his system. At the time, Lewis was gracious as could be about coming in second – he was eventually awarded Johnson's gold medal anyway – but in his autobiography, Inside Track, published in 1990, he described his less than charitable thoughts as he glowered at his rival: "I couldn't stop thinking about those yellow eyes. That bastard did it again, I said to myself." Translation: cheats don't deserve to win, and the gold medal was all mine from the outset.

After Seoul, there seemed to be no limits to Lewis's holier-than-thou attitude. In 1989, dubbed in his autobiography "the year of the steroid", he dropped less than subtle hints that he believed Florence Griffith Joyner to be a drug user – an accusation he was hastily forced to retract under the threat of legal action. (Interestingly, for all the rumours that followed her to her early death and beyond, Flo-Jo's name does not appear on the list of 114 drug offenders made public by the former anti-doping official, Wade Exum. Neither does that of her sister-in-law, Jackie Joyner-Kersee.) Over the years, Lewis hinted that he knew the names of drug users on the US Olympic teams without agreeing to name them, a habit that he took with him into retirement. Lewis refused to attend an Olympic trials dinner in Sacramento ahead of the 2000 Sydney Games because he was, he said, disgusted at the failure of the US authorities to weed out the miscreants in their ranks.

Lewis's humiliation, when it came, was no hundred-yard dash. It was not all over in 9.92 seconds, nor is it likely to be finished for quite a while yet. Rather, it happened in gruesome slow-motion. There was a real crash, as well as a metaphorical one. And substance abuse also featured, not just as an echo of the past.

It started with the attempt by Wade Exum, the departed US anti-doping chief, to wreak revenge on the USOC for what he deemed to be shoddy treatment. First, he sued the USOC for racial discrimination, figuring that they might prefer to pay him off than face the negative publicity. But he figured wrong, and the courts sided with the USOC, throwing out his suit earlier this month. That left him with one bomb still to detonate, and that was the list of athletes alleged to have tested positive for banned substances, who had been shielded from public view and allowed to compete as normal. Carl Lewis was merely the most prominent of a long roster of names covering the period 1988 to 2000, among them his fellow-sprinters Joe DeLoach (who took the gold medal in the 200m at Seoul) and Floyd Heard; the hurdler Andre Phillips; the Olympic tennis champion Mary Jo Fernandez; eight members of the US Soccer Federation and 11 Olympic skiers.

The 100m final at Seoul now looks a whole lot like the "dirtiest race in history" it has long been reputed to be. Five of the eight finalists – Johnson, Lewis, Linford Christie, Dennis Mitchell and Desai Williams – have been shown to have failed drug tests at one time or another. (See box)

By bizarre coincidence, the main official figure who might have carried the can for this fiasco, the USOC president who oversaw the Seoul Olympics, suffered a massive stroke on 9 April and died the very morning that Exum went public with his information. Nobody could have better embodied the corruption of the Olympic ideal than Robert Helmick: he was forced to quit the USOC presidency in disgrace in 1991 following allegations that he had accepted nearly $300,000, "trafficking on his Olympic positions", a polite circumlocution for taking bribes.

Helmick's death, however, did not help Lewis, who issued a brief statement through his lawyer saying that he did not intentionally take illicit substances. Otherwise, he kept quiet. Then, at the beginning of this week, came the next fiasco. Lewis crashed his brand new Maserati on a Los Angeles freeway in the dead of night, and was arrested on suspicion of drink-driving. A friend had to bail him out of the "drunk tank" at the 77th Street police station, one of the roughest precincts in Los Angeles.

This was not the behaviour of the squeaky-clean, all-American track and field hero, to put it mildly. In fact, several sporting myths have been exploded along with Lewis's reputation in the past few days. The first is the admittedly wishful thinking that drugs are something that foreign athletes do, not Americans. It would appear that US athletes were not caught with dope in their system because the USOC was covering up for them.

The second is the (perhaps equally fanciful) idea that there is anything salvageable from the mess of modern Olympic glad-handing and public-image manipulation. "The whole sport is not on drugs," Lewis once said. "There are plenty of clean athletes who train and compete by the rules." Well, one might now think, perhaps there aren't. As Charlie Francis, Ben Johnson's coach, memorably said: "If anyone is clean, it's going to be the losers."

Another casualty – less significant in the grand scheme of things, but still telling in the context of the sports world's particular cult of celebrity – has been the public image that Lewis has carefully cultivated for himself over the past 20 years. Ever since the first criticisms of him surfaced in the media, around the time of the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, he has taken care to refute every rumour and show himself in the most positive possible light. No, I'm not gay, he insisted (a rumour initially spread by a disgruntled ex-girlfriend). No, I don't think I'm better than everyone else. No, I'm not just in this to hit up my sponsors for as much as I can fleece them. And no (strange how this theme has dogged him from very early on), I don't do drugs.

To broaden his appeal, Lewis established some eye-catching extracurricular activities. He dabbled in singing and recorded an execrable album in the mid-1980s called The Feeling That I Feel. More successfully, he established training camps for young athletes from disadvantaged backgrounds in an effort to spread some of his good fortune. He openly discussed his deep religious convictions, his fascination with an Indian guru called Sri Chinmoy, and his membership of a largely non-proselytising religious brotherhood called the Lay Witnesses for Christ. And he also talked about his background as the son of two teachers heavily involved in the Civil Rights movement, a justifiable badge of pride, and one that he has always hoped would be inspiring to others.

More recently, since his retirement from sport, he has tried to work his way into television and film acting. His debut, in 1997, was in a chase comedy called Dirty Laundry, starring two other showbiz transplants, Sonny Bono and Frankie Valli. The only easily traceable review described it as "lame". His latest project is a sci-fi thriller set at the South Pole called Alien Hunter – he plays an air-force officer called Grisham. It sounds rather like the abortive film career of OJ Simpson.

What comes across, in the autobiography and in the various self-inflicted embarrassments that only take away from his status as a great athlete, is a tremendous underlying insecurity, an ego in constant search of self-justification and fear of humiliation. One of the chapters in Inside Track is called "Carl Bashing", and it is exhaustively devoted to denigrating those who have denigrated him. One senses that there is going to be a lot more of this as the doping scandal unfolds. Indeed, it has already begun. After a week of silence, Lewis spoke briefly to the Orange County Register, in southern California, a few days ago to argue that the herbal remedy that he took that fateful summer of 1988 had no stimulative effect at all. "There really is no pure evidence to show that it does something," he said. "It does nothing."

And although he admitted that he could easily have been suspended under anti-doping rules that he himself has pushed for over the years, he suggested that much has changed between 1988 and 2003. "The climate was different," he said. Could this be the same Carl Lewis who has always preached zero tolerance when it comes to drugs in sports? Sounds like he has a whole lot more explaining to do.

The race of shame: the 1988 Olympic 100m

1st ­ Ben Johnson (Canada)

Tested positive for anabolic steroids after the race. Stripped of his medal and banned for two years, then for life in 1993.

2nd ­ Carl Lewis (US)

It is alleged that he should have been serving a two-year ban after testing positive for stimulants at the US Olympic trials two months earlier.

3rd ­ Linford Christie (UK)

Tested positive for pseudoephedrine in Seoul but cleared by the IOC disciplinary committee who accepted his explanation that it came from ginseng tea. Banned for two years in 2000.

5th ­ Dennis Mitchell (US)

Tested positive for high levels of testosterone in 1999. Banned for two years. Claimed that the result was because he'd had sex and drunk six beers.

6th ­ Desai Williams (Canada)

Implicated in the 1989 Dubin inquiry into the use of banned drugs by Canadian athletes.