An Olympic memory

I am the ultimate sports junkie. If games were abolished by some satanic world dictator I would be almost as lost as if he banned all books. I love watching all sports. I love darts, I love javelin throwing. If my wife isn’t around I sneak a look at those crass and crazy professional fake-wrestlers. I love beach volleyball, though my friends tell me this is simply because I enjoy looking at nearly naked young women covered in sand (well, who wouldn’t?). In Canada I even became a little fascinated by that mysterious sport called curling, which involves throwing big stones slowly across ice.

You can imagine, therefore, that right now I am like a beer lover with the greatest brewery on earth about to throw open its doors. In other words, I am greatly looking forward to the Olympics. I hope terrorists will be held at bay. I believe the Chinese will call upon some ancient wisdom at the last minute to disperse that terrible pollution haze and scour the air pristinely clean by opening day.

But I have a confession to make as the Games get set to go. It is that my most vivid memory of Olympic glory remains the race which brought its greatest scandal. Such an infinity of famous deeds, such a multitude of unforgettable contests. Yet the men’s hundred metres at the Seoul Olympics in 1988 is the race I remember best – and not for the disgrace but for the splendour of the running before the shame was known. I keep still in my mind’s eye clear as clear to this day the majesty of Ben Johnson’s running in that catastrophic race.

As I write I see again the grace, the power and the final burst of speed. Nobody in history has ever equalled that strong surge off the blocks, the fierce strength of the middle running, the final gleaming ferocity of the finish which took him to the line in triumph on the dark red track. It looked on the replay as if he could have gone through stone walls without a shiver. I remember it so clearly. It was one of those times when you get up and punch the air and shout with an exuberance of praise. Honoured in one’s generation to have seen this best of the best.

And to think it all came to nothing a mere 24 hours later. The splendour and the triumph were utterly soiled and lost. The fall from grace was sudden and complete and poor Ben Johnson’s life became a ruin.

No flag-waving any more, no honourable receptions, no million-dollar endorsements, not ever again the ecstatic plaudits of adoring crowds. All gone in a flash of revulsion and a rush of universal blame.

And yet surely he at least will always be left, as I remember it in my mind’s forgiving eye, with those immortal moments when he only knew the glory of the greatest running any man had ever done, the surging sense of invincible power on the red and sunlit track, the feeling of the rush of the wind, the beating of his heart, the as yet unsullied triumph as he crossed the line with the roar of a thousand seas in his ears. There was another Ben Jonson long ago, spelt one letter differently, Shakespeare’s great contemporary. You can read his epitaph – “Oh rare Ben Jonson” – in Westminster Abbey in Poets’ Corner. As poets always do, he had the right words for the great (for, despite everything, he was great) runner with his name.

“It must be done like lightning,” Ben Jonson wrote more than 400 years ago – and like lightning then his namesake ran. “He was not of our age, but for all time!” Ben Jonson wrote – and so men for a moment said when his namesake ran the greatest race of all. “The applause! the delight! the wonder of our stage!” Ben Jonson wrote – and so it was for a single day.

But Ben Jonson wrote tragedies and in the end the words he might have uttered for his namesake are the saddest ones: “Alas, all the castles I have are built with air.”

I am not happy that my most vivid Olympic memory is a drug-inspired victory. But there you are – the world is what it is. Now another Olympics starts and I hope for unsullied greatness every day of the greatest sporting event in the world.