HISTORY AND HEROES

LINFORD CHRISTIE

He electrified the nation with his 100m win at Barcelona, but the gold has been tarnished by his positive drugs test. By Rob Hughes, Sunday Times

THE GREAT exodus is under way. Hundreds of athletes from the United Kingdom, thousands from countries across the globe, are beginning the flight to Sydney for what all of us have grown up to regard as the ultimate sporting challenge to mankind, the Olympic Games.

But as the pulse of expectancy quickens, louder than before comes the question: the glory or the infamy, which is it? Are the Games reflections of human or manufactured accomplishment, contaminated or pure? The British Olympians wait to see what happens when Linford Christie travels to Australia next Saturday. He withdrew his application for accreditation to coach his proteges in the Gold Coast camp, saying it would create an intrusive media circus. However, yesterday it emerged that Christie was planning to remove his athletes to coach them on their own "Christie island" at Couran Cove, the resort run by the former Australian distance runner Ron Clarke. We may never know whether he would have been allowed to set foot in training grounds where Australian state rules forbid "convicted" drug offenders.

Christie embodies the numbing dilemma that is tearing world sport apart. He is, as the 100m champion of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, the inspiration to our youth. He is, conversely, as judged by the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) six days ago, a banned athlete who tested positive to 100 times the acceptable level of the performance-enhancing steroid nandrolone.

In an apparent reversal of the principles of natural justice, Christie, born 40 years ago at St Andrews in Jamaica, but a Londoner since he was seven, has to prove himself innocent or lose the credibility, the respect and the wealth still accruing from his 9.96sec dash in the summer of 1992. He has, in effect, to destroy the efficacy of IAAF drugs testing and trials in order to restore the reputation won on the track; he is either a great example of what natural talent and extraordinary willpower can achieve or a fraud whose tarnished image lurks like a shadow across the lungs of healthy competition.

"Linford Christie," the website of his sports management consultancy Nuff Respect proclaims, "is Britain's greatest ever athlete." The claim is founded on a sultry August evening in the Montjuic stadium, Barcelona. There were 65,000 of us inside that arena when, shortly after 8pm on the first Saturday of the month, came the race that to this day sends shivers down the spine. My own observation in The Sunday Times Magazine at the time were:

"On the track, we had explosive reason to want to believe in human dynamism. When Linford Christie came powering down the 100m track, ahead of the fancied Americans, some of us were privileged to be sitting close to the finish line. We saw our man, a Briton by way of the West Indies, catapult into history. We saw the eyes popping, the astonishing hypnotic concentration, the biceps rippling. The impression of speed, and the knowledge that this was a man reaching his peak for less than 10 seconds in a lifetime, was awesome."

It was also unnerving. Even as Christie was draped in the Union flag, we reflected that, at 32, he was uncommonly advanced in years to be the fastest man on earth. We knew the symmetry that, because of boycotts at other Games, this was the first complete Olympics for all of those 32 years - and that therefore Linford Christie's run far eclipsed the 1924 sprint gold of Harold Abrahams, which came in an era when half the world did not have the wealth to train and send athletes, and the 1980 Moscow gold of Allan Wells, who beat what was there, albeit a field decimated by cold war politics.

So witnessing in the flesh the Christie achievement, seeing at close quarters a moment of wild joy shared by those close to the man who conquered the taunts of being a black immigrant to captain the Great Britain men's Olympic squad, ought to have been something that promoted sport to the heights and a thrilling confirmation that the Olympics remained an incomparable force for good.

If only. The event itself was over in several blinks of an eye. Out of the blocks, all the concentrated and compacted upper-body strength of Christie was visibly equal to the best of the human race, and superior to most. Starting wasn't his forte, but this time he gave himself the propulsion he wanted. By 20m he was at the shoulder of all contenders and by 60m, his peak in the performance, nobody could live with the Christie surge. At the finish, the eyes, those strangely enlarged and penetrating eyes, told us the gold was his. And for a nation starved of that metal in track and field, it was also ours.

Six-hundredths of a second behind Christie came Frankie Fredericks, the Namibian, and then the American Dennis Mitchell, then Bruny Surin representing Canada, then Leroy Burrell, the American who had headed Christie in their semifinal.

Carl Lewis, who, in his prime, might have beaten them all, was in the stands, having lost at the unforgiving US Olympic trials. Ben Johnson, who had "won" the 1988 Seoul Games ahead of Lewis and Christie, but brought shame on the Olympic family when his dope test denounced him as a cheat, was also in the stadium, or in some dark shadow of it. Johnson had worked off his suspension, rejoined the hallowed Olympic circle and finished last in his heat, almost three-quarters of a second behind Christie.

There was, too, another shamed sprinter, by now removed from the Barcelona vicinity. Jason Livingston was a young Briton whose drug test came while he was actually in the Olympic Village. He was known as "Baby Ben", and when the embarrassed British officials informed him and prepared his hasty departure, the comforter for Livingston, the captain and paternalist in that depressingly dark hour, was Linford Christie.

Livingston said he'd been duped. "I'm guilty," he said, "of naivety. I took the stuff because I trusted the friend who gave it to me." The stuff was contained in a drink supplement - and two Olympics on that is still the automatic answer, the reason or the excuse most competitors give for unexplained high levels of abnormal substances detected by urine samples.

Christie says now, as he said in 1988 and 1992, that he has never knowingly taken any illegal substance. He once called for a lifetime ban on those who do, and so protective is he of his reputation that, two years ago, he extracted £40,000 in libel damages against John McVicar, the robber-turned-writer who insinuated in a satirical magazine that Christie's remarkable rise from 156th in the world to triumph at an age when he should have been in decline could only have been achieved through drugs.

Christie lost money to win the case. If the need or opportunity to defend his reputation in court again arose, do not doubt he is proud enough and rich enough to do so. "I know it sounds like the same old record, but I did no wrong," Christie said a year ago when the news broke that six months previously, at an indoor meeting in Dortmund, both his A and B samples tested positive.

Christie, and three other prominent British runners, now stand in limbo. UK Athletics has exonerated them on the weight of scientific theory from an Aberdeen laboratory that nandrolone can be manufactured within the body, possibly as a chemical reaction to some of the dietary supplements that athletes take and endorse without censure from the authorities. The IAAF, however, last week over-ruled UK Athletics and issued mandatory two-year suspensions on Christie, Dougie Walker and Gary Cadogan, with the case against Mark Richardson pending. UK Athletics, insisted the international arbitration panel, "reached an erroneous conclusion and misdirected the athletes".

Even a mighty figure like Christie stands in such a state of limbo. Athletics, and the Olympics, are divided. Nobody can be definitive on what constitutes illegal tampering with human performance, and the inconsistency of officialdom rattles the arena like pills in a jar. Merlene Ottey, for many the queen of the women's track, a runner of similar vintage to Christie and from the same Jamaican roots (indeed, she trained with him a year or two ago), was declared positive around the same time, yet has been allowed to enter the Sydney Olympics.

So, the conspiracy theories abound. The disharmony and disbelief between the British and IAAF rulers leaves Christie a "Great Olympian" in limbo. It shrouds what he had striven for, certainly from his mid-twenties when his coach Ron Roddan gave him an ultimatum to stop lazing away his days, to put down the rum and blackcurrants, and to turn his body into the muscular transformation that carried him to Barcelona fame.

Now, and not just for Christie, the burden is on athletes to demonstrate not only courage to the very tips of their fingers, the very strength of their inner and outer bodies, but to convince us that seeing is believing. Christie's moods sway between contempt and an appeal for human understanding. He seeks to pass on his knowledge and his expertise to young athletes who, as Team Linford, train to his demands at the Linford Christie stadium in west London.

At 40, he pushes his impressive torso pain for pain with their routines. When the four-hour sessions are through, Christie, a grandfather and a modern celebrity, rushes to a studio in Snowdonia, where he is recording the next series of Linford's Record Breakers for children's hour on BBC television. Out of that 9.96sec burst in Barcelona, Christie has built a cult of sometimes bewildering contradictions. The same man who charms millions on the Parkinson Show makes no apology for accidentally driving over the foot of a photographer outside his £1m mansion in Buckinghamshire. The champion who disrupts his Olympic preparation to comfort young Livingston in Barcelona, taunts the already fallen Ben Johnson.

Carl Lewis, who was a partner to the vilifying of Johnson in the 1980s, praised Christie as one of the two or three best sprinters of all time. He did so knowing that in Seoul, where Johnson recorded his discredited world-record time, Christie also came under suspicion. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that traces of pseudoephedrine, a banned stimulant, were found in Christie's urine sample. He pleaded that the only possible source was ginseng tea that he had unwittingly drunk in South Korea. "The IOC medical commission," announced Prince Alexandre de Merode, its chairman, "have given this athlete [Christie] the benefit of the doubt." Johnson was heard to say that he had been a fool not to think of ginseng.

And so we limp towards the Games in Sydney, where Christie was meant to be a voice for the BBC, a commitment that is unlikely now to happen. His life and time will still be incredibly full. He has a duty of care to Jamie Baulch, Darren Campbell and Katharine Merry, athletes in his training group who each believe their chances of winning medals on the track for Britain depend to some extent on the drive and the guidance he is determined to give them.

His athletes want him there, of course. It is not just wishful thinking that gold might rub off on them, but, as Baulch recently explained: "It's the intimidation factor. People see the great Linford Christie hugging me and it can be scary for them."

What is scary is that, eight years to the month since Chistie's crowning moment at the Olympics, some of the euphoria has turned to dust. The medal cannot be taken from him, nor is suspicion good cause to doubt the fusion of mental and physical strength to be great when it counted.

Less than 10 seconds - as Christie's disqualification for two false starts at the subsequent Atlanta Olympics in 1996 showed - makes or breaks a career. To control those nerves, to control the race and the opponents over 41 strides should never be consigned to the dustbin. Yet even if Christie's lawyer convinces the IAAF, either through science, through the conspiracy theory that he has propounded, or through questioning the competence of the testers and those who handled the samples, the legacy of Linford is irredeemably smeared.

Christie is never likely to look back and rue the day his coach talked him out of whiling away his afternoons playing dominoes in Mick's Cafe next to the track, or downing more destructive rum and blackcurrants. But for as long as he lives he will be shadowed now by doubt. Undeniably, he is the survivor he says he is, but the message on the Nuff Respect website about being Britain's greatest ever athlete is open to challenge.

Linford Christie: the highs and lows