Yeah, it's extremely hard to make the human body run 100 meters in 10 seconds. I think Macro is clean and has broken his body trying. Here's an interesting article I came across on Flo Jo.
As competitors arrive in Sydney for the 2000 Olympics, there is mounting evidence that Florence Griffith-Joyner, the most glamorous as well as the fastest sprinter of her generation, took performance-enhancing drugs. ANDREW ALDERSON examines the legacy of Flo-Jo - a world in which top athletes have to cheat to win.
A DARK, flat granite slab etched with a black-and-white photograph marks her resting place in El Toro Memorial Park. The face is recognisable to most, but, in case there are any doubts, her nickname dispels them.
``Flo-Jo'', as she is affectionately called even on her gravestone, could not have been buried in a more peaceful spot. The sound of a fountain fills the air and gnarled Californian oaks older than the 104-year-old park cast their shadows over the 6,000 graves.
Florence Griffith-Joyner, who died in September 1998 aged just 38, remains the fastest woman who ever lived: the holder of two world records for the 100 and 200 metres that may never be beaten.
Yet, a week before the opening of the Sydney Olympics, there is increasingly open speculation that she used drugs and, thus, has done more than any other athlete to tarnish the Olympic ideal of fair play.
For Flo-Jo, the Olympics were not about taking part, but the winning. An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has added further fuel to suspicions that her staggering improvement was too good to be true. A coach has spoken about the tales of her drug use, while Dr. Robert Kerr, a Californian specialist in sports injuries who treated her, spoke of his conviction that she was a cheat.
According to fellow athletes, coaches, doctors and officials, some speaking for the first time, she was on banned performance- enhancing drugs before she won three gold medals and a silver in the 1988 Seoul Olympics. It is a tragedy for the Olympic movement today that Flo-Jo's name is still besmirched. If she had been a cheat and had been shamed as was Ben Johnson - the Canadian sprinter who won gold in the same Games, but who was exposed as a drugs cheat - any athlete would have thought again before taking banned substances.
As it is, Flo-Jo has proved to the generation competing in Sydney that it is possible to become a world beater by cheating.
Two former senior American athletics officials predicted that up to 50 per cent of the nation's 120 competitors in Sydney will have taken banned performance-enhancing drugs.
In Britain, if recent history is anything to go by, the situation may be little better. It is possible that some of Britain's best chances of winning a medal in the 80-strong team have resorted to drugs in order to compete on a ``level playing field''.
For a time, we all loved Flo-Jo. It was hard not to. The seventh of 11 children brought up by a single mother in the tough Watts district of Los Angeles, she was the personification of the American dream. With her dark good looks, her talon-like fingernails and her dazzling one-piece running suit, she brought much-needed glamour to women's sprinting.
Flo-Jo, sassy and streetwise, progressed from being a talented college runner to win an Olympic silver medal in the 100 metres in Los Angeles in 1984, an achievement devalued by the Soviet-led boycott of the Games that year.
By 1986, her star was fading. Disillusioned with athletics, she stopped training and she put on up to 60lbs. However, a year later, Al Joyner, her husband and an Olympic gold medallist long jumper in 1984, became her coach.
The transformation shook women's athletics. Flo-Jo went from not being ranked in the list of top 10 women sprinters in 1987 to smashing the world record in the 100 metres American Olympic qualifying race the next year, with a time of 10.49 seconds.
To put this into perspective, it was 0.27 seconds - or nearly three yards - faster than the previous world record and faster than the men's record for many nations. She had even outrun the 1930s Olympic legend, Jesse Owens.
In Seoul later that year, she won the 100 metres in a wind- assisted Olympic record time and set a world record for the 200 metres - 21.34 seconds. She also won a gold medal in the 4 x 100 metres relay and silver in the 4 x 400 metres relay.
Her times, however, were not all that had changed. Her physique had altered beyond recognition. When Pat Butcher, a British athletics writer, first met her in 1985, he described her ``as one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen, petite, oval- faced with unblemished skin''.
By 1988, the same woman had bulging muscles, huge veins and thick make-up to hide her acne, a known side-effect of taking steroids. According to Butcher, she had ``metamorphosed'': her voice had deepened and her jaw elongated, a condition known to be an effect of Human Growth Hormone (HGH) - a banned drug.
Flo-Jo explained her rapid improvement on everything from her new diet of water, vitamins, fish and chicken to doing up to 5,000 sit-ups a day. Her husband has always denied that this was the result of drugs.
In the past, the only person to make public allegations against Flo-Jo based on first-hand evidence was Darrell Robinson, a former American 400 metres runner who claimed she had asked him to find out the cost of HGH. When he later told her that it was $2,000, she allegedly replied: ``If you want to make a million dollars, you've got to invest a couple of thousands.''
Robinson's comments were made in the German Stern magazine, months after the Seoul Olympics. Flo-Jo dismissed him as a ``liar'', but she did not sue for libel and Robinson stands by his account.
He says that he bought the HGH from a bodybuilder in Los Angeles and that one evening he slipped the drugs into Flo-Jo's training bag after being paid 20 one hundred dollar bills.
Now, for the first time, other sports officials and specialists connected to Flo-Jo have been speaking of their conviction that the world's most famous woman athlete was a fraud.
Dr. Robert Kerr, a Californian doctor specialising in sports injuries, disclosed that he had treated Flo-Jo for an ankle injury. ``From the combination of her physical appearance and her increased performance, I believe she was on drugs,'' he said. Dr. Kerr should know: before steroids were outlawed in 1975, he had prescribed them to dozens of athletes, so is fully aware of what the drugs can do and their side effects.
Even more explicit was the evidence of a leading coach, who said he had been told by a woman athlete who trained with Flo-Jo in the run-up to the 1988 Olympics that she took a huge mixture of HGH and other steroids, but did not like to inject herself.
``Each girl thought she was the only one injecting Flo-Jo but, in fact, they all were and so she was multiplying her doses,'' he said.
The coach said that other athletes had told him Flo-Jo used drugs in a more moderate way as early as 1981, and that she used to cross the border to Tijuana, Mexico, to buy steroids legally across the counter.
Yet the coach, who asked not to be identified, did not consider that Flo-Jo's drug-taking detracted from her achievements, because he believes many top athletes also use banned substances. ``People debate whether 40 per cent or 80 per cent of Olympic athletes are on drugs, but in the end it's meaningless, because of those at the top it's worse,'' he said. ``First really is first, second is second and third is third.'' By which he meant that if all athletes are taking drugs, the outcome is ``fair''.
Neither Florence Griffith's 70-year-old mother, nor Al Joyner, her husband, would comment on the allegations. The two have fallen out and will be on different sides when Mr. Joyner goes to court to sue a hospital where his wife was taken in 1996 after a seizure that many fear was brought on by drug abuse.
Flo-Jo surprised the world by retiring in February 1989 at the height of her ability. Perhaps not coincidentally, her decision came just months before the introduction of mandatory out-of- competition drug testing. After she died, a postmortem examination revealed that her death had been caused by suffocation after an epileptic fit in her sleep.
Pat Connolly, a former U.S. athlete turned coach, said that she was equally convinced of Flo-Jo's drug abuse and said that then, like now, American officials had not wanted to catch their top athletes, preferring them to win drug-assisted than lose. ``I don't think Flo-Jo is to blame as much as the establishment that allowed her and others to get away with it,'' she said.
Her views have been echoed by Dr. Robert Voy, the chief medical officer of the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) for five years until 1988, who claimed his work was constantly undermined.
Dr. Voy said: ``Many people at USOC were in the business for one reason: to bring home gold. Just how the athletes accomplished that - few cared.'' Dr. Voy said that the results of positive tests were hushed up. He believes that if Ben Johnson had been American, not Canadian, he would never have been caught in Seoul.
Dr. Voy said that in one case a discus thrower was unconcerned when he failed a drugs test: the results were never made public and weeks later the man won a medal at a major championship. ``It seems that nothing has changed today,'' he said.
In Atlanta four years ago, the U.S. topped the medals table with 44 golds and they are favourites to win most medals in Sydney.
Five weeks ago, Dr. Wade Exum, who was the head of U.S. drug testing until earlier this year, said that half the American athletes at the 1996 Games had earlier failed a drugs test. He is bringing a case against USOC, which he accuses of dispensing drugs and asking him to inject athletes. This should have a seismic effect on all sports if it reaches court next year.
Over the past decade, athletics has become a multi-million-pound industry. The rewards - and the risks of injuries - are much greater, ensuring that the drug cheats have an increased incentive to stay ahead of the testers. The drugs, too, have become more sophisticated, in particular those that are naturally occurring, such as erythropoietin (EPO), which increases the number of red cells in the blood, improving oxygen take up. By athletes using such products, by using masking agents and by knowing when to stop taking a drug before a competition to avoid detection, the work of the drug testers has become very much more complex.
A new method of detecting EPO is to be tried in Sydney, but few experts doubt that these will be the most drug-ridden Games ever. If the testers catch up with the drug takers, a disaster is looming similar to the scale of the EPO scandal that wrecked the Tour de France cycle race two years ago.
Al Joyner, who has a nine-year-old daughter by Flo-Jo, and the champion's close friends have always dismissed the drug-taking rumours, putting them down to the jealousy of rivals. They stress that she never failed a drugs' test throughout her career.
After the postmortem examination, which did not link Flo-Jo's death to steroid abuse, Mr. Joyner said his late wife should be allowed to rest in peace. ``My wife took a final, ultimate drug test and there was nothing there,'' he said. However, his belief that the postmortem cleared his wife of drug taking, as medical experts have confirmed, is doubtful.
More revealing, perhaps, is Running For Dummies, a book co- written by Flo-Jo and published last year, which lists 32 short- cut tips for would-be runners. The heading on the opening page says it all, and sums up her legacy to this month's Olympic Games. It says: ``Cheat Sheet''.
Copyright, The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2000.
