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Last updated at 8:26 PM on 01st June 2008
Ben Johnson's wry smile will be even wider this weekend after a lesser-known Jamaican shattered the world 100metres record held by another fellow countryman.
Asafa Powell is not his favourite brother islander, so Johnson was not reaching for the telephone to offer his commiserations as 21-year-old newcomer Usain Bolt became the newest fastest man on Earth in 9.72 seconds.
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Usain Bolt of Jamaica celebrates after setting a new world record in the men's 100 metres
Powell, in his insistence that he ran clean to the previous mark of 9.74sec, has been just as quick to condemn Johnson for taking the steroids that caused him to be stripped of the world record and Olympic gold medal won in Seoul 20 years ago.
'Asafa is too self-righteous,' says Johnson. 'He has every right to defend himself but not to point a finger at me. I know as well as anyone what goes on down there in Jamaica most of the time.'
The irony is not lost on Johnson that Bolt came out of nowhere in the week he blew the lid off the extent of the steroids culture in athletics.
The exclusive interview Big Ben granted me in his adopted Canada sent seismic shockwaves through the Olympic movement just weeks before the Beijing Games, claiming that virtually all the top athletes use drugs.
Nor is Bolt's dash for glory the only cause of much eye-watering among the track and field fraternity.
It is not often that Johnson finds himself on the same page, metaphorically, as Lord Moynihan, the chairman of the British Olympics Association, who is a ferocious anti-drugs campaigner. Yet both are appalled by the gruesome lengths to which many of today's runners will go to elude the drugs police.
Johnson has revealed to me one practice which is as nauseating as it is excruciating. Readers of a squeamish disposition might be advised to skip the next few sentences.
When selected for a test, cheating athletes pee down the lavatory. They then refill their bladders with clean urine and pass that as their sample. Often it is their own urine, collected and stored when they are off steroids, but sometimes it is the urine of relatives or friends who have never used drugs.
The men use a catheter to force the urine back up the urethra. The females refill the bladder by syringing the replacement urine through a tiny tube.
Ben Johnson: 'Whatever anyone says about me and steroids, I would never have done that, never have risked the damage that could do to your body.'
Colin Moynihan: 'We've been told this is going on. We must find a way to stop it. This is not only illegal but disgusting.'
Still want to put your daughter (or son) on the track and field stage, Mrs Worthington?
Both men agree that blood, rather than urine, tests are the answer. Moynihan is privately urging the world and Olympic authorities to introduce them but Johnson says: 'They don't want to do it because it would catch nearly all the athletes and they know that would kill the golden goose which lays all those millions of dollars.'
Officials maintain they are doing all they can to combat drug abuse but Johnson compares those claims to the reluctance of major league sports in America to introduce testing programmes in line with other sports worldwide.
Steroids are reported to be rife in gridiron football. Baseball's all time home-run hitter Barry Bonds not only has an asterix against his record but is under indictment, along with an Olympian string of U.S. runners as a consequence of the BALCO laboratory trials, on drugs-related charges.
Johnson added: 'The Americans are ignorant. The dads spend a thousand dollars a game on seats and food to take their kids to see games played and history made but the owners of the teams know their players are taking drugs.
'Big bucks are at stake but that's not all. The American mentality is that they have to win. That's why they invent games which basically only they play, then they can declare themselves the world champions.'
There are echoes of Johnson's claim in these pages on Saturday that the Americans set him up in Seoul, lacing his drink with a near-lethal dose of one steroid he never used because they knew he would beat their own Carl Lewis to gold.
Few realists - never mind the cynics - will doubt that Johnson is justified in denouncing 'virtually all the top runners' as drugs cheats. Athletics, tainted as it is by those suspicions, will pray that its new 100m world record holder is as innocent as he seems.
A Bolt from the blue? Inevitably, fairly or not, eyebrows will be raised. Not least because Usain, a 200m specialist, was running only the fifth 100m race of his life.
Taking the stuff? As we watch the fastest men on earth hurtle out of their blocks in Beijing this August, we could hardly be blamed for wondering if they are taking the proverbial.
Ben Johnson's wry smile will be even wider this weekend after a lesser-known Jamaican shattered the world 100metres record held by another fellow countryman.
Asafa Powell is not his favourite brother islander, so Johnson was not reaching for the telephone to offer his commiserations as 21-year-old newcomer Usain Bolt became the newest fastest man on Earth in 9.72 seconds.
Scroll down for more
Usain Bolt of Jamaica celebrates after setting a new world record in the men's 100 metres
Powell, in his insistence that he ran clean to the previous mark of 9.74sec, has been just as quick to condemn Johnson for taking the steroids that caused him to be stripped of the world record and Olympic gold medal won in Seoul 20 years ago.
'Asafa is too self-righteous,' says Johnson. 'He has every right to defend himself but not to point a finger at me. I know as well as anyone what goes on down there in Jamaica most of the time.'
The irony is not lost on Johnson that Bolt came out of nowhere in the week he blew the lid off the extent of the steroids culture in athletics.
The exclusive interview Big Ben granted me in his adopted Canada sent seismic shockwaves through the Olympic movement just weeks before the Beijing Games, claiming that virtually all the top athletes use drugs.
Nor is Bolt's dash for glory the only cause of much eye-watering among the track and field fraternity.
It is not often that Johnson finds himself on the same page, metaphorically, as Lord Moynihan, the chairman of the British Olympics Association, who is a ferocious anti-drugs campaigner. Yet both are appalled by the gruesome lengths to which many of today's runners will go to elude the drugs police.
Johnson has revealed to me one practice which is as nauseating as it is excruciating. Readers of a squeamish disposition might be advised to skip the next few sentences.
When selected for a test, cheating athletes pee down the lavatory. They then refill their bladders with clean urine and pass that as their sample. Often it is their own urine, collected and stored when they are off steroids, but sometimes it is the urine of relatives or friends who have never used drugs.
The men use a catheter to force the urine back up the urethra. The females refill the bladder by syringing the replacement urine through a tiny tube.
Ben Johnson: 'Whatever anyone says about me and steroids, I would never have done that, never have risked the damage that could do to your body.'
Colin Moynihan: 'We've been told this is going on. We must find a way to stop it. This is not only illegal but disgusting.'
Still want to put your daughter (or son) on the track and field stage, Mrs Worthington?
Both men agree that blood, rather than urine, tests are the answer. Moynihan is privately urging the world and Olympic authorities to introduce them but Johnson says: 'They don't want to do it because it would catch nearly all the athletes and they know that would kill the golden goose which lays all those millions of dollars.'
Officials maintain they are doing all they can to combat drug abuse but Johnson compares those claims to the reluctance of major league sports in America to introduce testing programmes in line with other sports worldwide.
Steroids are reported to be rife in gridiron football. Baseball's all time home-run hitter Barry Bonds not only has an asterix against his record but is under indictment, along with an Olympian string of U.S. runners as a consequence of the BALCO laboratory trials, on drugs-related charges.
Johnson added: 'The Americans are ignorant. The dads spend a thousand dollars a game on seats and food to take their kids to see games played and history made but the owners of the teams know their players are taking drugs.
'Big bucks are at stake but that's not all. The American mentality is that they have to win. That's why they invent games which basically only they play, then they can declare themselves the world champions.'
There are echoes of Johnson's claim in these pages on Saturday that the Americans set him up in Seoul, lacing his drink with a near-lethal dose of one steroid he never used because they knew he would beat their own Carl Lewis to gold.
Few realists - never mind the cynics - will doubt that Johnson is justified in denouncing 'virtually all the top runners' as drugs cheats. Athletics, tainted as it is by those suspicions, will pray that its new 100m world record holder is as innocent as he seems.
A Bolt from the blue? Inevitably, fairly or not, eyebrows will be raised. Not least because Usain, a 200m specialist, was running only the fifth 100m race of his life.
Taking the stuff? As we watch the fastest men on earth hurtle out of their blocks in Beijing this August, we could hardly be blamed for wondering if they are taking the proverbial.
Skepticism is rife in the regarding Usain Bolt's world record run of 9.72 seconds at the Grand Prix Meet in on Saturday.
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