Ben Johnson at 36: The Disgraced Sprinter Who Still Outruns Global Hypocrisy

The Curious Case of Ben Johnson: How a Sprinter Still Outruns the World’s Moral High Ground
By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk

There are moments in global history that feel like cosmic punch-lines, and the fall of Ben Johnson is one of the few that keeps giving—like a re-gifted fruitcake laced with stanozolol. Thirty-six years after the Canadian sprinter exploded out of lane six in Seoul, chemically turbo-charged and still somehow shocked to be caught, the planet continues to sprint in circles chasing his ghost. Because if you look closely, Ben Johnson isn’t merely a disgraced athlete; he is the International Olympic Committee’s original sin wearing Nikes, a living reminder that geopolitics, pharmacology, and human vanity are the true triple jump.

Picture the scene: September 24, 1988. The Cold War is wheezing its last, the Berlin Wall is taking bookings for demolition parties, and the world still thinks “Just Say No” is a viable drug policy. Johnson crosses the line in 9.79 seconds, faster than a Moscow bread queue, and for roughly 48 hours Canada treats him like a polite Wayne Gretzky. Then the steroid tests come back hotter than a reactor in Chernobyl and—poof—national hero morphs into Caribbean-born scapegoat quicker than you can say “systemic oversight.” Cue global gasping, finger-pointing, and the ritual torching of Wheaties boxes.

But the joke never really ends; it just updates its passport. Every four years, like an Olympic strain of herpes, the Ben Johnson narrative resurfaces: Russia’s state-sponsored doping scandal, China’s teenage swimmers with pharmacological back-stories, Kenya’s marathoners dodging testers more nimbly than traffic. Each revelation is announced with the same solemn gravity a pope might reserve for schism, only to dissolve into the familiar puddle of sponsor panic and selective amnesia. Nike drops an athlete here, Adidas picks one up there; stock prices do the 100-meter bounce, and the only consistent winner is the broadcast rights holder.

The international significance? Johnson was the beta test for how the modern world metabolizes shame. Strip the medals, hold the hearings, commission the report—then quietly re-hire the coaches, repackage the lab, and raise the price of the shoe. In 1988, the scandal felt apocalyptic; today it’s just another quarterly earnings call. The World Anti-Doping Agency issues stern press releases with the regularity of Swiss trains, while biotech companies in South Korea and Switzerland patent ever subtler ways to make humans faster, stronger, and slightly more fluorescent under UV light. Call it innovation; call it fraud; call it whatever helps you sleep on memory-foam mattresses paid for by performance bonuses.

Meanwhile, the Global South watches the circus with the weary amusement of a bodega owner tallying lottery tickets. Western media still frames doping as a moral failing rather than an economic survival strategy—because nothing says “level playing field” quite like an Eton-educated rower with a nutritional team the size of Fiji’s Olympic delegation. Johnson, born in Jamaica, naturalized in Canada, vilified everywhere, became the poster child for a world that loves a villain with the right accent. Swap the passport and the narrative flips: American darling with asthma meds? Therapeutic use exemption. East African with altitude genes? Suspect. Russian with cough syrup? Lifetime ban. The arbitrariness is so precise it could only be international law.

And yet, like any good cautionary tale, Johnson himself has monetized the moral hangover. He makes a tidy living on the after-dinner circuit, selling keynote speeches about redemption to corporations who need a team-building metaphor that isn’t “fraud.” Last year he appeared in an Italian sports-betting ad, sprinting past CGI sniffer dogs while a voice-over intoned, “Everyone deserves a second chance—especially if the odds are 4-to-1.” You couldn’t invent darker satire if you worked for Black Mirror on commission.

So here we are, Tokyo to Paris, Qatar to L.A., still running relay races with the same baton soaked in hubris. The stadiums get shinier, the tests more sensitive, the excuses more multilingual. And somewhere in the VIP lounge, Ben Johnson sips a club soda, watches the heats, and allows himself the faintest smile: proof that the fastest man alive was never the problem—he was merely the diagnostic showing the rest of us how slow we are to learn.