A look back at a defining moment in Canadian sports: the Ben Johnson drug scandal.  Twenty-five years ago, Johnson won gold with a world record in the 100-metres at the Seoul Olympics. But the victory celebration was short-lived and would last no more than a couple of days before questions started arising about Johnson's drug use. 

Jeff Goodes sits in for Michael Enright. His special guest is Mark Lee of CBC Sports.

It was one of the most defining moments in Canadian sports:

The Date: September, 1988.  The time 9.79 seconds. Ben Johnson wins gold in the 100-metre race at the Seoul Olympics.

It was the too-good-to-be true story of a young boy, raised by a single-mom, brought under the wing of a visionary trainer, and then groomed to be a world-class track star, was just that, too good to be true.

It was the ugly climax of a long and ultimately tragic story. 

On this edition of Rewind we discover the details of this fascinating tale with the help of someone who followed the story very closely. Mark Lee is a sports journalist. You know him for his play-by-play coverage on Hockey Night in Canada, many Grey Cups, the Olympics (most recently Beijing), and way back during his humble roots in radio, when Mark Lee was a sports reporter as well as host of the program The Inside Track.  

The first clip was from 1986, two years before Seoul Olympics. It's from a report Mark did for The Inside Track in 1986 and was a lead-up to the Commonwealth Games in Scotland. He had created an excellent backgrounder on a young Ben Johnson and his coach Charlie Francis.

Not everyone liked Charlie Francis' coaching techniques, but one thing you couldn't argue is that his techniques worked. The second clip was with Mark and Vicki Gabereau, along with Ron Wilson in July 1986.

Ben Johnson took gold at the 1986 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh.

Ben Johnson's great rival at the time was the American Sprinter Carl Lewis. They had a history of rivalry. In 1984 at the Los Angeles Olympics Johnson lost to Lewis. In 1985 he beat Lewis for first time and, by 1987 at the World Track and Field Championships had won 4 races against Lewis.

The next clip was one of the defining moments in that rivalry. It was at the 1987 World Championship in Athletics in Rome. Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis faced off in the 100-metre event. Ben Johnson won that race and set a new world record in the 100-metres.
Here's an interesting statistic: East Germany was the top medal winner. 31 medals including 10 golds. The question is: how clean were those East German athletes? The East German medals still stand, but Ben Johnson is now literally a Wikipedia footnote as far as that competition goes. He was stripped of his 1987 World Championship gold medal after the steroid scandal. 

But that's moving ahead too quickly. In 1987 Ben's career was sky-rocketing. He was working towards the Seoul Olympics.

Our next piece of tape told the story of that increased attention. Rewind featured a report by Dave Downey that had aired as part of a documentary on CBC Radio's Sunday Morning and focused on the financial pressure Ben was under. It was just a couple of weeks before Ben's big race in September 1988.

We pick up the story in Seoul. It was September 24, 1988. It's a day that would be the most important of Johnson's career, but for all the wrong reasons.

Up next, we played that famous clip of the men's 100-metre final from the 1988 Seoul Olympics as heard on CBC Radio.

We all know now what was coming, but for that little slice of time, Ben Johnson and Canada were on top of the world. 

If only the story had ended there. But there was a drug test and a drug called Stanazanol was found in Ben's sample.

Ben Johnson was stripped of his gold medal shortly afterwards. And then came the search for explanation and the blame. The Canadian government set up the Dubin Inquiry or as it was officially called "the Commission of Inquiry Into the Use of Drugs and Banned Practices Intended to Increase Athletic Performance." It lasted for close to eight months with 119 witnesses and a lot of shocking testimony. 

In October 1989 As It Happens presented a montage of testimony from the Dubin Enquiry. The voices included: Ben Johnson, his coach Charlie Francis, a phone call between Charlie Francis and his doctor George Astaphan and sprinter Angela Issajenko.
Charlie Francis, Ben's coach said that if Ben Johnson wanted to "set up his starting blocks at the same level" as the other athletes, he had to take steroids.

Ben Johnson was given a two year ban but was then allowed to compete again. He competed at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 --but didn't place. Then in 1993, he tested positive at a competition In France.  And that was it.  Lifetime ban.

It was a different story for his archrival Carl Lewis. He was never penalized for doping even though before the Seoul Olympics he was caught with banned drugs in his system which he said he had taken by mistake. He was believed and there was no penalty for Lewis. At the 1991 World Championships in Tokyo, he set a world record in the 100-metres in 9.86 seconds. At the 92 Barcelona Olympics, he picked up two gold medals in the relay and the long jump. In Atlanta in 1996, he struck gold again in the long jump. Lewis retired from track and field in 1997.

Ben Johnson now works as a coach in Toronto. He popped up in the news this past summer when he showed up at an amateur track meet in Toronto and ran a relay race.  At 51, he still had it.

The last clip we aired was Ben Johnson in his own words. It aired on The Inside Track in 2006. Robin Brown asked Ben Johnson if he felt like a cheater.