Moments before the finals of the 100m dash at the 1984 Olympic Games, Ben Johnson took his place in the starting blocks.
He was little known outside of his homeland of Canada, but this was his chance for glory.
There are three signature events that define the Summer Olympics. The marathon defines the greatest distance runner; the decathlon, the world's greatest athlete.
But the Olympic 100 meter dash determines the fastest man on the planet. He wanted it so badly; years of hard work had come down to this pending ten-second burst of energy.
But there was something he wanted more than the title of the World's Fastest Man. Something he could earn on the track that day that meant more to him than the gold medal.
He wanted to beat Carl Lewis.
He couldn't stand Lewis, and there was nothing Johnson wanted more than to be the man that stopped Lewis from achieving his dream of matching Jesse Owens' four gold medals from Berlin in 1932.
Johnson, starting in lane 4, came out of the blocks well. At 40 meters he was running neck and neck with American Sam Graddy, who was to his right in lane 5.
With 15 meters to go, he allowed himself a furtive look to his right to see if it was to be he or Graddy for the gold.
That's when he saw Lewis, running far ahead in 6, preparing to
raise his arms in victory, in his first of four gold medal performances.
Johnson settled for bronze, and heartbreak. And he vowed on that day that it would never happen again.
His dreams of gold in 1988 were sidetracked in February of that year, when he hurt his hamstring. When he aggravated the injury again in May, his Olympic dream seemed lost, and desire to beat Lewis swept away.
Lewis, knowing of Johnson's disdain for him, brought out the needle. In August, just before the Olympics, Lewis beat Johnson again, and
let him hear about it.
"The gold medal for the 100 meters is mine," Lewis said at the time. "I will never again lose to Johnson."Oh, but he did.
In the finals of the Olympics in 1988, Ben Johnson shocked the world by not only winning gold, but by also shattering the world record. He destroyed Carl Lewis in the race and treasured every moment of making Lewis go to the podium and listen to "Oh, Canada!" instead of "The Star Spangled Banner."
But, as the world came to know, it was all a fraud. Johnson tested positive for steroids, and his gold medal was stripped 3 days later. He later admitted that he had been using steroids when he won the world championship in 1987, and that was stripped of him as well. His world record was removed from the books.
The desire for glory, fame and money had been too much, the temptation too great. He had cheated. He had broken with the Olympic ideal. He wasn't the first, and he will not be the last.
One of the main reasons for starting this blog is not just to discuss disability issues, but to point out that people with disabilities are, in so many ways, just like everybody else. They may have challenges others don't, but they are people first and foremost, and they have the same strengths and weaknesses as everyone else.
And there can be no clearer example than the news coming out of Beijing's Paralympics that, apparently, some competitors are following Ben Johnson's lead.
They are cheating their butts off.
How do disabled athletes cheat? Let me count the ways.
Take the case of
Irish Paralympian Derek Malone. He's been kicked out of the Paralympian soccer tournament for athletes with cerebral palsy. The reason? No one believes he has cerebral palsy. He doesn't appear to have any symptoms of it, a fact that Malone attributes to his extensive exercise regime:
"Cerebral palsy has shown to be a very trainable condition but if you stop training for any length of time, the symptoms will return. There's no cure for cerebral palsy."
"I refuse to let a flawed process cast aspersions on the integrity of the achievements I have made," Malone said. Those accomplishments include a
2004 bronze medal in the 800 meter run.
The Dutch soccer coach - after watching his team get hammered 12-1 by Russia - questioned how disabled the other team had been, saying he felt some of them were good enough to play professionally.
And outside of death penalty criminal cases, you don't often see people purposefully deflating their own IQ scores. One does not often hear someone at a cocktail reception lying about how they totally botched the Stanford-Binet.
But in 2000, the Spanish Paralympic basketball team fraudently lowered the IQ scores of its players on their way to a gold medal. It was later found out that 10 of the 12 players IQ scores were too high.
And, perhaps more amazingly, are some of things athletes with disabilities do to themselves physically to give them an edge in competition.
In 2000, 14 Paralympians tested positive for steroids; 10 were weightlifters. Athletes have also been known to raise their blood sugar levels, to increase stamina and energy. But those are the common ways - the ways non-disabled athletes also cheat.
Some disabled athletes who cheat are known as "boosters," people who look to get more out of their body by artificial means:
To do this they don't take drugs - instead, they injure themselves to trick their bodies into boosting performance.
Some of the ways that Paralympic athletes "boost'' include sitting on pins, thumb tacks or ball bearings, turning off their catheters - allowing fluid to build up inside the body - while some male athletes who go so far as to tie wire around their genital area.
No way in the world. I want to win as much as the next guy, but come on.
The next time I watch a wheelchair race, I'm going to have a hard time getting that visual out of my mind.
Cheating is always wrong, and these athletes should all be punished, if not expelled. They violated the Olympic creed which says, in part, "not the triumph, but the struggle." We can't have it.
But in a perverse way, it's nice to know that Paralympians want it just as badly as Olympians do.
If more people in these United States were like the good and faithful congregants of the Union Hill United Methodist Church, there might have no need for the passing of the ADA.
