On September 24, 1988, Ben Johnson ran the 100 meters at the Seoul Olympics in 9.79 seconds, a time no sprinter had run before. Two mornings later, at 1:45 a.m., Carol Anne Letheren, chef de mission of Canada's Olympic team, was woken in her hotel room by a hand-delivered letter from Prince Alexandre de Merode, chairman of the International Olympic Committee's Medical Commission. A first test on Johnson's urine, drawn after the race, had come back positive. The letter did not yet say for what.
At the Olympic laboratory that morning, doctors told Johnson his urine had tested positive and asked whether he had ever taken a banned substance; he said he had not. Only when they named the substance, stanozolol, did Johnson offer an explanation: a stranger, in a doping-control room his own entourage described as loosely guarded, must have slipped it into him after the race. Canadian officials spent the afternoon building an appeal around that account, and IOC vice president Richard Pound carried it into the Medical Commission's hearing that evening. It was the only explanation consistent with Johnson never having used the drug at all.
The sabotage story needed one fact to hold: that the stanozolol had entered Johnson's body once, and recently. Professor Manfred Donike, a member of the commission's subcommittee on doping and biochemistry, had already read the laboratory's full analysis of the sample, and in the commission's own language it was inconsistent with a single application and indicated long-term use. Nobody can produce a long-term-use pattern by slipping a dose into a drink after a race is already run; a single dose and repeated use leave different signatures, and a signature does not take instruction from whatever defense is needed. The commission deliberated for about two hours and rejected the appeal.
The IOC's own statement the next morning said as much, in the chemistry's own terms: the committee had weighed the sabotage claim against the steroid profile and found the two could not both be true. Officials had already retrieved Johnson's gold medal from his hotel room before dawn. Two years later, a government inquiry led by Ontario's Chief Justice Charles Dubin filled in where the drug had come from: vials of stanozolol, chemically identical to a veterinary formulation, administered to Johnson in Toronto that August by his own coach and physician, who had told the world on television and in print that he had never used steroids at all. The Commissioner's own finding tied the two accounts together: the Seoul sample's indication of long-term use, he wrote, was consistent with the injections Johnson's coach and physician had just described.
A test that only answers yes or no invites an argument about what else might explain the answer. A measurement detailed enough to carry a history is harder to talk around, because disputing it means accounting for a pattern built from repeated use, not one inconvenient fact. Johnson's body had been keeping a record of its own since August, and no story told in September could revise what it had already written.