Walker: Athens 2004: TEST

1988.

Chapter 1

Bentley, you’re a disgrace, shouted a threatening London accent from the midst of a pack of two hundred supporters and reporters assembled to watch and report on the 100 metres men’s sprint final at the 2003 World Athletics Championship in Paris - a year prior to what was expected to be the greatest Olympics of the modern era in Athens in 2004. They had returned at early morning to stand in silence listening to the Chairman of the World Championship Committee confirm that Bentley had tested positive for Nandralone, at +200 times the normal level. The Brits screamed derision and hatred like a lynch mob.

It was fifteen years since Ben Johnson’s disqualification in the 1988 Olympic 100-metre final, and anything like this had happened at a major world athletics championship.

Haven’t these guys learned by now? said an American journalist, or at least found a way of cheating and not being caught, he went on.

Now the Brits are at the bottom of the pile, said his friend.

They’ll destroy the seedlings from which athletes grow if something isn’t done.

When will they learn that cheats don’t win? continued the first guy.

Sometimes they do, said his friend.

I knew that too, and so did Bentley. But it didn’t alter the fact that this disaster wasn’t just Bentley’s, it was also the entire British team’s and as the American had put it.

The Brits are at the bottom of the pile.

At least he hadn’t denied the finding of the testers like every other athlete with a plus 200 Nandrolone reading had always done. Yesterday, I had reported for the Telegraph Bentley’s unexpected victory and predicted him as a future Olympic champion. This morning, he was a disgraced athlete whose career was ended having achieved nothing.

This huge gathering of reporters and supporters had been attracted by speculation and rumours during the night over Bentley’s post race drug test. At 8.00 p.m. after sending off my report on the day’s performances, the press office received an unconfirmed report that a sprinter had tested positive. The report had circulated like rumours do, so that by 7.00 a.m. there were 200 Athletics press, officials and supporters gathered inside and outside the testing headquarters at the Stade de France in a northern suburb of Paris. The British 100-metre runner, David Bentley, came into the packed foyer of the testing centre, flanked by three French officials. He stood, as he had on the winner’s rostrum, as alone as he had raced out of the starting blocks at the sound of the gun, silent. How desperate he will have felt. After a sleepless night of emotional pain, here he was to face the music and a punishment that many would think would far outweigh the crime.

I have nothing to say, was all he said, to a barrage of questions that followed the findings of the International Athletics Committee. Amidst abuse and anger, he eased his way to a side exit, and into a waiting car that drove him away to anonymity and the everlasting loneliness of the disgraced athlete.

I had already alerted my sports editor, Jack Galloway, that Bentley had been asked to the stadium at 8.00 a.m. When I spoke to him the previous evening, he seemed to know already, so I agreed to report again after this momentous meeting, which I did. Bentley was officially disqualified, returned his gold medal, made his I have nothing to say comment to the world’s press and TV, and departed Paris.

We have to do something, before it’s too late and before the Olympics in Athens, next August, said Jack, knowing that unless something dramatic was done this would drag on in the world’s sports press all through the build up to the Games. In truth, all that could be done in the time left, exactly one year, was to limit the damage.

Stay in Paris for two days and report on the reaction of the foreign press. By then, I will be ready, he said. So I stayed and covered every nasty report on Bentley.

Jack had appointed me to athletics because he loved the sport and I was his protégé. This business with Bentley disgraced the sport he’d spent his life ennobling, lifting the athlete above the ordinary, compensating for their sometimes lack of worldly wisdom, and education; placing them on pedestals above their achievements, building their confidence, and rounding them into people who had futures with families, and in modern times, fortunes to invest, living comfortably, and anticipating that one day they would give something back to the sport. He’d done for them, what he was doing for me as a sports journalist. He knew the athletics clubs where the coaches and athletes experimented with substances, trying to find an undetectable mix of banned substances that worked, succeeding until they became over confident or made one careless mistake. Jack never let it dampen his endeavour or spoil his lifelong ideals and love for athletics.

After two days reporting on the press’ condemnation of another cheating athlete, I resented Bentley’s actions at these championships. In a pre-Olympic year, we feared a repeat of Seoul in Athens, especially as four months earlier, new revelations had come to light that in the run-up to the US Olympic trials in 1988, Carl Lewis, an 8 time Olympic gold medallist had been a performance enhancing drug abuser. The British athletes would not talk; they were traumatised and frightened. It was a bad experience for a team where 99% of athletes were clean. Now a nervousness about testing had crept in. The British Amateur Athletic Authorities were nowhere to be seen, the athletes were on their own, like Bentley, without coach, manager, or BAAA representative to support them. It was their view that only the ill advised or the foolish got caught, and they didn’t want to be associated with either. The mauling for Bentley and the British team came principally from the entire foreign press. Russia, Switzerland and France particularly took revenge against the ‘holier than thou’ Brits, after years of their occupation of the moral high ground.

For me, athletics was becoming an ordeal. I couldn’t see a happy future reporting on it. Anything was better than working on something blessed with the kiss of death, even if it meant missing a month at the Olympics in Athens in August 2004.

Rugby, immediate and exciting, was my game but the papers’ coverage was already intense with six reporters during the winter sports season doing nothing else. It was disproportionate, but the Telegraph readership demanded it. Rugby wasn’t Jack’s game; nobody played rugby in Bermondsey, where he was brought up. Soccer was his game and Millwall was his team. He left rugby to Selwyn Jones, Gareth Morgan, Evan Hughes, and the others who’d played for Pontypool at various times a couple of decades ago when the famous Pontypool front row had dominated the Welsh international game. I’d have done anything to join the rugby reporting team.

Archer had selected from dozens of Oxbridge applicants for junior sports reporter on the paper. After two interviews with personnel, the third, the one that mattered, was with Jack. In 2001, they’d hired four junior reporters, one in sports, and Archer had got it. He didn’t know why. Perhaps it was his aggressive manner, and that he liked to call the shots. It was probably that Jack liked him.

Wigan was where, as a schoolboy aged 15, he’d run a 12.0 second 100 metres to win the under-16 100 metres All-England Schoolboy Final at Crystal Palace. After that, he had played rugby union on the wing for Orrell and as an amateur for Wigan Rugby League, who at that time were the best rugby league club in the world. They offered him good money to become a professional, and if he thought he could have made it to the top in League or Union, he’d have taken it. He didn’t believe he was physically or intellectually suited to become a professional sportsman.

He’d been adopted at 12 weeks and his childhood, with his adopted parents, had been extremely happy. The love he had for his adopted parents had never created the desire to seek out his real mother or to learn of the circumstances involved with her decision to let him be adopted. To his mum, Iris and dad, Ted, he had been a gift from God. He had grown up with their values, which he lived by and they had loved him, as he loved them.

She had taught him to read books. She’d once been on an Arvon writers’ course in Yorkshire to learn how to write books, but she never did. He had taught him to play rugby.

Jack could not understand why Archer never wanted to know about his real parents.

I’ve got everything, they may have nothing. Why should I invade their privacy, embarrass them, or destroy something they have. One day I might get a call, he said to Jack, who’d guessed that rejection lingered somewhere in Archer.

Archer always gave of his best so he never felt any obligation to be grateful to his employers. What he earned he deserved and although he’d challenge Jack’s viewpoint on most things if he believed otherwise, Jack usually knew best.

Jack believed that sports journalism was an elevated form of writing, and the finished article, a work of art, like a painting or a sculpture. His editorials read like those of the great sports writers of the pre-television era; Edgar Turner, Alan Hoby, Denzil Batchelor, and Sinclair Lewis the Nobel Prize winning author who started as a boxing writer. Paul Calico, a boxing writer and novelist wrote: ‘Boxing is a sport capable of ennobling a man, the way a title is won or lost.’ He dug deep inside boxers, discovered where they come from, what they were about and described the spirit and humility of the champions and the losers, with an educated knowledge of the sport and an economy of language readers understood. From the minds of these writers, sports journalism revealed truths about people in all walks of life.

Jack had seen Hurst’s 1966 world cup hat trick, Ali -v- Frazier’s 1971 battle at Madison Square Garden, Ali -v- Foreman’s ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ in 1974. From these reports in the archives, you could relive these great sports moments of history. In 45 years he’d visited every sporting venue of importance in the world, and been at most Cup Finals, Boxing Championships, Twickenham and Wimbledon. He was a member of countless football, golf, cricket, rugby and rowing clubs throughout the world, and was frequently named among their honorary members.

His promotion to Sports Editor had not been meteoric. He was 44 when he got the job, after 25 years as a sports writer, during which time he had become an expert on most modern sports. He’d won Sports Journalist of the Year three times and in 1992 he was Sports Editor of the Year. His reputation, opinions and views on sports carried considerable weight and his reputation was that if there was something wrong in a sport, if it was crooked, unfair, against the rules, his sports pages would get to it, bring it out, and campaign about it so that injustices could be put right.

There were always issues in sports which needed writing about, and Jack believed no sport was outside of politics. His reporters had to be constructive with no witchhunts. The guilty could be allowed to escape, but with convincing proof he’d get them eventually, off the page - round the back - and when a cause demanded it, and there was no other way, below the belt.

At The Telegraph, open plan offices were fashionable, although editors operated behind half glazed windows and closed doors where they could destroy illusions of ego and pride without the world listening. Junior reporters watched them through the glass divide, correcting, improving and repositioning their articles on page layouts - news, gossip, stories of triumphs and disasters - that as editors and experienced journalists they fashioned into the headlines for the day. After re-drafts, coffee, more re-drafts, and more coffee, a junior might be sent out for additional material, more facts, a different story, or a new line on the same story, until their knowledge and insights of particular sports eventually gained them promotion to reporter with their name printed on the page. Which, in Paris, Archer was still aspiring to.

All sports writers began the same way at the Telegraph covering the ‘non-headline’ sports; fishing, volleyball, netball, squash, rackets, developing the skills to convey the essence of the game and generating interest from an informed audience, and bringing these minority sports to a wider audience. In the nineteen eighties, athletics had been a major sport in the UK. Now it was in between - could go either way. With Bentley it looked certain to take a dive.

Archer’s desk was 10 metres, twenty paces and a half dozen cluttered desks from Jack’s half-glazed office door. He could see him working, arranging articles, like a tailor preparing to cut a suit from a single piece of cloth. It could be done on a computer screen but to give each report balance he needed to see the words, the print size, laid out in a full-page format. The words had to play a tune before he would press the button and that page got into print.

Archer was only pretending to work, watching Jack out of the corner of his eye. His movements and actions suggested he wanted a row with somebody and he knew it was him, so he had to be ready. He was too controlled to explode impulsively. He measured his anger, and after 15 minutes simmering, ratcheting it up, he’d confront the subject of his anger and then he would hit the roof.

Precisely the second he’d anticipated, Jack glared through the glazed window at Archer and beckoned him with his right index finger to come to his office.

He’d known it, all the while he’d sat, unable to concentrate on anything, other than the awful anticipation of knowing it was him.

He rose like a boxer from his stool at the bell, frightened, resigned, advancing towards an opponent who could flatten him with a single punch. Boxers had referees to protect them. Seconds to drag them back onto the stool at the end of three minutes, stick a plastic bottle of warm water in their mouth, clean ‘em up, stem the bleeding, iron out the swellings with the ice pad, and most importantly, tell them what to do next before shoving them back in for more. They could also throw in the towel, and protect you from more punishment. In Jack’s office he was on his own. Jack gazed at the pages laid out on his desk and waited for Archer to speak, throw the first nervous, tentative punch that he could duck and return a measured counter, a perfectly timed verbal left hook, and realise Archer’s worse fear, knock him cold with the first punch. He knew what Archer was thinking; he’d decades of experience in dealing with junior reporters.

Archer closed the door while Jack continued gazing at the partly finished sports pages.

Yes, Jack? he said, lowering his voice and gazing at the typed articles all over Jack’s desk, searching for his own contribution.

Don’t sit down and SHUT UP, he said, lifting his eyes for one second to look Archer in the eye. One word and I’ll kick your arse through that door, and out of this building, he said, sliding the article Archer had written for the next morning’s edition across his desk towards him.

This is the third time you’ve shoved that shit down my throat.

Clemence’s urine samples have been negative for a year, and with Bentley gone, he’s our only athlete capable of winning a sprint medal in Athens.

We can’t take another Bentley, said Archer, and in Athens, he’ll be found out.

If there is anything in Clemence’s samples, our testers will find it before he departs for Athens.

They think we’ll ignore any positive test to keep anyone with a chance in the team.

I’m not a tester or on the selection committee, so I don’t know. But if I find that out, I’ll publish it. This is a personal attack, he said, gesturing towards Archer’s article.

You’ve a grudge against Clemence because he beat you in the Schoolboy Championships years ago, he said, pointing his finger across the desk at Archer.

I’ve forgotten that, said Archer, embarrassed that Jack should wrongly think that he’d write anything subjectively.

Well I haven’t forgotten, he said. Don’t behave like an arse-hole, or I’ll file your name with the Unemployed.

‘Attack!’ a little voice kept saying to Archer, ‘You know you’re right about Clemence’, it said, but prudence prevailed. If this had been the first time he’d challenged Jack about Clemence, he might have - but he had no proof like there was with Bentley.

He’d watched Clemence training that very morning. The UK sprint team knew that Clemence had been on a sophisticated drugs programme for ages. They had thought Bentley was clean - now they didn’t know what to think.

Clemence’s coach has a system that masks and neutralises the effect of performance enhancers immediately after performing, before drugs test can be taken so there is no proof. Archer knew that, so he had decided to try one last time to get Jack to print his story. Jack didn’t see it his way.

You will damage the reputation of this newspaper with this kind of attack, unless you have evidence, and you haven’t. If this is all you can do, get a job on the Reflector, he said referring to a tabloid that writes lies about sports and had lost a lawsuit to a well-known sportsman. You’re here to write factual reports, not land us in court.

Jack fully understood the drugs culture in athletics - and in other sports, like cycling, where drug use was highly publicised.

You’ve got to like the athletes, said Archer. Go to the clubs, travel with them, understand what sort of people they are and where they come from. Clemence is a fast sprinter but that is all he is. He is a young man in need of help. He is not an ogre, a murderer or a thief. He was encouraged to run at the youth club in Hackney because he was tall, thin and black. He’s the UK champ, and we think, and probably we can prove, he’s into all sorts of performance enhancing drugs. Exposing him is not the answer. We must show the competitors another way. In my day, I paid athletes’ bus fares to meetings because there’s never been money for club athletes. I wrote about their injuries, pain, endurance and spirit, in a way that uplifted the sport. I never engaged in character assassination or feuding.

Bentley was caught, Clemence has been lucky, but he’ll go the same way, if we don’t rescue him. Telling the public what they don’t want to hear when you can’t prove it, is not the right way.

Wexford trains him, makes him believe in himself, gives him confidence. Athletes need that kind of help.

Winning races takes place in the mind. Clemence doesn’t believe he is as good as he is and Wexford has persuaded him to take these substances. So far he’s never tested positive, said Jack.

Bentley has, so he’s finished. You have no proof, so forget it.

Ben Johnson had a 6 year programme of drug use before the Seoul Olympics. He’d set a world record - without testing positive. He didn’t make a mistake until the 17th of August 1988, in Zurich, at the pre-Olympic meeting. He wasn’t ready or completely fit but the prize money was huge, $200,000 to the winner, and $150,000 appearance money to Johnson, the fastest man in history. So he ran. Carl Lewis won in 9.92 seconds; Johnson was third in 10.0 seconds. The defeat destroyed his confidence and his belief he could win at the Olympics in Seoul. Instead of obeying Astaphan, his doctor who had always prescribed and administered the doses, the memory of Zurich wouldn’t go away. So he gambled, and continued his steroid programme up until the 3rd September. Did he carry on using steroids until it was too late by accident, or did he gamble he wouldn’t be tested? Perhaps he wanted to be found out, on the biggest stage - we’ll never know, unless he tells us. If he’d stopped before September 3rd, the tests would have detected nothing but he continued without telling his doctor, or coach. We know the rest. Nowadays it’s different, we have random, mid-season, in your own home tests.

Athletes like Johnson and Clemence can control steroid use and we won’t stop them with exposure articles like this, he said, holding up Archer’s 750-word script. This will backfire on the sport of athletics and the reputation of this paper. If I get this again from you, you’re out, fired, whatever you want to call it, he said, dropping Archer’s article about Clemence into his waste bin.

I want 650 words on Clemence’s performance on Friday evening, in the next 30 minutes, he said, looking at the clock hanging over the door.

It didn’t take one second eyeballing Jack to know that he could have blown a job he loved, and ruined a relationship with a man he respected. He returned to his desk. He’d survived.

He’d tried three times to expose Clemence, and each time Jack had buried it. At last he was beginning to understand what he was saying. How thick he must seem to Jack.

If he’d been sacked, no other newspaper would hire him and his two years on The Telegraph would have been thrown away because everyone knew Jack was the best Sports Editor in the business and if he fired you, you were dead.

He had an unquenchable journalists desire to tell the truth - the whole truth and nothing but with compassion and understanding. Which was not always what editors did because sometimes politics played a part and editors had to play along.

In 30 minutes he returned 650 words to Jack’s desk. His amiable, constructive editor restored, the aggression and anger gone. He stood while Jack read his re-write and before Archer could return to his desk, he said Sit down.

I want to tell you a story that might help you with this Bentley business, and prevent a Clemence disaster.

Barring a random test, Clemence will test negative as long as Wexford, who knows how to program him, remains his coach and Clemence obeys his orders.

What we have to prove to the athletes, not our readers, is that performance enhanced athletes will lose to exceptionally trained athletes, and that training is the only answer. Then it will be all over for the cheats. Cheats cheat because they think it’s the only way.

I know of an athlete who can run, jump, throw and break world records and, if he wanted, re-write the entire record books.

His name is Walker. No connection with the New Zealander, the great 1970’s and 1980’s 1500-metre world champion. I have seen him perform incredible feats. Jumping, running, throwing and occasionally he has unofficially broken world records in various events.

I witnessed these feats on his own private running track when he felt he should prove to me the results of his experiments on the human body. He didn’t tell me everything. If he had, I wouldn’t have believed him. He drew me in gradually, every step of the way, with proof. Over time, he has proved everything to me and, in return for my loyalty supporting him and maintaining his secrecy, he has promised me that if the spirit of the sport of athletics was ever threatened, he would demonstrate to everyone in the world what he has shown me and how he achieves these performances, which are entirely through a sophisticated training program.

Recently, there has been revelations that Carl Lewis failed three drug tests as early as July 1988, but was allowed to compete in the Seoul Olympics, and keep the 100-metres gold medal he snatched from Johnson.

Then there was the blood doping business earlier this year among the UK team.

Perhaps the time has arrived for me to ask Walker to help. Let me tell you about him briefly. He was once world record holder for the 100 metres.

Where does he live?

In Yorkshire. In a forest, in the heart of the north Yorkshire moors. I want you to meet him and, as I need a break, tomorrow seems as good a time as any. It’s a long walk across the moors to his place, so you need some hiking boots. I’ll take you in the morning, he said.

After giving Archer some instructions about clothing, and when and where to meet him the next day at noon, he finished editing the 12 pages that made up the Sports Section of the Morning Telegraph by 1.00 a.m. This Monday’s edition had gone badly, apart from his disagreement with Archer. Crowd trouble at the European Soccer Champions Cup match in Amsterdam between Dynamo and United had delayed kick off. So the match reports from Holland were late. The game had finished 4-4. United 3-0 up at half time against a mighty wind in the second half had blown it, conceding 4 in the first 22 minutes of the second half. They remained 4-3 behind until a penalty two minutes into stoppage time, scored by United striker Stuart Simmonds, took the English Champions into a scoreless extra time, and a dramatic 3-1 penalty shoot-out win. The match commentaries about this thriller took up the entire back page, with a double spread continuation inside the back cover, and half an hour of Jack’s editorial skills to ensure that the game got accurate coverage. Only after he’d read Archer’s re-written athletics report, to see that he’d not retained a single reference to the matter he’d demanded out, did he push the button to the typesetters and leave the building.

It was a mild, moonless night as he drove home along a lamp-lit silent embankment, past Big Ben, the House of Commons, Albert Bridge, the Tate Gallery, across Vauxhall Bridge and on. In choosing to tell Archer about Walker, he had made one of the most momentous decisions in his life and he wanted to think about how he’d speak to Walker before he got home and prepared himself for the next day’s expedition to Yorkshire. Instead of driving on through Brixton and South London to his house in Surrey, he took a left turn. Not, as he often did, to relax, and join his journalist friends at the Devil for a pint.

Archer had tired him. He was the same up and at ‘em person Galloway had been at his age and the reason why, after watching him for two years work diligently, sometimes passionately, covering big and small sports and athletics meetings, he’d chosen him to take over something that he regarded as his life’s work. Archer wouldn’t get sucked into anything without purpose. He would require all of his selling skills.

Walker had been his life’s mission, which he knew now he couldn’t conclude in his lifetime, so to provide continuity, somebody had to carry on and Archer fitted the bill. Clemence’s recent performances had convinced him that Walker must return, if the integrity of the sport of athletics