50 stunning Olympic moments No36: Linford Christie wins gold in 1992 | Rob Bagchi (original) (raw)

The two pitfalls confronting considerations of Linford Christie’s victory in the 100m at the Barcelona Games in 1992 are cynicism and naivety. How much more straightforward the assignment would be were it not for Christie’s positive test for nandrolone in 1999 and subsequent two-year ban from athletics?

He has always maintained his innocence of doping and last year insisted in an interview with the Independent on Sunday’s Alan Hubbard that his sample had been contaminated. Yet whether you find his defence plausible or not – or similar arguments about tainted nutritional supplements a number of high-profile runners that year, including Merlene Ottey, Dieter Baumann, Mark Richardson and Dougie Walker, say they took in ignorance – it is impossible to overlook two facts: his urine sample was found to contain almost 100 times the legal limit of nandrolone metabolites and that the International Association of Athletics Federations overruled UK Athletics’ not guilty verdict and suspended Christie.

Suspicion, once raised, is inextinguishable. And because of what happened at the Seoul Games in 1988 – when he tested positive for pseudoephedrine after a 200m heat but was allowed to keep his 100m silver medal on an 11-10 vote by the disciplinary committee which gave him the benefit of the doubt that the substance had been unwittingly imbibed when drinking ginseng tea – his critics’ mistrust will never be assuaged.

But for all the conjecture, no one has the proof or right to revoke his Olympic gold nor any of the numerous other medals in European, Commonwealth and World competition. What cannot be denied either is that for anyone who witnessed his performance in Montjuïc that glorious August night in 1992, Christie’s triumph truly was a stunning Olympic moment.

A year before the Games, at the world championships in Tokyo, Christie finished fourth in the 100m final behind the double Olympic champion Carl Lewis, Leroy Burrell and Dennis Mitchell. Lewis broke the world record in 9.86sec, shaving 0.04 off the benchmark set by Burrell two months earlier and the men in second and third also established new personal bests.

Christie’s 9.92 was the fastest ever by a European but he was despondent when interviewed by the BBC’s Brendan Foster after the race, saying that he had reached his peak at the age of 31 and there were no faster times in his ageing legs. Foster had to spend a good two minutes of compelling television persuading the Great Britain team captain why retirement after running his best time would be a profligate folly. Live on air, Foster’s ardent and sympathetic campaigning changed the sprinter’s mind.

Since his breakthrough season in 1986, age had always been an issue. The slow starter, as the poet Louis MacNeice observed about himself, “took his time, and found his time and talent gone”. Precisely that fear, that a lack of discipline and diligence during the early part of his career had fatally undermined his prospects of fulfilling his potential, was the spectre at almost all his feasts. Until 1992 there were at least as many what-ifs as well dones.

Christie was brought up by his grandmother Anita in St Andrew, Jamaica, the parish that spreads north, west and east from Kingston up to the Blue Mountains. “My grandmother was strict and kept me on the straight and narrow,” he said. “In Jamaica, before she sent me to the shops, she would spit on the ground and say: ‘Don’t let it dry before you come back.’ You knew you had to run, even though, like most kids, I wanted to hang out with my friends. So I ran to the shop and back – it was my first experience of back-to-back training.”

At the age of seven he moved to Shepherd’s Bush in west London to join his parents and took up athletics at Henry Compton school in Fulham in his teens. Living on Loftus Road, football was understandably his first love, taking inspiration from the maverick charm of QPR’s Rodney Marsh and the exemplary style and verve of Manchester United’s George Best. It was while playing the game at school that he was spotted and recruited for the athletics team but he did not commit himself to the sport, and even then not all that seriously, until he joined Thames Valley Harriers when he was 19.

In 1979 he began to train with Ron Roddan, a silver-haired former sprinter who became his first and only coach, at the West London Stadium which lies in the shadow of Hammersmith hospital and HMP Wormwood Scrubs in Acton, barely a mile north of Christie’s parental home.

For years he partied as much as he trained and said that the culture of growing up in a first-generation immigrant West Indian family meant that his focus was elsewhere. “You helped around the home, you did your schoolwork and then you got a job, that was your priority,” he told the Observer’s Kevin Mitchell. “No one knew really you could make a career from sport.”

He made his contribution to the family as a cashier for the Co-op and later as an Inland Revenue clerk. He raced alongside Kermit Bentham and Mike McFarlane who called him “Horse” because they felt he galloped all over his lane. He got by on talent rather than technique and hard work – beating better-prepared athletes gave him a thrill. If you have ever had a teacher who trotted out the old line about how they would always take the side of the mediocre-minded who put the effort in rather than the clever but indolent, you can guess how the GB coaches felt about that.

Success domestically at the inter-counties and other meets, however, convinced Christie he should be on the relay team for the 1984 Los Angeles Games. He was not picked and when he confronted the coach to ask the reason for his omission, Frank Dick said: “Because you’re not good enough.”

Instead of mollycoddling him with sympathy, Roddan wrote to Christie saying he should knuckle down or walk away. Andy Norman, the former policeman turned promotions director of the British Athletic Federation, also sent him a letter, arguing that a sprinter who had a personal best of 10.5 without giving it his all had the capability of becoming Europe’s best if he dedicated himself to the sport.

He wasn’t invited to the elite meetings, said Norman who controlled the purse-strings and much else in the sport, “because you couldn’t fill a phone box” but suggested that could quickly be redressed if he changed his attitude.

Christie was finally convinced by the arguments and committed himself to gambling all his energies on training. Out went the long afternoons playing dominoes, the rum-and-blackcurrants and the clubbing and partying that kept him out so late he often came home with the milk bottles. “He made up his mind that he was going to be the best and he did everything necessary to achieve that,” Roddan said in 1993. “A lot of people have said the same thing. But they don’t do the work. Linford is a very receptive athlete.”

But was it too late? “I was in a room with these guys from athletics and I said I wanted to be Olympic champion,” he said after his first year of intensive training. “They all said, at 26, I was already too old. I said: ‘They say that your sexual peak is at 19, but how many of you guys believe that?’ They all laughed. But they knew I was right, too.” In 1986 he won his first international championship, in the 200m at the European indoors and was runner-up to Ben Johnson in the 100m at the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh. Four years on from his disappointment over Los Angeles, his third-place in the 100m final in Seoul was upgraded to silver behind Carl Lewis after Johnson’s disqualification, and in 1990 he again won Commonwealth as well as European indoor and outdoor titles.

As a black man in west London in the 1980s he was the victim of police violence, harassment and abuse when repeatedly stopped while driving through his home borough. On one occasion he was waved to a halt, provocatively questioned and arrested while the Metropolitan police investigated the ownership of a sponsored car he was driving. At court, after the charges were dropped, the police apologised and paid him damages. Despite that, his patriotism never wavered and the first thing he targeted after winning a medal was a union flag to drape around his shoulders on the victory lap. His motivation for gold in Barcelona was, he said, “Roddan and the people”.

In general his relationship with the British newspapers was appalling. He felt they were too critical, damning even, while some of the athletics’ press corps felt Christie was uncooperative, arrogantly antagonistic and rude. On the eve of Barcelona he told Hugh McIlvanney how he took strength from bigots’ prejudices against him, his maltreatment by the police and what he perceived to be the hostility of disrespectful writers in memorable terms. “Every time they shit on my head, I wear a new hat,” he said. “All the bad stuff has proved my mental strength.”

His first team-mates also called him “Horse” because of his long legs and the problems they caused him in picking up his stride. After he began to adopt a higher knee lift in 1985 and generate more power from his hips, he started to resemble his great rival Lewis in style but acknowledged before the Games that he still had to correct the problem that had hindered him. He may have coined that evocative phrase about always going “on the B of the Bang” yet he was, in truth, an erratic starter. “I have a habit of going side to side in the first two or three strides and that means vital fractions of seconds are being lost,” he said. “I must go on striving to gear everything so that I am driving straight forward. You must run as economically as possible, get the maximum miles per gallon.”

He honed his start during the winter in Australia and must have been heartened in July after a cat and mouse European outdoor season racing against Olapade Adeninken, Frankie Fredericks, Mitchell and Burrell when he heard the news that the defending champion, Lewis, had failed to make the USA team for the 100m at the trials in Louisiana. “Maybe it’s someone else’s turn,” said Christie.

It proved to be his turn. The unofficial motto for those attempting to qualify for Barcelona, “no pain, no Spain”, seemed apt even after their arrival and the complaints about inadequate facilities, in particular the short beds, were rife. The GB team’s focus was temporarily distracted when Jason Livingston, the reigning European indoor 60m champion, tested positive for the steroid methandienone and was sent home. Christie was said to have counselled his 21-year-old team-mate long into the night after his expulsion and before his own heat and quarter-final.

Christie won both, the first after a lumbering start in 10.48, the second in a season equal-best 10.07 which pushed Burrell into second place. In the semi-final Burrell had his revenge, winning in 9.97 with Christie behind him in 10 dead. “I was in control the whole way, whereas Leroy was running really hard,” the GB captain said three years later. At the time, however, despite taking confidence from improving his time with each race, he maintained that Burrell and Mitchell were favourites.

Even before he took his place at the start line shortly before 7pm BST on Saturday 1 August, he looked fully focused, lost in a zone of his own concerns. The BBC’s commentary team elaborated on his tunnel vision and in Christie’s case it was literally true. “Barcelona was the first time I went to the blocks imagining my lane was a tunnel, with everything else on either side a blur,” he wrote.

The first time they crouched in their blocks, Burrell false-started, the second time Mitchell raised his hand and they were all told to stand up. At last they went off at the third attempt, Fredericks powering marginally ahead in the first 20m but Christie’s opening strides were smooth and true. At 50m he edged ahead, pumping his arms and knees, his eyes fixed straight ahead, unblinking on the line and confident that his second-phase surge was the strongest in the field, and he knew he had won. He crossed it in 9.96, raised his arms to form a Y and smiled briefly before skipping towards the crowd.

He took his customary lap with the union flag and received his medal with a lump in his throat but says he was too scared to cry in case the pictures were endlessly replayed and used to mock him. Six weeks before the Games he said his only aim was “to get from one end of the track to the other as fast as possible for Queen and country”. He was certainly cheered home by the latter to win, as David Coleman put it, “the greatest prize in sport”.

“When I began to wind down, I felt mentally exhausted,” he wrote in his autobiography. “It may be 10 seconds but that had been 10 years to me. Mentally, physically and spiritually, it’s tough because of the need to dig in, concentrate, avoid mistakes and get everything right. For those 10 seconds you are putting everything you’ve got in your body into running 100m. People say 100m is not that far. They should try running it. It’s a long, long way.”

However many more twists and turns that long journey still had to go, the abiding memory of that night is Britain’s pride in its singular sprinter and his stunning Olympic moment.

What the Observer said

Hugh McIlvanney

2 August, 1992

Linford Christie turned the Olympic 100 metres final into a graceful slaughter as his long stride almost disdainfully overwhelmed the sprinting power of America and Africa to take the greatest gold medal victory ever achieved by a British athlete.

The most satisfying 10 seconds of Christie’s life (9.96 to be precise) did not permit the briefest flicker of serious threat from any of the seven outstanding sprinters from five nations lined up against him. When he had crossed the line a couple of relaxed strides ahead of Namibia’s Frankie Fredericks it was hard to believe how unchallengable his supremacy has been on the way to becoming, at 32, the oldest 100 metres champion in Olympic history.

It was, however, easy to accept his declaration that the whole of his athletic career – and especially the past decade of intense effort in alliance with his coach and trusted friend, Ron Roddan – had been a rehearsal for 7pm British time (and he was determined that it should be the most British of times) in the Montjuïc Stadium last night.

“Nothing was going to distract me,” he said later, echoing the theme of inviolable concentration he had articulated for me in the rather different surroundings of a rain-swept West London Stadium three weeks before. Now, in Spain, in the biggest test of all, he needed every vestige of the single-mindedness he had honed over long years of international competition and on countless glamorous nights at that simple training ground.

First he had to cope with the unsettling effects of a false start but there was consolation in the knowledge that it was precipitated by Leroy Burrell, the former holder of the world record at 100 metres and the betting favourite to win last night. Burrell had beaten Christie in a good semi-final and his 9.97 was the fastest time ever recorded into a headwind, but after ruining one start the American had to be concerned about the risks of disqualification.

There may have been a greater element of calculation involved when the second US contender, Dennis Mitchell, suddenly raised a hand after the field had settled down for another attempt at a getaway. Mitchell apparently wanted a few seconds to compose himself and no doubt would have welcomed the bonus of discomfiting one or two others.

But if he had Christie in mind, his was a forlorn hope. The captain of the British men’s athletics team had found himself handling far more distressing problems earlier in the week when his former training companion, Jason Livingston, failed a drug test and was packed off home.

Christie was determined to lift his team’s morale with a perfect run for the gold medal and once the starter had sent them away at last, that was pretty much what he produced.

At 6ft 2½in and 14 stone, he is beautifully constructed for the job, both lithe and muscular. From the moment he launched himself smoothly from his blocks, avoiding the slightly lurching start that has often slowed him over the first 15 metres, he was in absolute command. Fredericks may have started fractionally better but the difference was minimal and almost immediately it was utterly irrelevant.

By halfway, the large British contingent in the crowd could roar confidently and 25 metres short of the line he was plainly out of reach.

At the finish he was six one-hundredths of a second in front of Fredericks, with Mitchell in third place and Burrell labouring back in fifth. The nearest the great American came to Christie was when they stood in the adjoining lanes, five and six, at the start. Fredericks was obviously a far happier man, having brought distinction to Namibia, a country competing at the Olympics for the first time.

But no one was as happy as Christie when he carried an immense union flag on his lap of honour and blew kisses to his supporters. He was born in Jamaica but raised in West London and, in spite of having more than his fair share of racist maltreatment, he is impressively patriotic.

Two other British sprinters have won this title but the Americans were absent because of a boycott when Alan Wells of Scotland took it in Moscow 12 years ago and it was in the Chariots of Fire era that Harold Abrahams claimed his gold at the 1924 Games.

“I can’t afford to be emotional,” Christie said at his victor’s interview. “I’ve got other races to run. I must concentrate on my next job, the 200 metres. OK, there was no Carl Lewis, no Ben Johnson. It’s a shame Carl wasn’t there but today was my day.”

And one that will be remembered in Britain as long as foot-racing remains a sport.