Ben Johnson and the dream that shadowed Seoul

Kochi: In the summer of 1988, as the world watched Ben Johnson prepare for the Seoul Olympics, his mother, Gloria, was startled by a dream. “My mother saw the sky being split by a sword and a flash of light, with me standing at the centre. She took it as an omen,” Johnson told a group of school students and journalists at an event in Muvattupuzha.

That race in Seoul detonated the Olympic record. But suspicion followed Johnson almost immediately. Whispers trailed him from the heats, about his water, his food, his body. Johnson concedes something was amiss before the test. He remembers being thirsty, grabbing water that “could have been spiked.”
Before giving his urine sample, he says, a Carl Lewis aide handed him a beer, a detail that's lodged in his memory.



Then came the fall. Seoul, 1988: a date stamped forever beside his name, like the last four digits of his phone number.

Johnson’s defence has never softened. “I ran for my mother,” he says. “So, I will never dope.” He believes the system needed someone, and he was the most visible. A sword fight, just as Gloria had dreamed, with light flashing.

"Faith and my mother's love carried me through the wreckage," Johnson recalls. Gloria, a devout Christian, believed survival mattered more than reputation.
“Not a day goes by when I don’t think of my mother," Johnson laments.

Decades later, he continues to run races in his mind. Sometimes, Usain Bolt appears in the next lane. When asked if he could beat Bolt in his prime, Johnson fires back: "I think I could.”

It’s an audacious claim, and precisely why Johnson, 64, refuses to fade from athletics folklore. Long after his Olympic gold was stripped, the former Canadian sprinter continues to surface at unlikely places — in Bolt’s much-discussed “dream 100m lineup,” and most recently at the Kozhikode Literature Festival.
Johnson concedes Bolt’s greatness — the fluid stride, the showmanship. “But I was stronger,” he quips.

He watches modern athletics with skepticism. “They have the same timings I did 37 years ago,” he says. “But rules are different.”

For Johnson, the sport’s original sin wasn’t individual cheating but institutional complicity. “Everyone doped during my time,” he argues. He throws in a figure that's shocking. "Atleast 60 per cent of today's elite athletes are using something illicit," the 1986 Commonwealth gold medallist argues.

His lifetime ban prevents him from coaching or formally passing on the knowledge he insists goes beyond bans — strength, technique, mental preparation.

“Every failure teaches you something,” he says. The lesson he carries isn’t about speed or medals. “I have no negativity...just happy to be alive.”



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