Whistle Blower

When Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson was stripped of his gold medal for the 100-meter race at the Seoul Olympics for using illegal steroids, he claimed that someone had spiked his water bottle. That dubious explanation was torpedoed last week by Johnson's longtime coach, Charlie Francis, who told a government inquiry that the runner, along with up to a dozen other athletes at his Toronto club, had knowingly been taking performance-enhancing drugs since 1981.

But Francis, 40, did not stop there in his three days of testimony before a Canadian government inquiry called to investigate drug use among athletes in the wake of the Seoul scandal. He claimed that anabolic steroids, banned by the International Olympic Committee in 1975, have been regularly coursing through the bodies of Olympic sprinters and jumpers for decades. He told the Toronto inquiry that many of the top sprinters at the 1968 and 1972 Olympics were on steroids. Although he cited no non-Canadian athletes by name, Francis referred to drug training programs in the U.S., the Soviet Union and several other nations.

Ben Johnson was apparently no exception to the rule. Francis said that in the fall of 1981 he explained to Johnson that anabolic steroids, artificial hormones that enhance the body's ability to grow muscle, marked the only path to international success in the explosive 100-meter dash. After some hesitation, said the coach, Johnson agreed to try the drugs.

The results were spectacular. Johnson, initially a scrawny sprinter, bulked up like a wrestler. In August 1987, he shattered the 100-meter world record with a stunning 9.83-sec. performance at the Rome track-and-field championships, a feat that Francis claims was aided by an extensive anabolic- steroid program. But John Holt, general secretary of the International Amateur Athletic Federation, has said there are no grounds for nullifying the seemingly tainted record, because Johnson tested negative for the drugs after that key race. The Jamaican-born sprinter, 27, had no such luck after his 9.79 sprint in Seoul.