Health & Welfare | Daily Report

Charlie Francis, who died last week, was a renegade track coach. He was implicated in the Olympic movement’s two worst doping scandals – the steroid bust of Canadian sprint champion Ben Johnson at the 1988 Seoul Games and BALCO in 2003.

Ben Johnson, Seoul 1988
Flickr photo by DPMS

As a young man, Francis was a sprinter at Stanford University, good enough to compete for his native Canada at the Munich Games in 1972.

As a coach, he got the nickname “Charlie the Chemist” for his familiarity with performance-enhancing drugs.

Francis was unsentimental to the point of cynicism about elite sports. After he was busted and banned, Francis spoke eloquently about how sports had been transformed by performance-enhancing drugs.

As Mark Fainaru-Wada and I wrote in our book “Game of Shadows,” it was Francis who described the unhappy choice facing elite athletes in the steroid era.

Cheat or lose, was the way Francis put it.

Francis was Johnson’s coach at Seoul, where the big Canadian sprinter broke the world record in the 100 meters. But two days later Johnson tested positive for a bodybuilder’s steroid. He was stripped of his record and his Olympic gold medal and banned. Francis was banned as well.

In testimony before a Canadian government committee, Francis didn’t apologize. Of course he gave Johnson steroids, Francis said: Steroid abuse was so rampant in the Olympics that it had become impossible to succeed without them.

“We had no reason to believe that anyone at the highest levels was not using performance-enhancing drugs,” he testified.

After the ban, Francis’ track career was on the down-low, but he still found gigs.

In 2000, Francis was invited to BALCO’s offices near the San Francisco International Airport for “Project World Record,” an endeavor promoted by Victor Conte, BALCO’s combination mad-scientist and marketing guru. Conte, who later pleaded guilty to dealing BALCO steroids, proposed using sophisticated banned drugs to transform a promising sprinter into a world champion.

Besides Francis, Conte invited North Carolina track coach Trevor Graham, who himself was later convicted of lying about distributing steroids, and a body builder and alleged steroid expert named Milos “The Mind” Sarcev. Also present was the subject of the experiment, U.S. sprinter Tim Montgomery.

Francis was assigned to create a track workout program for Montgomery. Graham supervised Montgomery’s running, while Sarcev was in charge of the sprinter’s weight training. Conte himself would manage Montgomery’s “pharmacology and nutrition program” – the drugs.

The project was a success. Two years later, at the Grand Prix Final in Paris, Montgomery set the world record, running 100 meters in only 9.78 seconds, faster even than the mark set by Johnson in the race at Seoul and then expunged. Afterward, Montgomery credited Francis for his victory.

But then Montgomery was implicated in using BALCO drugs and banned from track. Later, he went to prison for check fraud and heroin dealing.

By then, Francis had convinced himself that doping was as old as sport itself. In a 2001 article in the muscle magazine Testosterone Nation, Francis sought to trace the use of performance-enhancing drugs to the ancient Greek Olympics of 776 BC: In those days, athletes ate sheep’s testicles to spike their testosterone levels before competing, he wrote.

In the 2,300 years that followed, sports doping became extraordinarily sophisticated: By his account, at the Sydney Games, at the dawn of the 21^st century, some sprinters were cocktailing such exotic drugs as human growth hormone, insulin and EPO, a prescription drug that increases endurance by stimulating production of red blood cells.

“The systematic use of performance enhancing drugs in sports for more than 50 years has punted performance standards clear out of sight,” Francis wrote, “so far out of sight that no human can attain them without chemical assistance.”