From: The Sydney Daily Telegraph May 14, 2010 12:00AM
By Mike Hurst
I RECEIVED an email from Charlie Francis on Monday. He was excited about starting stem-cell therapy for the cancer he had been battling for the past five years.
“The stem-cell match came through, literally at the 11th hour,” he wrote. “I’ll be in the hosp for the first of 3 hits starting tonight for about a week with 3 week gaps in between - then I get the huge hit and they try to save me with the stem cells they now have.”
I awoke yesterday morning to the news of Charlie’s death. Like 10,824 members of his internet coaching forum (charliefrancis.com), I am shocked and saddened.
Especially saddened at the news agency reports that typically dismiss Charlie as “the coach who gave dope to Ben Johnson, the first Olympic champion ever to be disqualified”. The charge was true and, to his credit, he never denied it.
“I’m not going to perjure myself,” he told me back in 1989 as he was called to testify at Canada’s judicial inquiry into doping in sport which became known as the Dubin Inquiry.
“There is a level playing field out there. It’s just not the playing field you think it is,” he told Justice Charles Dubin back then, the implication being that if all the medal contenders are using dope, then ultimately it must come down to who has the best coach and training program.
And by the brilliance of his mind and the strength of his personality, Charlie turned coaching on its head, in much the same way that he exposed the great track and field swindle at the Dubin Inquiry with the use of facts.
With his interpretation of science-based facts related to the physiology of exercise, Charlie - through personal consultations, training manuals, books (notably Speed Trap) and DVDs - has influenced every athlete who has run 100m in 9.8sec or faster, whether they are conscious of the source of their knowledge or not.
So many sportswriters since that day of infamy in Seoul in 1988 portrayed Charlie as a lone wolf, a pariah in the athletics community, a one-off rogue coach.
Since Johnson was busted, though, far more than 1000 elite sportsmen and women have failed drug tests - none of them associated with Charlie.
Yet he remains the only coach ever to stand up in public and tell it how it was, and probably still is.
Charlie acknowledged his “wrong-headedness” and although banned for life from coaching in Canada, he had spent the rest of his years trying to make amends by helping journalists expose the frauds and helping coaches and athletes - including contemporary Canadian champions - arrive at victory without doping.
A Stanford University graduate in modern history, Charlie had a piercing intellect and a wicked sense of humour.
When Ben Johnson’s lawyer tried to get his client out of the Dubin Inquiry smelling like roses he presented Ben as mentally incompetent and thereby unable to understand that he was taking a banned product. Charlie quipped to me: “Ben is trying to demonstrate diminished capacity by his choice of lawyer.”
Johnson, who eventually admitted knowingly taking banned drugs, was at Charlie’s side in hospital shortly before he died.
His wife, Ange, told me Charlie, 61, died after contracting an infection following chemotherapy to annihilate the cancer as a prelude to receiving the stem-cell treatment.
“It was fast, peaceful, not too much pain,” Ange said.
"It was literally within hours. James [their 11-year-old son] and I were by his side.
“Charlie was totally lucid. I was crying. He said, ‘Don’t cry sweetie … it’s been a good run’.”
