Ange, the press still demonizes her. When Charlie passed, not too many papers tried to make not so subtle inferences. Tim obviously turned out to be a bit of an idiot. She has paid a heavy price for her misdeeds. I love how the average person who drives drunk or cheats on their taxes, or is unfaithful to their spouse sits back and takes some moral issue with everyone who gets caught in sport. The problem is common sense isn’t to common. She should be applauded for being a good person, for paying her debt for her wrongs. Just like happened to Charlie, these same people who know nothing of the person, sit on their pedestal and judge those who they have no business judging.
Sorry and not wanting to cause offence but Marion may be super talented and a really nice person but she broke the rules (whether they be right or wrong) and most damningly lost all credibility (as has Landis etc) over the way she handled things. Big kudos has to go to Charlie over the way he handled himself throughout the Dubin enquiry and afterwards, quite a contrast.
obviously has a heavy price. It’s really hard for an athlete to be honest. Way too much judgement by people who know zero about high level sports. I agree that Charlie handled it much better, but Marion was likely thinking about all she would lose by admitting guilt. Charlie was apparently too honest for the tastes of Sport Canada.
Really??? Doesn’t make her a bad person… I’m sure you have demons in your closet also.
Funeral for a Friend
By Jim Ferstle
Funeral services were today for Canadian sprinter and coach, Charlie Francis, who died last Wednesday after a five year battle with cancer. We met nearly two decades ago when I was working on a television documentary for the BBC. During those 20 years we had many long conversations—you didn’t have short chats with Charlie—about everything from family to his fight with cancer to his latest theory on sprint training.
Mostly we talked about the topic that had brought us together, drugs in sports. He was a Shakespearean figure. Triumph and tragedy, great ambiguity, comic relief, lessons learned, and great stories. We made a strange pair, two men who viewed the world, ethics, and sport from opposite poles when we met, but probably came closer together as the years past and we became friends. His was a tale of great ambition, a thirst for knowledge, great hubris, and harsh reality.
As a young man, Charlie wanted to be the best sprinter in the world. He earned a college scholarship to Stanford where he was tutored to be both an athlete and a coach by Payton Jordan. He made it to the second round in the 100 in the Munich Olympic Games in 1972, but had already made a discovery that would change his life. In discussions with an American hurdler he was introduced to steroids and said he felt like an idiot for not figuring out sooner what was happening. While steroids were banned, the tests to detect their use would not be used to sanction athletes until the 1976 Games in Montreal.
Both Charlie and I grew up in a generation of idealists who saw the Olympics as the Camelot of athletics where the best in the world were crowned and recognized for their achievements. Where you were taught to play by the rules and not take “short cuts.” Sometimes. The lesson Charlie took away from Munich was that steroids weren’t “short cuts,” they were part of the program if you wanted to be the best. One reason for this was that there was very little deterrence to their use.
In the GDR, as we would all discover later, there was a government sponsored program to exploit these doping products in sports. But the real escalation of doping in sports was another byproduct of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the US. American sports officials became aware in the 1950s that the Soviets were using testosterone to help their athletes, so, like the nuclear arms race, a US doctor, John Ziegler, who had worked with US teams, used the wealth and scientific technology of the US to “invent” designer testosterone—anabolic steroids. The US wanted a better steroid to use in the “war” with the Soviets.
Francis picked up information like a sponge from everyone he could. As a coach on the international circuit, he made friends with some of the GDR coaches, who observed what he had done with Canadian sprinters and had heard of Francis’ technical expertise. They shared information on workouts, drills, spotting talent, and, ultimately, doping. Contrary to popular belief, not everyone was seeking an “edge” from doping, many just wanted it to be a “fair fight” where each side came into the battle with similar tools.
There is the famous story of a US and an Iron Curtain country athlete who competed against one another in the ‘70s. They were friends off the playing field, but on it they would do whatever was necessary to win. They talked openly about their drug regimens. Compared notes on substances and doses, concluding that they were on similar programs. Then they went out and beat the rest of the opposition.
For them, that was a “level playing field.” At that time, doping was not the “Scarlet Letter” that it is today. The IOC and the sport governing bodies just wanted to make sure athletes didn’t die during events, and the testing was done primarily on stimulants. The medical community kept debating whether or not steroids really “worked,” aided performance. The athletes figured out that they did through trial and error and sharing information.
In the early 1980s two American coaches took a trip to a US military research facility to meet with one of the “steroid gurus” of the day. He gave them a lesson in proper, “safe,” steroid administration. One coach left the session troubled by what he had witnessed. The other said the reason for it was that the team knew the athletes were going to experiment with drugs, thus it was his duty to educate them on how to do it properly. Papers were prepared, sort of a CliffsNotes version of the infamous Underground Steroids Handbook that outlined how to take the drugs, and handed out to athletes. I still have copies of some of them.
In addition to the GDR coaches, Francis had compared notes with Chuck DeBus, a US coach who would become the first to be sanctioned by the sport’s governing body for aiding his athletes in the use of performance enhancing drugs(PEDs). Francis became known in the Canadian athletics community as “Charlie the chemist.” He had absorbed everything he could about the technical aspects of sprinting, probed the best minds, but knew from his own experience and what he would encounter on the world track circuit that the use of PEDs was common at the upper levels of competitive sport. From this Francis concluded that success at the pinnacle of sport not only took knowledge and application of training, recovery, and performance, but PEDs as well.
Not everybody in our generation made that choice. John Treacy was World Cross Country Champion and later a silver medalist at the 1984 Olympics in the marathon. In the spring of that year he had walked into the bathroom at the Meadowlands race track where the World Cross Country Championships were held and observed the Spanish team injecting themselves. Blood doping was believed to be the PED of choice for distance runners at that time. But Treacy didn’t conclude from his experience that he had to dope to be the best. He would say that his satisfaction came from beating people he knew were cheating, but had never been caught.
Mark Nenow, who ran for Anoka in high school and later became the US recordholder at 10,000 meters, was a member of the US track team at the Pan American Games in Cali, Columbia in 1983. That competition had the first major steroid scandal in sports when many athletes flunked drug tests and over a dozen of the US track team members left the Games before the competition after the entire team had been warned by US officials that they might also get caught if they had been using PEDs. Prior to the 1984 LA Olympic Games the USOC instituted a pre-Olympic non-punitive drug testing that, in effect, provided those using PEDs with information on how to avoid testing positive on Olympic drug tests. Sessions were held with Olympians prior to the 1984 Games where “experts” gave information similar to that given to the US coaches on how to use PEDs and how to use them to beat doping tests. I still have copies of those.
Francis testified at the Dubin hearings that Canadian officials told him in prior to the 1988 Olympics that out of competition testing that was beginning to be implemented in selected countries would not target his athletes. Francis also said that meet promoters would also “protect” certain athletes by either manipulating who would be tested or tipping off the athletes to what places in each race would be tested. Most athletes didn’t need a lot of help to beat the testing system.
As one lab director admitted in 1984 the labs could not detect stanozolol, the steroid found in Ben Johnson’s urine in Seoul. That wasn’t the only “loophole” in the testing. There are countless stories of athletes who tested positive only to be exonerated by appeals panels that were intentionally stacked with people predisposed to let off the athletes. The testimony given in those hearings would be laughed at today for the rationale given to not impose a sanction.I have copies of some of the decisions in these cases as well.
All this illustrates the “environment” back then. Not to condone the choices Francis and others like him made, but to provide an understanding of what he was thinking. Why he chose that path. If he wanted to be the best, Francis believed, he had to “level the playing field.” Don Kardong, who would finish fourth in the marathon at the Montreal Games in 1976, was a teammate of Charlie’s at Stanford. I asked him once for his impressions of Francis. He responded that it did not surprise him that Charlie made the choice to encourage his athletes to use drugs, but it also didn’t surprise him that when he was caught in 1988 in Seoul and when the Dubin Inquiry convened that Francis didn’t try to do what nearly every other person who has faced that situation did and deny any wrongdoing.
Instead Francis decided to attempt to blow the lid off of what he saw as the hypocrisy in the sport where athletes, coaches, administrators, and the like who publicly denounced doping while either engaging in the practice themselves or aiding it. He had been part of that hypocrisy before Ben got caught. Yes, one motivation in his confession was to expose others he either knew or believed were “dirty,” but the other was that old idealism. The hope that by coming clean on all this it would force the Olympic sports world to finally address the problem, not sweep it under the rug and hope that nobody noticed.
Charlie was no angel. He could be profane and vitriolic toward those who he considered to be the greatest hypocrites. He could be stubborn. He could be arrogant and displayed plenty of hubris. As the years rolled by he often found himself caught between two worlds, the present where he now had a young son, who was the light of his life, and advised a bevy of eager clients who wanted his knowledge on the finer art of training, and the past where he had worked with the top of the pyramid in the athletic world.
He told me during one conversation in the early 2000s about a job he’d been asked to do in California. They wanted his technical expertise on training and sprinting. I didn’t ask for specifics. Later I found out that the project he was talking about was Victor Conte’s Project World Record that resulted in Tim Montgomery’s short lived 9.78 world best. Montgomery, in turn, would recommend to his then wife, Marion Jones, that the pair train with Francis. Marion paid for Charlie’s trip to Hawaii to work with her and Tim. The arrangement was kept undercover until Tim and Marion showed up in Toronto to train, and a media firestorm erupted.
Francis tried desperately to salvage the project. He insisted that the goal was to prove that an athlete with Marion’s talent could accomplish what she had clean. He knew that he could not afford to be associated with them if they could not buy into that goal. Marion was pregnant when they were working together in Toronto. Charlie had filmed them, worked with them, and was firmly convinced that they could improve on what they had already done, and do it without drugs. While Francis would insist that he was happier being out of top level coaching, he also really wanted to get another shot at working with the best.
He had Tim and Marion come to Toronto knowing that this would be the make or break point in his quest. Prior to this he had always insisted that he could have gotten back into top level coaching if he had been willing to grovel and declare that he was wrong in giving his athletes steroids, sort of do his public penance for another shot at the big time. The fallout from the discovery that he was working with Marion and Tim killed that notion. In athletics circles he would always be the “disgraced coach,” the pariah. It was a hurtful revelation.
He admitted in our conversations that until he’d worked with Marion he hadn’t believed it was possible to compete clean at the highest level. He believed that she could. But the harsh reality was that nobody in the athletics world was going to let him try. Before his belief was that the key to ridding the sport of drugs, if it could indeed be done, was to give the athletes an alternative to PEDs. Demonstrate that it can be done without “short cuts.” Instead there was a market flooded with unregulated supplements that promised to deliver the same benefits as steroids.
Supplement makers got rich and athletes suffered. There was a period of bitterness and remorse. If he knew then what he knew now, Charlie said, he never would have come clean at the Dubin hearings. What good did it do? Why would anyone confess when it did no good? While those sentiments reflected more the anger of the moment than the true impact of his testimony and continued efforts to expose what was happening in sports, his confessions were a key element in the attempts at reforming and improving the drug testing system.
It may well be his enduring legacy. Soon after the collapse of his working with Marion and Tim, the BALCO scandal erupted, he found out he had cancer, and the trivial things of the past became not all that important anymore. Just as he had in athletics, Charlie plunged into cancer research, sought out the best information he could find, the best treatments. He was able to get five pretty full years. Years to continue to work and help others realize their dreams. Years to watch his son grow up. Years to spend with his family and friends.
He didn’t totally separate from track as there were many conversations about the present environment, Usain Bolt, and a snippet of the past. He finally answered questions he’d had about Seoul in 1988 and what really happened. Some day the full story may yet emerge. But the last sprint for Charlie Francis was perhaps best expressed in a Dylan Thomas poem that his wife Angie recited during the visitation services on Monday. “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
[That was awesome AngeQUOTE=Angela Coon;235728]Funeral for a Friend
By Jim Ferstle
Funeral services were today for Canadian sprinter and coach, Charlie Francis, who died last Wednesday after a five year battle with cancer. We met nearly two decades ago when I was working on a television documentary for the BBC. During those 20 years we had many long conversations—you didn’t have short chats with Charlie—about everything from family to his fight with cancer to his latest theory on sprint training.
Mostly we talked about the topic that had brought us together, drugs in sports. He was a Shakespearean figure. Triumph and tragedy, great ambiguity, comic relief, lessons learned, and great stories. We made a strange pair, two men who viewed the world, ethics, and sport from opposite poles when we met, but probably came closer together as the years past and we became friends. His was a tale of great ambition, a thirst for knowledge, great hubris, and harsh reality.
As a young man, Charlie wanted to be the best sprinter in the world. He earned a college scholarship to Stanford where he was tutored to be both an athlete and a coach by Payton Jordan. He made it to the second round in the 100 in the Munich Olympic Games in 1972, but had already made a discovery that would change his life. In discussions with an American hurdler he was introduced to steroids and said he felt like an idiot for not figuring out sooner what was happening. While steroids were banned, the tests to detect their use would not be used to sanction athletes until the 1976 Games in Montreal.
Both Charlie and I grew up in a generation of idealists who saw the Olympics as the Camelot of athletics where the best in the world were crowned and recognized for their achievements. Where you were taught to play by the rules and not take “short cuts.” Sometimes. The lesson Charlie took away from Munich was that steroids weren’t “short cuts,” they were part of the program if you wanted to be the best. One reason for this was that there was very little deterrence to their use.
In the GDR, as we would all discover later, there was a government sponsored program to exploit these doping products in sports. But the real escalation of doping in sports was another byproduct of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the US. American sports officials became aware in the 1950s that the Soviets were using testosterone to help their athletes, so, like the nuclear arms race, a US doctor, John Ziegler, who had worked with US teams, used the wealth and scientific technology of the US to “invent” designer testosterone—anabolic steroids. The US wanted a better steroid to use in the “war” with the Soviets.
Francis picked up information like a sponge from everyone he could. As a coach on the international circuit, he made friends with some of the GDR coaches, who observed what he had done with Canadian sprinters and had heard of Francis’ technical expertise. They shared information on workouts, drills, spotting talent, and, ultimately, doping. Contrary to popular belief, not everyone was seeking an “edge” from doping, many just wanted it to be a “fair fight” where each side came into the battle with similar tools.
There is the famous story of a US and an Iron Curtain country athlete who competed against one another in the ‘70s. They were friends off the playing field, but on it they would do whatever was necessary to win. They talked openly about their drug regimens. Compared notes on substances and doses, concluding that they were on similar programs. Then they went out and beat the rest of the opposition.
For them, that was a “level playing field.” At that time, doping was not the “Scarlet Letter” that it is today. The IOC and the sport governing bodies just wanted to make sure athletes didn’t die during events, and the testing was done primarily on stimulants. The medical community kept debating whether or not steroids really “worked,” aided performance. The athletes figured out that they did through trial and error and sharing information.
In the early 1980s two American coaches took a trip to a US military research facility to meet with one of the “steroid gurus” of the day. He gave them a lesson in proper, “safe,” steroid administration. One coach left the session troubled by what he had witnessed. The other said the reason for it was that the team knew the athletes were going to experiment with drugs, thus it was his duty to educate them on how to do it properly. Papers were prepared, sort of a CliffsNotes version of the infamous Underground Steroids Handbook that outlined how to take the drugs, and handed out to athletes. I still have copies of some of them.
In addition to the GDR coaches, Francis had compared notes with Chuck DeBus, a US coach who would become the first to be sanctioned by the sport’s governing body for aiding his athletes in the use of performance enhancing drugs(PEDs). Francis became known in the Canadian athletics community as “Charlie the chemist.” He had absorbed everything he could about the technical aspects of sprinting, probed the best minds, but knew from his own experience and what he would encounter on the world track circuit that the use of PEDs was common at the upper levels of competitive sport. From this Francis concluded that success at the pinnacle of sport not only took knowledge and application of training, recovery, and performance, but PEDs as well.
Not everybody in our generation made that choice. John Treacy was World Cross Country Champion and later a silver medalist at the 1984 Olympics in the marathon. In the spring of that year he had walked into the bathroom at the Meadowlands race track where the World Cross Country Championships were held and observed the Spanish team injecting themselves. Blood doping was believed to be the PED of choice for distance runners at that time. But Treacy didn’t conclude from his experience that he had to dope to be the best. He would say that his satisfaction came from beating people he knew were cheating, but had never been caught.
Mark Nenow, who ran for Anoka in high school and later became the US recordholder at 10,000 meters, was a member of the US track team at the Pan American Games in Cali, Columbia in 1983. That competition had the first major steroid scandal in sports when many athletes flunked drug tests and over a dozen of the US track team members left the Games before the competition after the entire team had been warned by US officials that they might also get caught if they had been using PEDs. Prior to the 1984 LA Olympic Games the USOC instituted a pre-Olympic non-punitive drug testing that, in effect, provided those using PEDs with information on how to avoid testing positive on Olympic drug tests. Sessions were held with Olympians prior to the 1984 Games where “experts” gave information similar to that given to the US coaches on how to use PEDs and how to use them to beat doping tests. I still have copies of those.
Francis testified at the Dubin hearings that Canadian officials told him in prior to the 1988 Olympics that out of competition testing that was beginning to be implemented in selected countries would not target his athletes. Francis also said that meet promoters would also “protect” certain athletes by either manipulating who would be tested or tipping off the athletes to what places in each race would be tested. Most athletes didn’t need a lot of help to beat the testing system.
As one lab director admitted in 1984 the labs could not detect stanozolol, the steroid found in Ben Johnson’s urine in Seoul. That wasn’t the only “loophole” in the testing. There are countless stories of athletes who tested positive only to be exonerated by appeals panels that were intentionally stacked with people predisposed to let off the athletes. The testimony given in those hearings would be laughed at today for the rationale given to not impose a sanction.I have copies of some of the decisions in these cases as well.
All this illustrates the “environment” back then. Not to condone the choices Francis and others like him made, but to provide an understanding of what he was thinking. Why he chose that path. If he wanted to be the best, Francis believed, he had to “level the playing field.” Don Kardong, who would finish fourth in the marathon at the Montreal Games in 1976, was a teammate of Charlie’s at Stanford. I asked him once for his impressions of Francis. He responded that it did not surprise him that Charlie made the choice to encourage his athletes to use drugs, but it also didn’t surprise him that when he was caught in 1988 in Seoul and when the Dubin Inquiry convened that Francis didn’t try to do what nearly every other person who has faced that situation did and deny any wrongdoing.
Instead Francis decided to attempt to blow the lid off of what he saw as the hypocrisy in the sport where athletes, coaches, administrators, and the like who publicly denounced doping while either engaging in the practice themselves or aiding it. He had been part of that hypocrisy before Ben got caught. Yes, one motivation in his confession was to expose others he either knew or believed were “dirty,” but the other was that old idealism. The hope that by coming clean on all this it would force the Olympic sports world to finally address the problem, not sweep it under the rug and hope that nobody noticed.
Charlie was no angel. He could be profane and vitriolic toward those who he considered to be the greatest hypocrites. He could be stubborn. He could be arrogant and displayed plenty of hubris. As the years rolled by he often found himself caught between two worlds, the present where he now had a young son, who was the light of his life, and advised a bevy of eager clients who wanted his knowledge on the finer art of training, and the past where he had worked with the top of the pyramid in the athletic world.
He told me during one conversation in the early 2000s about a job he’d been asked to do in California. They wanted his technical expertise on training and sprinting. I didn’t ask for specifics. Later I found out that the project he was talking about was Victor Conte’s Project World Record that resulted in Tim Montgomery’s short lived 9.78 world best. Montgomery, in turn, would recommend to his then wife, Marion Jones, that the pair train with Francis. Marion paid for Charlie’s trip to Hawaii to work with her and Tim. The arrangement was kept undercover until Tim and Marion showed up in Toronto to train, and a media firestorm erupted.
Francis tried desperately to salvage the project. He insisted that the goal was to prove that an athlete with Marion’s talent could accomplish what she had clean. He knew that he could not afford to be associated with them if they could not buy into that goal. Marion was pregnant when they were working together in Toronto. Charlie had filmed them, worked with them, and was firmly convinced that they could improve on what they had already done, and do it without drugs. While Francis would insist that he was happier being out of top level coaching, he also really wanted to get another shot at working with the best.
He had Tim and Marion come to Toronto knowing that this would be the make or break point in his quest. Prior to this he had always insisted that he could have gotten back into top level coaching if he had been willing to grovel and declare that he was wrong in giving his athletes steroids, sort of do his public penance for another shot at the big time. The fallout from the discovery that he was working with Marion and Tim killed that notion. In athletics circles he would always be the “disgraced coach,” the pariah. It was a hurtful revelation.
He admitted in our conversations that until he’d worked with Marion he hadn’t believed it was possible to compete clean at the highest level. He believed that she could. But the harsh reality was that nobody in the athletics world was going to let him try. Before his belief was that the key to ridding the sport of drugs, if it could indeed be done, was to give the athletes an alternative to PEDs. Demonstrate that it can be done without “short cuts.” Instead there was a market flooded with unregulated supplements that promised to deliver the same benefits as steroids.
Supplement makers got rich and athletes suffered. There was a period of bitterness and remorse. If he knew then what he knew now, Charlie said, he never would have come clean at the Dubin hearings. What good did it do? Why would anyone confess when it did no good? While those sentiments reflected more the anger of the moment than the true impact of his testimony and continued efforts to expose what was happening in sports, his confessions were a key element in the attempts at reforming and improving the drug testing system.
It may well be his enduring legacy. Soon after the collapse of his working with Marion and Tim, the BALCO scandal erupted, he found out he had cancer, and the trivial things of the past became not all that important anymore. Just as he had in athletics, Charlie plunged into cancer research, sought out the best information he could find, the best treatments. He was able to get five pretty full years. Years to continue to work and help others realize their dreams. Years to watch his son grow up. Years to spend with his family and friends.
He didn’t totally separate from track as there were many conversations about the present environment, Usain Bolt, and a snippet of the past. He finally answered questions he’d had about Seoul in 1988 and what really happened. Some day the full story may yet emerge. But the last sprint for Charlie Francis was perhaps best expressed in a Dylan Thomas poem that his wife Angie recited during the visitation services on Monday. “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”[/QUOTE]
never said I don’t and never said she was a bad person just saying I felt she made some really bad decisions in handling issues (as others have) that despite all the good things she will be judged by. Like it or not it comes with the territory.
Sometimes it pays more not to tell the truth
It’s symptomatic that no article quoted Charlie’s superior knowledge in EMS.
give him credit for anything other than the Olympic scandal in mainstream media. We as educated people obviously know what kind of impact Charlie has had on athletic prep, let alone track and field. It sells papers to say rubbish like implicating Charlie with Marion and Tim. Maybe they should understand who did what before just summarily chucking everyone involved under the bus. Personally, I have a great deal of respect for Ange, and if she said Marion is a good person, I take her at her word. People make mistakes, she paid her price. The culture of modern sports is one of complete hypocrisy. Baseball knew about PED’s. The game almost died after the last strike, PED’s indirectly saved it with McGwire and Sosa, and later Bonds. 90% of people are hypocrites. They cheat on anything and everything, then point a finger and chastize those athletes who try to keep up with the pack. I don’t even enjoy pro sports. Too many over paid prima donna’s. I’ll take high school and college for my money
“There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.”
~OSCAR WILDE
I pick up the paper and watch the news as little as possible to avoid poisoning my mind with BS and sensationalism.
David Owen: Ben Johnson’s coach was my sporting hero
Wednesday, 26 May 2010
This month I have been mourning one of my sporting heroes, Charles Merrick Francis.
Yes, that Charles Merrick Francis, the man who coached Ben Johnson, the disgraced Canadian sprinter, and who died of cancer on May 12, aged 61.
It was not, of course, his use of anabolic steroids that made me grow to respect Francis.
Although I can understand how he came to conclude in the 1970s and 80s that, in his words, “As I saw it, a coach had two options: He could face reality and plan an appropriate response, or he could bury his head in the sand while his athletes fell behind”.
After all, as he also wrote: “Throughout two decades of acknowledged doping in East Germany…only one G.D.R. athlete has failed a drug test at an international competition.”
Nor would I necessarily quibble with the opinion attributed by Francis to a respected medical director that, “when regulated in small doses [my italics], there was no evidence that anabolic steroids had any significant side effects”.
What qualified him for hero status in my eyes was the way he reacted to the disaster of Johnson’s sensational positive test at the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul.
He tried - without undue delay - to tell the truth, both in 29 hours of testimony to the Commission of Inquiry into the Use of Drugs and Banned Practices Intended to Increase Athletic Performance, the so-called Dubin Inquiry, and in a subsequent book.
To quote him once again, this time at length:
"As I saw it, I could only gain by providing the Inquiry with the fullest and most detailed truth.
"I had lost my career and my athletes.
"I’d been branded a cheat, a Svengali, and even (by the more imaginative commentators) a pusher of drugs to children.
"I’d been portrayed as a coach who took short cuts because he couldn’t succeed in any other way…
"But while my career was a dead issue, I thought I might still salvage my reputation and those of my athletes…
"There was more at stake, of course, than my personal honour.
“In giving my testimony, I hoped that others would be induced to follow my lead.”
To my mind, that book, Speed Trap, written with Jeff Coplon, is one of the best sports books ever published.
I don’t know if everything in it is true.
And what it does not do is provide a definitive explanation of how Johnson came to test positive after the most important race of his life when, in Francis’s words, “using the same steroid, Ben had tested clean on 29 previous occasions”.
Actually, more than 20 years after the event, I think we still await a wholly convincing explanation.
But the tone is unflinching, matter-of-fact and utterly candid.
The picture it paints is at times shockingly bleak, sometimes perhaps unjustifiably so.
Francis could, in my experience, be cynical about the world at large.
I would hope, for example, that in this passage relating to the tragic 1972 Munich Games, in which he competed, he was mistaken about athletes’ reactions.
“The massacre evoked little outward emotion among the Village survivors,” he wrote.
"The incident was jolting, even numbing - but there were still races to be won, medals to be earned.
"Olympic athletes are the most single-minded people on earth.
“Their grand obsession cannot be shaken by a last-minute intrusion of the real world.”
When talking about the nitty-gritty of track and field and, in particular of course sprinting, however, the insights are profound, the prose lucid and the messages simple to comprehend.
Take this on his training methods:
"My theory was simple: Sprinters needed to train at race pace, both to imprint the higher speeds on their muscle memory and to acclimatize their muscles and tendons to the demands of racing…
“No one in North America conducted special endurance drills this fast.”
Or this on the peculiar discipline that is sprinting:
"The 100 metres is track’s ultimate challenge precisely because it is so austere, so short…
"Precision matters more than effort…
"In the greater athletic community, however, sprinters get little respect.
"Distance runners disdain them for their lack of suffering.
“These Calvinists equate pain with achievement…”
Or this on the anguish that lies in store for all but the lucky and hyper-talented few:
"My chosen sport was one of ultimate frustration for almost everyone who played.
"There can only be one Olympic champion.
"The rest of us must confront our limitations.
"It might happen at the local level, or at the national, but we reach a point where we stop winning.
"(The purest expression of competitive agony is the face of a silver medallist just after a near-miss for the gold.
"I’ve lost, the face tells you, I’m a loser.)”
He must, in short, have been a brilliant coach.
On a bitterly cold Toronto day five months ago at Christmas-time, Francis had the good grace to spend a good two hours answering my questions, though he was plainly very ill.
I’m grateful that I had that opportunity to meet him face-to-face.
Now that we can no longer do so, it would be a fitting tribute if someone would re-publish Speed Trap, which has become quite scarce.
David Owen is a specialist sports journalist who worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering last year’s Beijing Olympics. An archive of Owen’s material may be found by Twitter users at www.twitter.com/dodo938
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mebabe - mebabe |28-05-2010 04:05
Great article, and wonderful idea to republish to book, I was actually planning
I can’t believe it’s been over two weeks and I only just found out!
I’m so saddened by this. thank you to charlie and best wishes to his family…
I read Speed Trap in 1999. I decided there and then, to change sports and switch to track and field. It is the most absorbing sport I have ever been involved in.
This is the first time I have posted in this thread, since learning nearly two weeks ago, of Charlie’s departure. I was being in denial.
I didn’t want to post in this thread, because I’m using my mates computer, and I need to keep my eyes dry.
But then, I just read a thread started by Charlie in another part of the forum. And it hit me again… I couldn’t leave a message for Charlie to read or respond to.
I miss his humour and witt, and kindness.
I am very sad to hear this only now and I had no clue the brave man was posting and sharing while battling cancer. And this is all I can say in his memory to quote Dawkins-
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
Richard Dawkins - Unweaving the Rainbow
Just found out about this. Had about a month without logging in. I’m in shock, what a terrible loss. My condolences to Charlie’s family.
Hear Hear, Goose…
I haven’t been on this site for a long, long time. I’ve been out of the profession i.e. physical preparation/athletic performance for awhile…but I believe that is about to change. First of all, my sincere prayers go out to Charlie’s family. Secondly, I am grateful for the gifts that God provided for Charlie and his willingness to share them with all of us.
I didn’t realize Charlie had died until I read it in Sports Illustrated a week and a half ago (not the most eulogistic article to find out about his passing). And yes many other articles in the mainstream media sought to villify him rather than acknowledge his work and contributions…what’s new…
My first introduction to Charlie’s coaching prowess came at the 1984 Olympics where I attended the men’s 100m final. I had read something about Ben Johnson prior to the Olympics but that was the extent of my familiarity. As everyone knows, he placed third behind Carl Lewis and Sam Graddy. I followed Ben Johnson’s career during the 80’s and it was inevitable that I would find out who Charlie Francis was. In 1990, I purchased Speed Trap and found it interesting but it wasn’t until later that I discovered the important training elements that were peppered throughout the book.
In 2004, I to was blessed to have met Charlie. Just like a few others on here, I attended the 2004 Vancouver seminar. Someone in a previous post summed up Charlie’s style very accurately. He was genuine, humorous and accesible. Btw, some very dynamic coaches evolved out of that seminar (for lack of a better term…they were already evolving) and were also in attendance…I was just thankful for the opportunity to be there.
Charlie was very forthcoming with information and I personally liked how he presented it. I have used the material from that seminar as templates for many programs and his concept of Vertical Integration has been invaluable.
Like so many others, I have my own personal story about Charlie’s generosity,humility, and integrity and that is the way I remember him.
Peace be with your soul…
Wow, this is shocking. 