I AM SITTING IN my office this morning reflecting on the death of an American athlete, the Olympic champion Florence Griffth Joyner. I am wondering how this can be. The newspaper stories say she died of a heart seizure. At 38.
A heart seizure.I turn the page of the newspaper and find this little item: Ben Johnson was denied his appeal to compete again in track and field.
Almost exactly 10 years after their amazing feats in the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, both Joyner and Johnson were in the news again together. I couldn't help but wonder: Were they both dealing with consequences of their bid for gold in the '88 Olympics? One was suspended from track and field for testing positive for steroid use after setting a world record in the 100 in Seoul. The other went on to fame and riches and instant retirement - and early death.
I am wondering how I feel about Flo Jo. Is it sympathy? Or something else? I am wondering, was she a heroine, a role model? Or something else?
It's difficult not to jump to conclusions. One of the symptoms of anabolic steroid use is liver and heart damage. But even before her death, I have wondered about Flo Jo. Was she simply an athletic freak of nature or did she pull off the athletic scam of the century?
Imagine this: You are one of 11 children, growing up in the proj-ects of Watts, supported only by a divorced, working mother. You have little money or promise, but that doesn't stop you from dreaming. The other kids ridicule you for your fantastic dreams of international fame and accomplishment. You aspire to be a famous artist, beautician, poet, fashion designer. You wear odd, attention-grabbing outfits and weird hairdos to school. You make your own wild fingernail polish colors with crushed crayons. You are once kicked out of a mall for wearing a boa around your neck - a live boa.
Then you discover your ticket. Even as a child you are fast. You become a world-class sprinter. You are good at that level but not great. You are not fast enough to be an Olympic champion. You were fourth in the '83 world championships 200 and second the following year at the L.A. Olympics, but the East Bloc countries and their superior sprinters (later determined to be drug-aided) are absent. After that, you fail to improve. Your times slow. By 1986 you are in semi-retirement. You are working as a bank secretary and beautician. You gain 15 pounds. Your dream appears finished.
What if you decided to gamble? What if you decided to undertake the drug program of the East Germans, for instance, and go for broke? What if you thought that with a little help, you could become an Olympic champion and win international fame and set yourself up for life with endorsements? What would you have to lose besides your integrity and possibly your health?
Would you do it?
I first met Flo Jo, as she became known, at the 1984 Olympic Trials in Los Angeles. She was charming, personable and composed. She was also inescapably beautiful, with smooth, coffee-colored skin, flowing raven hair and a petite figure. It was difficult not to notice her. I didn't see her again until the 1988 Olympic Trials, and the difference was startling. Slender arms and legs had been replaced by huge, bulging rolls of muscle. She looked like she had stepped into one of those cardboard cutouts at the circus in which you insert your face in a hole above a picture of a bodybuilder's body. Even her face was different somehow, wider.
But of course what was most startling about Flo Jo was her performances. They were off the charts. When she crossed the finish line in the Olympic Trials and Olympics, her rivals weren't even in the same area code. She set records that were unheard of then and ever since.
Some background: Improvement in the sprints comes in the tiniest of increments. Carl Lewis, for instance, set a world record of 9.92 in 1988 at the age of 27. He set another world record of 9.86 in 1991 at the age of 30. Over a four-year period, at the peak of his career, he improved .06 of a second. He never came close to that mark again.
Here's why Flo Jo's performances raised suspicions. She ran her best times of 10.99 and 22.04 in 1984, then leveled off and even declined for a couple of years. In 1987, after undergoing a rigorous weight training program, she said, she improved her times to 10.96 and 21.96. Then in 1988, at the age of 27, she ran 10.49 and 21.34 - personal improvements of .47 and .62, respectively! The old world records were 10.76 and 21.71.
It was the equivalent of Mark McGwire hitting 85 home runs. Other than Flo Jo, no woman has broken 10.6 or 21.6. Her records are from another planet. At the time, her record in the 100 was faster than the men's national records for Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, Iran and Turkey.
Pat Butcher, writing in the Independent-London this week, recalled that other performances were greeted enthusiastically in the press box at the Seoul Olympic stadium, but when Flo Jo crossed the finish in the 200 "silence invaded the press box . . . It was not awestruck, it was despairing."
Observers had already seen the effect of steroids on human performance earlier in the competition. Johnson ran 9.79 on steroids. While big advances have been made in other sprint records since then, the accepted world record 10 years later is only 9.84.
After watching Flo Jo's Olympics, several athletes predicted she would retire. "We've seen the last of Flo Jo," one American Olympian told his wife as they left Seoul. "She'll never run again." And of course Flo Jo did just that. She retired a four months later, shortly before the implementation of mandatory random drug testing.
Imagine this: After your big gamble, you tell yourself, why risk it all now? Why risk your fame, your place in history and your endorsements with the potential for a getting caught by a drug test?
Other sprinters and track afficionados, even a senator, raised doubts about Flo Jo's performances, but she always denied drug accusations and noted that she passed the tests. She reportedly suffered a seizure on a plane flight in 1996. The family asked the hospital not to release records of the episode, and her husband, Al Joyner, refused to discuss it.
There will always been speculation about Flo Jo. If she had secrets, she took them with her. Dr. Robert Voy, a former Olympic team doctor, said an autopsy won't help discover the truth.
"But it would be helpful for those of us involved in sports medicine to know the true nature of something like this," he told the L.A. Times. "The premature death of an elite athlete is something that taunts us." He said it would be valuable to know if drugs played a role in her death, especially at a time when Chinese athletes and cyclists and home-run hitters, to name a few, are using various performance-enhancing substances, and sales of androstendione - McGwire's choice - are soaring even though no one can know its long-term effects.
Reflecting now, I wonder what Flo Jo was thinking when she suffered her first seizure two years ago. I wonder what ran through her mind. I wonder what the truth is about her dazzling Olympic performances. I wonder what the beautiful, powerful, charming, determined Flo Jo was thinking as she closed her eyes for the last time.