Mary Ormsby

World's Fastest Man*

For twenty-four hours in the summer of 1988, Canada's Ben Johnson was the most celebrated athlete on the planet. He'd won the 100-metre sprint at the Seoul Olympics in a world-record 9.79 seconds and just had time to say, "A gold medal--that's something no one can take away from you," before testing positive for performance enhancing drugs and giving back his medal. Admitting to steroid use, Johnson has lived in ignominy ever since, but there's much more to his incredible story. The sprint he won has since been called "the dirtiest race in history," with six of eight competitors linked to doping infractions. The steroid for which Johnson tested positive was not the steroid he was using. There were so many irregularities and mistakes in his testing that credible experts now say he should never have been disqualified and some see a conspiracy of Johnson's track rivals behind his disgrace. Sportswriter Mary Ormsby was on the scene in Seoul. Now, with unprecedented access to Johnson, she tells his whole story for the first time--the rise of a skinny kid working Jamaican sugar estates to track-and-field superstardom to his lifetime ban from the sport and his unyielding efforts to determine exactly what happened to him on that fateful night in 1988.