Charlie’s No Angel, Song Isn’t Sweet

Charlie Francis is singing like a bird, and his song is too loud and shrill to be ignored.

Charlie is the star witness at Canada’s Dubin Inquiry into performance-drug abuse. He is the whistle-blowing, mud-slinging, bean-spilling, stone-turning, finger-pointing, gut-spilling, chop-busting track coach who, he says, steered Ben Johnson into steroids and who, he says, has the bad goods on many, many track and field greats, dating back almost to Pheidippides.

Charlie Francis does not have a four-star credibility rating, since he was part of the Ben Johnson Steroid Denial Team in Seoul, where Ben tested positive. But he can’t be ignored, and the impact of his song is going to be major. Charlie Francis is going to change the Olympic Games.

His testimony is a breath of stale air. After decades of rumor, innuendo, cheap talk and an occasional suspension, someone is standing up and naming lots of names. Instead of chipping away at the problem, in the manner of such self-styled reformers as Carl Lewis and Edwin Moses, this man Charlie has hauled out a jackhammer.

Finally.

Everyone does not salute Charlie’s song.

“It’s so unfair, it’s so unfair,” said Anita DeFrantz, president of the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles and a member of the International Olympic Committee, when told that Evelyn Ashford, among other world track champions, had been indirectly implicated by Francis. “Evelyn was a world record-holder and I know that Evelyn is not one to use drugs.”

It’s unfortunate that a lot of people will be accused and they will have no way of proving their innocence. Jay Silvester, a former discus world record-holder indirectly tainted by Francis, surely can’t produce a urine specimen from 1972. In fact, in 1972, there were no rules against the use of steroids.

But if Charlie’s song leads to a reform of what many suspect is widespread steroid abuse among Olympians, a greater good will be served.

First the pain, then the healing. The image of the Olympic Games is taking a beating. The Olympic symbol of the five interlocking rings may have to be changed to crossed hypodermic needles on a field of stanozolol capsules.

Francis is telling us the inside story, about how Olympic drug testing apparently isn’t detecting all the cheaters. With Ben Johnson as a notable exception, we have a system that is not working. We have a dishonest sport.

Maybe none of this should matter. It’s fairly certain that steroid abuse is heavy in the National Football League, yet we still watch and enjoy. Do we really care about the means, as long as we get to watch the end?

I think we do for the Olympic Games, where we have the right to expect a minimal level of purity. The public doesn’t care if Olympic champions are amateur or professional, gay or straight, black or white, personable or surly. But the public, I think, prefers to believe its Olympic heroes are more than lab rats in gym shorts.

We want our Olympian muscles to be man- and woman-made. We want to think that our kids have a chance to become Olympians without shooting themselves full of plastic muscle builders. Seems like a fair request.

So Charlie Francis’ singing is going to result in changes, such as:

--A beefing up of the drug enforcement. More sophisticated and frequent testing. The public will no longer believe the athlete’s or the coach’s word. We will want to see the lab report before we hold the ticker-tape parade.

--An end to the Western buck-passing to the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc. Maybe the Soviets started all this drug stuff, maybe not. But according to Francis, steroid abuse among Western Olympians dates back at least to 1968. As Pogo once said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

--A domino effect. If Olympic track and field--and weightlifting--are drug-saturated, isn’t it likely that just about every other sport, with the possible exception of chess, is infected?

What about, say, the National Basketball Assn.? The league, as far as I know, doesn’t even test for steroids, or have rules against steroids, yet considering the prevailing world drug climate, can all that muscle and talent be 100% natural?

And won’t Francis’ singing, and confessions such as that recently of American sprinter Diane Williams, likely bring out other whistle blowers and confessors, in many sports?

It’s not always the gold-hearted do-gooder who touches off a revolution of reform. Remember Al Campanis?

Charlie Francis is no folk hero, but he’s a hell of a singer.