TORONTO -- Charlie Francis, Canada's sprint coach, testified to a public inquiry Wednesday that Soviet and American world-class track stars have used steroids to enhance performance for more than 20 years.
The inquiry was called by the Canadian government after Ben Johnson, who is coached by Francis, was stripped of the gold medal and a world record in the 100-meter dash at the Seoul Olympics after failing a drug test.
Francis, himself once a world-ranked sprinter and hurdler who represented Canada at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, said he believed American sprinters were using steroids as far back as the 1968 Olympic Games.
He estimated 80 percent of the top track athletes at Munich used steroids.
He accused the Soviets of operating ship-board drug-testing labs for their athletes before the 1976 Montreal Olympics. Francis said the Soviets brought their own ship to both Montreal and to Seoul. The labs were maintained to ensure their athletes would pass the Olympic drug tests, Francis said.
'They (Soviet athletes) could come early enough to get over jet lag and yet not go off the drugs too early and still test to make sure their athletes wouldn't have a problem at the Games,' Francis said.
Francis also said the Americans set up voluntary, non-punative drug-testing for their athletes before the 1984 Olympics. American athletes could take successive tests to find out their individual clearance rates for banned drugs to ensure they would then test negative during the Olympics, Francis said.
'They (U.S. athletes) would do this two or three times during the year and then they would know on an individual basis what their clearance time was,' Francis said. 'Women in some cases with a drug called Anavar during the '84 Olympics were clearing it in two days.'
A spokesman for The Athletics Congress, the governing body of American track and field, scoffed at Francis' accusations.
'Charlie Francis talking about drugs is like (recently executed serial killer) Ted Bundy preaching about morality,' TAC spokesman Pete Cava said. 'There's no credibility. He never once admitted to what everyone else knows to be true and that's that Ben Johnson was on steroids. If he has solid information on people using drugs, let him come forward, name names. But he has not, so we have to consider the source.'
Francis told of how in 1979 a former American world-record holder in the shot put, whom Francis did not name, told him it was obvious that Francis' sprinters were not using anabolic steroids and were starting to fall behind American sprinters who were using drugs. He told Francis it was his responsibility to tell his sprinters 'the facts of life.'
Francis said 'most, if not all, sprinters' at a U.S. training camp held at Lake Tahoe, Nev., before the 1968 Olympics were using steroids. Francis, who had seen the U.S. sprinters at the U.S. national championships two months earlier, said that at the Olympic Trials the change in appearance of the sprinters was 'profound and unmistakeable.'
'They were far more muscular and far leaner,' said Francis. 'There was just no mistaking it.'
