Her lack of pure speed was why she was a 200 meter specialist.
All of a sudden, she runs 1/4 second faster than the World Record.
Sprinters don't improve by 4/10 or 5/10 of a second late in their careers.
She knew what the doping program used by Coach Chuck D did to former UCLA sprinter Diane Williams. Banned-for-life coach D.
I watched it all happen at UCLA and Santa Monica tracks. Watched her train before and after.
She should have known better. She was a nice kid.
noinnurt 1 year ago
- She was a career 11.0 sprinter, like cal said.
Her lack of pure speed was why she was a 200 meter specialist.
All of a sudden, she runs a quarter second faster than Evelyn, who trained at the same UCLA track as Florence.
Sprinters don't improve by 4/10 or 5/10 of a second late in their careers.
FloJo knew what Chuck Debus did to former UCLA sprinter Diane Williams. She should have known better. She was a nice kid.
noinnurt 1 year ago
- @calvintoronto and @silentboyfilms
She was a career 11.0 sprinter, like calvin said.
Her lack of pure speed was why she was a 200 meter specialist.
All of a sudden, she runs a quarter second faster than Evelyn, who trained at the same UCLA track as Florence.
Sprinters don't improve by 4/10 or 5/10 of a second late in their careers.
FloJo knew what Chuck Debus did to former UCLA sprinter Diane Williams. She should have known better. She was a nice kid.
noinnurt 1 year ago
How in the entire fuck have these records by Eastern European CACs stood for 25 years?
Here are some of the records that were set during the 1980s . Although the record holders came under suspicion for steroids, their performances remain the benchmarks for women's track and field :
100m: Florence Griffith-Joyner, 10.49, July 16, 1988
200m: Florence Griffith-Joyner, 21.34, Sept. 29, 1988
400m: Marita Koch, 47.60, June 10, 1985
800m: Jarmila Kratochvílová,
1:53.28, July 26, 1983
100m hurdles: Yordanka Donkova, 12.21, Aug. 8, 1988
High jump: Stefka Kostadinova, 2.09m, Aug. 30, 1987
Long jump: Galina Chistyakova, 7.52m, June 11, 88
Shot put: Natalya Lisovskaya, 22.63m, June 7, 1987
Discus: Gabriele Reinsch, 76.80, July 9, 1988
Heptathlon: Jackie Joyner-Kersee, 7,291 pts., Sept. 24, 1988
Google the pics of some of those she-men...no way...no fucking way were they clean. Athletes please weigh in on this...
Seoul 1988 - the dirty games
Anabolic steroid use tends to be easier to spot in female athletes. Flo-Jo famously set records at the 1988 Seoul Olympics that have not been equalled since. 12 months earlier, sports writers recalled, she hadn’t been running anywhere near as fast. Others reported that her muscles grew bigger and her voice deepened. The after and before photos here are pretty dramatic yet she never tested positive. She died at 38 from a seizure.
Note the complete lack of muscle definition in Flo-Jo’s legs in the early shot, and the enormous, ripped leg muscles in 1988.
The Seoul Olympics became known as ‘the dirty games’, but the LA games four years earlier may well have been worse. There were lots of positive drug tests, but they simply disappeared (they were lost in transit). In the run-up to the LA games, at least 34 U.S. track and field athletes had tested positive or had possible positive tests during six weeks of testing by the U.S. Olympic Committee in 1984, according to the Orange County Register. The USOC simply covered it all uphttp://www.usatoday.com/sports/olympics/2009-08-03-1984-testing_N.htm.
BY T.J. QUINN DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
Sunday, July 04, 2004
No scientific test ever made Florence Griffith-Joyner out to be a liar.
The glamorous goddess of American track, who came, conquered and quickly vanished, finished her brief life with a batting average of 1.000 when it came to steroid testing. Even when she died at the suspicious age of 38, her strained heart only offered hints during an autopsy that she may have had chemical help.
There was no proof.
There wasn't even enough urine in her bladder to test. The official cause of death was asphyxiation, suffered during an epileptic seizure as she slept.
But in 1988, the year Flo-Jo set two records that still stand, Brazilian runner Joaquim Cruz diagnosed her with what he felt was a foolproof tool: "The eyes of an athlete."
"The athletes are the first ones to suspect, especially the athletes who work hard and find it really difficult to improve their times," says Cruz, who won Olympic gold in 1984 and silver in 1988 in the 800-meter run. "Those athletes are the ones who know who is there competing clean and who is not."
What athletes also see is which records seem realistic and which do not. After 16 years without a serious challenge, Griffith-Joyner's records in the 100 and 200 meter dashes have joined the ranks of the eternally suspect.
Those ranks are well-populated.
Almost every premier women's track and field event has a world record that was set in the 1980s when steroid use was rampant, especially in East Germany and other Soviet bloc nations. None of those record holders failed a drug test.
The result is that while track now tries aggressively to rid itself of cheats, the brass rings of the sport still remain under suspicion and look almost hopelessly out of reach.
"It's unfortunate because women's track and field, to me, is not as exciting," says Ato Bolden, one of the world's top male sprinters, of what seem to be unassailable records. "The men, there's a chance when you go to an event you'll see a world record. With the women, unless you're a pole vault fan, maybe you'll see one, but not in one of the marquee events."
Men, of course, have also used steroids but they haven't had the same dramatic performance improvements that women have, says Gary Wadler, a medical professor at NYU and WADA board member. Steroids are synthetic testosterone, and men start out with ample helpings of that hormone. Steroid-using women such as East German Marita Koch demolished existing records, while the men made smaller improvements and remained less conspicuous.
The hunt for dopers has taken on greater intensity because the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, spurred by the BALCO and THG scandals, is trying to weed out potential cheaters before the Olympics next month. Despite renewed questions about the integrity of some women's records, however, the International Association of Athletics Federations has shown no interest in reviewing those marks.
"That's because the IAAF knows that if you take away the world record-holder's record, the second, third, fourth and fifth-place people are drug-tainted, too," Bolden says.
Marion Jones, the second-fastest woman in history after Griffith-Joyner, has been under investigation by the USADA because she worked with BALCO founder Victor Conte, and because of her associations with her ex-husband, shot-putter C.J. Hunter, who tested positive for steroids numerous times, and her current boyfriend, sprinter Tim Montgomery, who was recently charged by USADA with doping.
The records themselves, however, stand, even though there is considerable evidence that some record holders, notably Koch, used steroids. The records for the 400m, 800m, 100m hurdles, high jump, long jump, shot put, discus and heptathlon were all set in the 1980s. All, including Jackie Joyner-Kersee's record in the heptathlon, have been under suspicion for years.
"That doesn't make them guilty," WADA's Wadler says. But the number of anomalous performances over a small period of time makes them all suspect.
"I resented it. People would say things out of pure jealousy," Joyner-Kersee says of the innuendo that followed her and her sister-in-law, Griffith-Joyner. "It was easier just to ignore it. It just goes along with the territory."
Koch's case is unique because she admitted to doping. The 47.60 she ran in the 400 meters in 1985 is often held as the prime example of records that need erasing, and some runners consider the "real" world record to be the 48.25 that France's Marie-José Pérec ran in 1996. That time is still only the sixth-fastest recorded by a woman - four of the top five marks were set by Koch.
Direct evidence of doping has never been presented against Griffith-Joyner, but suspicions began at the start of the 1988 season, when she returned after a long layoff. She had never won a world championship, but was suddenly the fastest woman in the world. Her body had also morphed from slender to ripped.
During the Olympics that year, Cruz, a Brazilian middle-distance runner, was asked what he thought about Ben Johnson's positive steroid test. Cruz answered, but also offered opinions on other competitors, breaking a universal athletes' code to not name names. In doing so, he also made it all right for journalists and critics to speculate about who might be doping.
"Florence, in 1984, you could see an extremely feminine person, but today she looks more like a man than a woman," Cruz said in the interview. "And Joyner herself, she looks like a gorilla, so these people, they must be doing something that isn't normal to gain all these muscles."
His first reaction was to deny that he made the comments, and he apologized to Joyner-Kersee in person. But when a tape of the comments surfaced, Cruz was openly vilified. Today Cruz, who coaches high school and works with a group of elite runners near Los Angeles, says he was never ostracized by athletes for what he said.
"In the (Olympic) village I became the hero," Cruz says. "Everybody said, 'Yeah Cruz! Keep up the good work.'"
Griffith-Joyner took a bigger hit a year later when sprinter Darrell Robinson, in a paid interview with a German magazine, said he had given her human growth hormone. She denied it, and when they both appeared on the "Today" show, she said, "Darrell, you are a compulsive, crazy, lying lunatic."
The real suspicion came from her performances. Evelyn Ashford's 100-meter record of 10.76, set in 1984, was whittled to 10.49 in Indianapolis in 1988. The margin of difference was more than double any previous improvement, though one culprit may have been the wind. The wind meter on the track for Griffith-Joyner's race read 0.0, while nearby at the men's triple jump the meter read 4.47, more than twice the allowable 2.0.
"Just for that reason," Bolden says, "I don't think I'll see a record in the (women's) 100 in my lifetime. I think it was wind-aided."
Wind or no wind, Griffith-Joyner still owns four of the five fastest times ever recorded by a woman in the 100 meters. No one has come closer than 10.61, much less approached her 10.49 mark. No one has come within two-tenths of a second of reaching her record in the 200m. The only runner to come within three-tenths - a massive margin - during the past 13 years was Jones, who did it in 1998.
IAAF officials did not return several phone calls and E-mails for comment, but several sources in the track and field community said they know of no new efforts to review tainted records.
U.S. Track and Field spokeswoman Jill Geer said CEO Craig Masback would not comment on the issue. In a 2001 interview, however, before the world had heard about THG or BALCO, Masback was quoted in an interview as saying: "In a circumstance that someone admits that they adulterated the competition by taking performance-enhancing drugs or in which there is overwhelming evidence to support that, retroactively changing the records and/or results is appropriate."
And yet no federation has made a move to address the records, even Koch's. Track legend Carl Lewis says there is little support for the idea of scrapping all the records and starting anew.
"I think most of the records are clean," he says. "The ones we can document we should go back and get rid of. To eliminate all the records we think are dirty - if the athletes want it done, they can get it done."
Even Cruz thinks eliminating records because they're anomalous or scrapping all the records wouldn't be fair without solid evidence.
"What are they going to do? Once they are eliminating those records, you're accusing the person who did it," he says. "It was not proven that the athletes were doing (drugs). It's not like Marita Koch (where the evidence is clear)."
Not everyone is willing to concede that Griffith-Joyner's records are tainted.
"I think we rejected the notion back then and we reject it today," says Joyner-Kersee. "I truly believe those are some great performances that are not tainted at all."
Others in track and field are defensive about the attention to their sport, which they say has done far more to police itself than America's more popular pastimes.
"Track merely looks dirty because it's actively looking for dirt," says E. Garry Hill, editor of Track & Field News magazine. "I believe that if the major pro leagues applied the same kind of scrutiny - and jurisprudence - that track does, their records would become similarly 'tainted.'"
That still leaves the issue of how to rejuvenate women's track when its greatest athlete is under investigation and its greatest records are seemingly unbreakable.
"If there is (a solution), I haven't heard the idea that I think is logical or fair," Bolden says. "Maybe you start with anybody who's admitted (to doping). But if that's where you start, you're not going to get far."
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cacs keep hatin!
