Asafa Powell Dept: When Johnson pulled up lame in ’97 it should have answered the question of who was fastest man. Till Saturday. The BBC’s boast might also tweak Maurice Greene, Asafa Powell and Tyson Gay, who lowered the 100-metre record set by Bailey in 1996, according to The Globe and Mail. While Johnson couldn’t bring himself to mention Bailey’s name, he did exhume the Ben Johnson fiasco. “In fact, the only mention of any Canadians was of Ben Johnson and how he put a black mark on the sport,” Besharat says. Somewhere in the great WADA in the sky, Charlie Francis is smiling and this claim of Johnson as fastest man will come as a surprise to the many Canadians who saw Donovan Bailey - the world’s fastest based on his Atlanta Olympics double gold medals - kick Johnson’s tush on the floor of the Skydome now Rogers Centre in their 150-yard match race in 1997. Johnson’s tenuous claim to the title of fastest human was based on Bob Costas of NBC trying to salvage America’s tattered pride in Atlanta by pointing out that Johnson had run the second 100 metres of his 200-metre gold medal run in a faster time than Bailey had executed his only 100 metres. The wonky history lesson didn’t end there, says Canadian Salem Besharat, a law student studying in the Oxford, England. “I saw the show on BBC, and I was with my housemates, who are not Canadian,” Besharat told Usual Suspects. “When there was no mention of Donovan, I got really upset and my housemates were asking me why I was so mad. To my shock, after Michael went through every single person in the history of the race to break the 100-metre record, there was a section that went from Leroy Burrell to Maurice Green and completely skipped Donovan.” As
reported in the news.
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19.5.10
