O n 16 July 1988, on a sweltering afternoon at the Indiana University Track Stadium, the US Olympic trials turned into a stunning festival of speed, an unparalleled riot of achievement. Carl Lewis ran the fastest ever men’s 100m (a wind-assisted 9.78sec) while Willie Banks triple jumped further than anyone ever before, twice. Jackie Joyner-Kersee smashed the world record for the heptathlon with 7,215 points ? a mark beaten only once since, by herself in Seoul two months later. But there was no doubt about the day’s highlight, and it came from her sister-in-law, Florence Griffith Joyner, in the quarter-finals of the women’s 100m.

Griffith Joyner was considered an excellent 200m runner, but not a great one ? she failed to make the US team as a 20-year-old in 1980 (in the end they boycotted the Moscow Games), and her silver in 1984 was cheapened by a reciprocal boycott by Russia, East Germany and the rest of the Eastern Bloc. It was thought that she might win another medal in Seoul, but was not considered a contender in the shorter sprint. After all, she had never previously competed in a top-level 100m race.

Her personal best before she travelled to Indiana was 10.96 ? a very good time but well outside world record pace, and even that had come five years earlier. In round one, though, she posted a stunning if wind-assisted 10.60, and in the quarters she was timed at 10.49. The world record of 10.76, set by Evelyn Ashford four years earlier, had been broken by the massive margin of 0.27sec.

She was helped by what appeared to have been a technical malfunction, as the Omega-manufactured wind-speed meter produced a reading of 0.0. An identical meter on the triple jump runway, a few metres away, read 4.3m/s ? enough to nullify the record ? while flags around the stadium were flapping wildly. “We’re staying with it,” said a spokesman for Omega. “We tested it and couldn’t find anything wrong.” John Chaplin of the Athletics Congress, the governing body of the sport in the US, said: “The mark is incredible, but when you have machines to indicate the wind and when the people who run them stand by them, it seems you have to stand by it.”

More phenomenal times followed. The following day she won her semi-final in 10.70, and destroyed the field in the final, winning in 10.61. In 24 hours she had run the three fastest legal women’s 100m races in history, and before the trials finished she smashed the US 200m record as well. “The world record will come in Seoul,” she predicted. All of this was achieved while wearing a different eye-catching outfit in each of her eight races, the last of which ? a quite revealing floaty white number ? was, she said, her negligee. “I’m a little bit surprised,” she said of her times in the 100m. “My goal coming here was to go under 11-flat four times.”

Other people were more than surprised: they were incredulous. Among those who publicly questioned her performance ? ironically, given what was in store for him at the Olympics ? was Ben Johnson. “There’s no way Florence ran 10.49,” he said. “I just don’t believe it. A 10.71, I would believe. That would have beaten me 10 years ago.”

What made her success in Indiana even more preposterous was that she had given up on athletics in 1986, spending the best part of a year working as a bank clerk and styling hair in the evenings. When she decided to return to athletics in April 1987 she was more than a stone overweight; a little over four months later she won 200m silver at the world championships in Rome, and she just kept on getting better. In 15 months she metamorphosed from a fat average sprinter to a taut world-beater.

Flo-Jo claimed that her improvement was down to altered technique, improved diet and total dedication to training, particularly in the gym. She said she had talked at length with Johnson and had modelled her training regime on his (she could have picked a better teacher, in many ways). “If you want to run like a man, you have to train like a man,” she said.

Her coach, Bob Kersee (to complete this mildly complicated family tree, Kersee was married to Joyner-Kersee, whose older brother Al Joyner, the 1984 Olympic triple jump champion, was Griffith Joyner’s husband, and took over as her coach after the trials), said he “saw something I’ve never seen before” in Indiana. “I saw a sixth gear,” he said. “I’ve never seen anyone with that speed and that fluidity. She’s wasting very little motion. There’s very little bounce in her stride. She and Jackie believe they can do the unbelievable.”

And they did. At the Olympics Flo-Jo won gold in the 100m, the 200m and the 4x100m, and silver in the 4x400m. In the 100m she broke the Olympic record twice and produced a stunning performance to win the final in a wind-assisted 10.54. “I always knew I could run the 100m if I was given a chance,” she deadpanned. The final was so comfortable that she started grinning with 40m to go, certain that victory was hers. “I felt so happy inside that I had it won I just had to let it out,” she said.

In the 200m semi-finals she beat the world record by 0.15sec, and less than two hours later she beat it again in the final, by another 0.22sec. In 1984 she had been left out of the sprint relay because US coaches thought her trademark luridly decorated 5in fingernails would stop her from safely passing the baton. But she had been a successful member of the team at the 1987 world championships, and ran the third leg in Seoul without incident.

The only disappointment was that in the 4x400m ? for which she was co-opted into the team at 48 hours’ notice ? she missed a chance to pass Olga Bryzgina in the final leg. “These days have been a dream come true,” she said, “plus more that I didn’t dream. I know I said the 200 gold was the one I wanted, but last night I laid out all the medals, and I felt that the silver was the special one, because of the team’s trust in giving me the chance. That silver is gold to me.”

The Seoul Olympics would be dominated by talk of performance-enhancing drugs, and inevitably, given the sudden and astonishingly successful nature of her ascent, some pointed the finger at her. “Florence runs 10.49 in the Olympic trials and people say ‘wind’,” moaned Al Joyner. “She does 21.34 here and they say ‘drugs’.”

Griffith Joyner took, and passed, 11 tests for performance-enhancing drugs in 1988. “I know exactly what people are saying about me,” she said. “And it’s simply not true. I don’t need to use drugs. They can come and test me every week of the year if they want to. I’ve got nothing to hide.” Prince Alexandre de Merode, chairman of the IOC’s medical commission, later said she had been singled out for particularly rigorous testing in Seoul. “Since there were rumours at the time, we performed all possible and imaginable analyses on her,” he said. “We never found anything. There should not be the slightest suspicion.”

Unfortunately for Griffith Joyner, many athletes and observers considered their eyes and their intuition more reliable than the IOC’s laboratories. In the Olympic village athletes watched her suspiciously, noting how much make-up she always wore (more than enough to cover up the steroid abuser’s trademark pockmarked skin). Joaquim Cruz, a Brazilian who won 800m gold in 1984 and silver in Seoul, said: “Florence, in 1984, you could see an extremely feminine person, but today she looks more like a man than a woman. [Joyner-Kersee] looks more like a gorilla. These people, they must be doing something that isn’t normal to gain all these muscles.” The Guardian’s report on her 200m victory pointedly remarked that “there has been no evidence that her thickly muscled thighs and arms and her husky voice are anything but natural”.

A few months after the Olympics Carl Lewis told students at the University of Pennsylvania ? in the belief that he was speaking off the record ? that “some very reliable sources” had told him that she had been using steroids. Griffith Joyner’s manager, Gordon Baskin, accused him of “trying to rob the children of the world of a role model who has achieved this athletic excellence through diligent, tenacious work”.

There was more in his autobiography, published a couple of years later. “She had made the transformation from being just another Olympian to one of the most incredible athletes in the world and it was a change that came too quickly for the imagination,” he wrote. “Her physical appearance alone ? muscles popping everywhere ? made a lot of people wonder. Then there was her voice, much deeper than it had been in the past.” Griffith Joyner said she could sue, but “did not want to waste time and money”.

In March 1989 Charlie Francis, Johnson’s disgraced coach, implicated her during his testimony to Canada’s Dubin inquiry into drugs in sport. “If you listen to him, everyone’s on something,” replied Al Joyner. “He’s dirty, he’s going to say anything.” Later that year Darrell Robinson, a former 400m runner, said he had procured human growth hormone for Griffith Joyner the previous year. She called him a “compulsive, crazy, lying lunatic”.

After Seoul, she talked optimistically of the future. She planned to defend her titles at Barcelona in 1992, and talked about competing in the 400m. Asked in Seoul if she could better her world record, she said: “I do believe I can. When, I’m not sure, but I do feel I can go faster. I have to work on my start next year. That’s my goal, to have a better, explosive start. I have the relaxation in the middle part down pat, but I just feel I have to work on that start.”

That made it all the more astonishing when she abruptly announced her retirement in February 1989, at the age of 29. “I have decided to run on a different track and to strive for the best of which I am capable in a different field,” she told a packed press conference. “Life has many things to offer all of us and, since the Olympics, many challenges and opportunities have been presented to me. I want to pursue them.”

Her decision came just before the introduction of mandatory random drug testing. Other unsubstantiated gossip suggested that she had already failed a drug test, possibly even in Seoul, but to save the sport further embarrassment after the Johnson debacle had been offered the chance to retire gracefully, without the result ever being made public.

In retirement she designed clothes, wrote a couple of romance novels and a series of children’s books starring a character called Barry Bam Bam, set up a cosmetics firm, employed at least three of her sisters (she was the seventh of 11 children), recorded fitness videos, and turned her hand to acting. In 1990 she had a daughter, named Mary after Joyner’s mother, who had died aged 38.

A couple of years later she announced her intention to return to athletics. “I always had a love for distance running, and it’s been a dream of mine to compete in the Olympic marathon,” she said, setting her sights on the 1996 Atlanta Games. “A lot of people will laugh about this, but you don’t laugh at Florence Griffith Joyner,” added her husband.

She never competed in a marathon, and any possibility of a comeback ended in 1996 when, while on a flight from California to St Louis, Griffith Joyner suffered a seizure. She spent the night in hospital, but no serious condition was identified. In September 1998, when she was only 38, she died suddenly in her sleep, the coroner concluding that she had asphyxiated herself on her pillow during an epileptic seizure.

Al Joyner specifically requested that her body be rigorously tested for signs of steroid use. None was found. “My wife took the final, ultimate drug test,” said Joyner, “and it’s what we always said: there’s nothing there. So please, please, just let my wife rest in peace.”

Not so easy. The problem is that Flo-Jo’s improvement was just too great, her times too good. Her career as a top-level 100m runner was effectively three months and eight races long, but she still has all of the top three and five of the top 10 fastest times in history. In the 14 years since 1988 the men’s 100m record has been broken 15 times; not only does Griffith Joyner’s time still stand, nobody has even got close to it. Only three women have run under 10.70: Griffith Joyner, the confirmed drug cheat Marion Jones and the reigning world champion Carmelita Jeter. After she set her personal best of 10.64, still 0.15 off Flo-Jo’s record, in 2009, the latter said: “Honestly the first thing I heard was ‘well, she’s faster than Marion and a little slower than Flo-Jo, hmmmm’.”

Griffith Joyner’s 200m record is also emphatically unbeaten. The only person to have got within 0.30 of it since is Jones. Jamaica’s Veronica Campbell-Brown won 200m gold in 2004 and 2008, as well as at last year’s world championships. Her personal best, 21.74, is 0.4sec slower than Griffith Joyner’s at Seoul. “It is beyond my reach,” she has said. She believes the continued presence of Flo-Jo’s times in the record books has cheapened women’s athletics. “It’s disappointing to not get the respect that the males do, because they are capable of breaking the record and people are excited to see them run because they know the possibility of breaking the record is close. I don’t have that luxury.”

Nothing will change now. Griffith Joyner will never fail a drug test, and she will never admit to doping. No one will strip her of her record-obliterating times, but she will also never be rid of the deep and damning fog of suspicion.

What the Guardian said

Flying in the face of disbelief, by John Rodda, Friday 30 September 1988

Believing the unbelievable has become more of a burden since Ben Johnson hustled out of Seoul on an early-morning plane.

He left behind a host of desecrated emotions about sport, sportsmanship, winning and losing, so that when someone like Florence Joyner takes off and destroys a world record by the sort of margin Bob Beamon achieved in the long jump 20 years ago at the Games in Mexico City, the elation one should feel becomes stifled.

Joyner does not have altitude assistance here as Beamon did, and there has been no evidence that her thickly muscled thighs and arms and her husky voice are anything but natural. She has performed in the Olympics arena according to the rules and spirit of the occasion and has now won two gold medals and is likely to get a third.

Yet because of Johnson, and because of the weightlifters and modern pentathletes who have also been caught cheating at these Games, the immediate thrill of an astounding break-through in sprinting has been warped. And that is a vital part of the rapport between the athlete and spectator ? those at home as much as those in the stadium.

If all is well after Joyner’s dope test ? as it was after her 100 metres victory ? then she has truly taken women’s sprinting to a new dimension.

To bring the new world record down from 21.71sec to 21.56sec in one race and then improve it to 21.34sec an hour and forty minutes later, having run no faster than 21.96sec a year ago, is barely credible.
As other runners crossed the line and looked at the time Joyner had achieved flashing on the scoreboard their disappointment carried doubts as well. With the Olympic gold medal gone for four years their goal is now a world record and that, as they looked up at the result, is a dot on their horizon.

Joyner was adamant about what had brought her success: “Hard work, determination and dedication”.