BBC reports Charlie Francis, White, 61, dead from Cancer. He coached Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery, Ben Johnson.

Good post. Thank you.

I will refrain from this discussion until the man is laid to rest, thank you...RIP Charlie, and condolences to Angie and family...

I find this post very sad and disheartening. For someone to say that drugs are integral and necessary to elite sprinting shows a total lack of love for T&F. It shows a love of oneself. If he truly loved track and knew about the cheating that was going on he would have found a new career. He cheated because he HAD TO WIN. That's it. Anybody that regularly and systematically cheats does it solely for selfish reasons. His ego is what drove, him not his, so called, love of sprinting.

I hate to say it, the man just died, that's sad and all, and I'm sure he did a lot of good things in life,.....

....but this is an EXCELLENT post.

And, the very best 100m men now ARE doing very different things from what Charlie's people did. (400m work for example.)

When George W passes, I'm not going to say that he was an excellent Pres. (Oh, shit.....)

I know I seem mean and cold in this thread (sorry Ron) but I f***in remember (like most Canadians my age) where I was and how I felt when the news broke, and that will never leave me.

Then I went to Australia in Oct 88 and won a local 3000m race, and the announcer said "Skuja from Canberra" and I said "no, Canada", and he announced "well, we better test him then" and the crowd laughed their asses off.

Then in Tunisia in 89 I was in a military XC meet, had a really rough time with 1k to go, bent over with a heat cramp.....some Tunisian kid was right there, laughing, saying "hahaha.....Canada......Ben Jonson.......hahahaha...."

Thank you Charlie.

Those were heady days, in the 1980's.

It seemed that everything was possible, that there were no limits.

There were so many record-holders around, it was ridiculous--Ben, McKoy, Issajenko, even people like Desai Williams and Angela Bailey who were on the cusp.

It was the athletic equivalent of today's Wall Street mentality, with the same giant personal egos and disregard for adverse effects.

And like that era, the current Wall Street era will come to an end, only to be replaced in the future by the same types of practices in some other venue, like Shanghai or Singapore.

Things will never really change, the practices and attitudes will just migrate to the most favorable location, and as long as the institutions are making money off people like Bolt, their winning ways will fluorish.

I must admit that, having been around the scene and completely clean, I was of mixed opinion--on the one hand, I would have loved to have won every now and then, so that was a drag. On the other hand, it was inspiring to see such performances. I was young, and didn't necessarily believe that I could never achieve those types of performances.

I'm glad I was young and idealistic. If I had known then what I know now, I may have been much more tempted to go down the wrong path.

I don't hold any adult records, but I do have a perfectly functioning liver, which means that I can still metabolize a whole bunch of beer after a long training session.

Quality of life!

We weren't sending individuals or teams up there, although in 1973 -- not long after Charlie and I were gone -- Stanford sent a 4x220 yards relay team up there that stunned itself by setting an indoor WR in that seldom run event! So weird!! The anchor was a pretty decent 220-runner, Kenny Curl, who beat John Smith at that distance once, but otherwise -- I don't think Stanford's sprint teams were even in the top half of their conference, much less the world!

With all due respect, I agree w/ you in your opinion and prespective on CF. However, I would say that it is folly to state that you know other people were clean. We don't know, even people that are close family and friends don't know for sure most of the time.

I'd be interested where your confidence is that most of these people were clean. I like to think the best of people but the only person I know for a fact is not doping is me.

Believe me, I was not honoring Charlie for taking steroids (although what he was taking was legal at that time.) I thought the irony was clear: He was a very good sprinter who briefly touched something close to greatness because he took a performance-enhancing drug, which IS cheating even if it wasn't strictly-speaking illegal.

I was obviously overstating it when I said that "everybody" was juicing. Of course "everybody" wasn't -- I would have thought that was obvious, but still, I overstated. In the sprinting community it was widespread, even if it wasn't so in Canada. Also, I'd be curious how "you figure" 11 Canadian teammembers were doping. (And by the way, congrats on your track success.)

You're not the only reader who thought I was somehow praising Charlie Francis for beating Harry Jerome when he (Charlie) was on steroids. Far from it. I thought I was making the point that a lot of people ran faster on drugs, which IS cheating even if it wasn't strictly speaking illegal.

Also -- I don't think the logic of "everybody does it," which is the logic Charlie used, ever justifies taking performance-enhancing substances. One has to wonder if his personal drug use was a factor in his too-early death.

At Stanford, I was nopt aware of any anabolic or androgenic steroid use by any athlete, football player, track, anything, in all my years there. That's including two teams that won the Rose Bowl Game. Years later I read the claim of a Stanford quarter-miler who finished 7th at the NCAAs in 1967 that all six runners ahead of him took performance-enhancing drugs; friends of his at U.S.C. and U.C.L.A. had told him they were given pills in the training room like candy. But in a pivotal era in innovative approaches to training, I never knew about these things, nor apparently did Chuck Francis.

I wish that Cierpinski, the east German who won the Montreal marathon, would have his medal taken away. If I am defaming him, I apologize, but there was widespread suspicion that he was a drug cheat. If his medal was taken, my friend and teammate Don Kardong could get the bronze that should have been his.

All to say I am utterly opposed to performance-enhancing drugs, and it feels a little weird to get jumped on by your emal.

Did he coach any prominant field event athletes?

The sad part, for me, is not that the CF bashers are disrespecting the man upon his death.

The sad part is that CF did what every elite sprint coach does: coach athletes on PEDs. He got caught and paid the price but let us not pretend that anyone else is morally superior or "loves" track more.

Charlie loved track as much as anyone.

I disrespected him when he was alive, too, FWIW. And I feel the same about Trevor Graham and so many of the Euro coaches, if that makes you feel any better. However, I sure as f*ck don't feel better about CF's sins simply because he wasn't the only one to commit them. That's like saying that this priest's rape of altar boys is really not bad or his responsibility because he was just doing what a lot of other priests were doing and he still loved the church and God as much as anyone. 100% BS, don't even come in here with that nonsense. The earlier comments on ego were spot-on, that's what drives anyone to cheat in any field, unchecked ambition.

Red Glare wrote:

I disrespected him when he was alive, too, FWIW. And I feel the same about Trevor Graham and so many of the Euro coaches, if that makes you feel any better. However, I sure as f*ck don't feel better about CF's sins simply because he wasn't the only one to commit them. That's like saying that this priest's rape of altar boys is really not bad or his responsibility because he was just doing what a lot of other priests were doing and he still loved the church and God as much as anyone. 100% BS, don't even come in here with that nonsense. The earlier comments on ego were spot-on, that's what drives anyone to cheat in any field, unchecked ambition.

I would first like to state emphatically that what Charlie Francis did should not be mentioned in the same sentence with sodomy.

That said, your analogy fails for so many other reasons. Francis' athletes were willing participants in a professional training system. I will not defend "cheating" since CF broke the rules but, to be fair, so did Jesse Owens, so did Steve Prefontaine, so did Jim Thorpe, so did every Spartan to ever compete in the ancient Olympics.

I like fair games but to pretend that Franics, Graham, and the Euro coaches are the only ones cheating is plain naive. Let me be clear: they are all using PEDs. It is part of the sport. The only difference between the heroes and the cheaters is about who gets caught.

I agree with most of what you have to say, but remind me again how Jesse Owens cheated???? I'm old and I'm starting to forget......

ray wrote:

I agree with most of what you have to say, but remind me again how Jesse Owens cheated???? I'm old and I'm starting to forget......

I believe the controversy surrounded his six spiked track shoes made by the German brothers (who later split into Adidas and Puma). They were a prototype and considered ungamely by the German hosts who all wore the standard four-spiked version.

Don't be so simplistic. The analogy was clearly about pardoning an offense because others also did it and otherwise ascribing wishful thinking to the intent of the doer of the deeds. And I never said the list stops with Graham, Francis, and Euro coaches. Jesus.

Please, just take your relativistic BS and shove it, you clearly hate the sport as much as CF did.

OP here.

If CF was a black man, be it Afro-American, Jamaican, Indian, Sri Lankan, Guinean, Brazilian, Egyptian, Kenyan, Samoan, Fijian, etc., he'd be tarred, feathered, and dragged naked here on LR the way Tim, Marion, LaShawn, Justin, Barry have been.

The responses thus far only confirm to me that the United States of America is the most racist nation in the recorded history of mankind.