Christie's £1m re-run

14 April 2012

You are 44 next month, a legend, still in fantastic shape and lightning fast. Someone is offering you the prospect of the biggest payday in athletics annals to come out of retirement for just one 10-second joust with another bunch of fortysomethings you're sure you can beat.

But this is to be a re-run of track's most notorious race, the 100 metres final at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, which saw Ben Johnson's downfall. As four other competitors also failed drugs tests during their careers, wouldn't it all be portrayed as, at best, a joke and, at worst, a disgrace?

So if you were Linford Christie, would you take the money and run?

This is his dilemma after being offered a remarkably lucrative contract from a Canadian entrepreneur, Morris Chrobotek. He has been promised $10,000 a month to fund his training, plus a $150,000 appearance fee. He would get $2m for winning, $1m for second or $500,000 for third.

Six others, including Johnson, have signed up and are in training for the 31 July contest, but it is a non-starter without Christie and Carl Lewis, both of whom are still undecided.

Yet Chrobotek, Johnson's former manager told Standard Sport from Toronto last night: "It's inevitable. This race is going to happen."

Adamant Lewis, the 1988 champion, would soon be on board for an event to be bankrolled by as-yet unnamed blue-chip sponsors, he says the most likely venue is Seoul. But it could even be Athens on 31 July, a fortnight before the Olympics start there.

If you suggest he is trying to cynically make money on the back of drugs scandals, Chrobotek counters fiercely. "Look, it's 16 years ago," he said. "It's in the past. Hello. Wake up. There's the chance of putting out a wonderful message here. That you can come back and 'do it right'."

Christie, who was famously cleared over a positive test in Seoul for a stimulant which he had innocently ingested by drinking ginseng tea, had originally said no. Yet Chrobotek's persistent wooing by telephone had made him re-examine it.

"He is considering it because it does appeal to Linford's competitive nature," said Christie's manager, Sue Barrett. "He takes his sport very seriously and wouldn't want to do anything that ends up as a circus. It depends on how the race is going to be sold and how it will be perceived."

Christie would certainly demand that all the athletes be drug tested so the race was transparently clean. Chrobotek agrees, saying Dr Wade Exum, the former US Olympic doping control chief, will conduct the tests.

Chrobotek is surely right about one thing. Whether it is seen as freak show, as serious 'masters' competition like that on the senior golf tours or as just a bit of a lark, people won't be able to resist tuning in. "Three billion would watch on TV," he predicts.

As for Christie, if people were prepared to pay him money he couldn't have dreamed of in his Olympicwinning heyday, then who could blame him for taking the shilling?

And his reputation could not be damaged more than it was when, at the end of his career, he was banned by the International Association of Athletics Federations for failing a test for nandrolone.

Christie, who still protests his innocence, had previously been cleared by a UK disciplinary hearing but still lost a lot of potential endorsements.

Time is running out for Christie and Lewis to decide - if one goes for it, the other might follow - but Barrett admits Christie is in such good nick while training his own potential Olympic charges that he believes he would win that $2m jackpot. Even Chrobotek thinks he would win.

"But Johnson is wild for it. He's been training like a demon and he scorched over 50m the other day," said the promoter, sounding as if he was carefully laying the tastiest bait of all for Christie. Chrobotek is very persuasive; don't yet rule out the possibility of sport witnessing its most unlikely action replay.

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Christie's £1m re-run

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