Linford in £1m Seoul rerun offer

Linford Christie today revealed he is considering the lure of a £1.2million pay day, the most lucrative in athletics history, to make a one-off comeback in a rerun of the sport's most infamous race.

The 43-year-old told Standard Sport that he is in a dilemma about whether to accept the offer of £111,000 in training grants and appearance money to sprint against Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis in a reprise of the 1988 Olympic 100 metres final.

He has been promised that if he wins the race, provisionally set for Seoul's Olympic stadium on 31 July, just a couple of weeks before this year's Games start in Athens, he will receive another £1.1m.

Canadian organiser Morris Chrobotek claims that six of the eight finalists have signed contracts to compete. They include Johnson, whose world record 9.79sec victory in the original race was followed by his historic disqualification for failing a drugs test for steroids. Lewis, the eventual champion, has not signed up yet but Chrobotek is adamant he will. Christie, who had also originally ruled out the prospect of running, has also been persistently wooed.

Now with a contract on the table, Christie said: "It does appeal to the competitive athlete in me but there are many things that need to be considered because I take my sport very seriously."

He fears the race, which has already been condemned by the IAAF, would be sold as "a circus", playing on the notoriety of five of the eight finalists having once failed drugs tests. At the end of his career in 2000, Christie was handed a two-year ban for failing a test for nandrolone. To this day, he still fiercely maintains his innocence.