Talk:Ben Johnson (Canadian sprinter)

message: ban him —This unsigned comment was added by 194.83.233.3 (talk • contribs) .
Quite. When was his world record surpassed by (presumably) non-steroidal means? -Ashley Pomeroy 10:57, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: its incredibly naive to think the gold medalists in these events are drug free. not testing positive does not equate to being drug free. the article is excellent, renders my copy of speed trap useless (almost ;)). StrengthCoach 23:34, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: hmm, sorry but I don't think it's a very good article. It's an excellent story which would be perfect for a magazine or something, but using all this emotive language and summarizing a book doesn't belong in an encyclopedia. It's also too long and while interesting, an encyclopedia should just list the facts and cut all the action. 218.102.71.167 10:19, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You're welcome to try and do better. Yankees76 22:10, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: ban

message: I'm working on putting together sources for each quote/fact. Much of it is from Speed Trap, Inside Track and the CBC. This was the first article I wrote for Wikipedia, and I missed that aspect. If anyone can help, please feel free to add sources. Thanks. Yankees76 14:03, 7 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Sources

message: I see a contradiction:  "Gold" should read "bronze", otherwise it doesn't make sense in this passage:  "In May 1987, Lewis’s father died of cancer and it was at the funeral that Lewis pulled from his pocket his gold medal from the Los Angeles 100 metres and put it in his father’s hands. “I want you to have this”, he said, “because it was your favorite event”. When his mother expressed her surprise, he said calmly: “Don’t worry, I’ll get another one”.  29 July 2006
:I'm not following you. Carl Lewis won numerous gold medals at the LA games. Ben Johnson won the bronze. The paragraph is about Lewis - not Johnson. And please sign your posts as well. Thanks. Yankees76 05:11, 30 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Contradiction

message: Wow, this is an extremely dramatized and sensationalistic article.  Sources are badly needed here.  An example is:
:It was in a quiet meeting with Francis, in Toronto in September 1981, three months before his 20th birthday that Francis brought up the subject of steroids. He informed Johnson that steroids represented 1% of performance, or the equivalent of one metre in the 100 metres, and he suggested that it was time to put Johnson in touch with his doctor. And it was a few days later that Johnson phoned Francis. He had made up his mind, and yes, he wanted that extra metre. 
How can we so baldly assert the facts of what was a private meeting of two people?  Was this Francis' story, as would make sense since the article quotes from his book later?  This should be stated.
: Was Johnson panicked by all this into a late run to the drugs cabinet? Not according to Francis. 
The tone here is hardly encyclopaedic.
: In the finals, however, Ben stepped it up a notch, destroying the world record with a time of 9.83 seconds. He finished almost exactly a metre ahead of Lewis, exactly the lead that Francis once told him the steroids could provide.
The dramatic value here -- the difference equalling exactly what was promised with steroids -- seems so perfect as to cast the original account of Francis/Johnson's meeting into doubt. --Saforrest 17:55, 30 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That quote/fact was obtained here: []Yankees76 13:28, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with Saforrest.  I just tried to clean up the first section.  I think we could do with less melodrama and fewer sub plots. David D. (Talk) 17:38, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I fully concur. This article is smutty and written to excite and please vulgar taste. It's not written like an encyclopedia but like a tawdry British tabloid newspaper. Loginnigol (talk) 06:49, 10 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Sources and sensationalism

message: Just out of interest, what is to stop me deleting this whole article?  I just googled one of the sentences from the article and came back with this article from The Times.  Clearly there is major plagarism in this article. It might be best to delete the whole thing and start again from scratch. Here is another example. Many of the sentences are identical. It looks like this whole article is a cut and paste job from multiple sources.  David D. (Talk) 19:29, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with David D. on this. It is a shame, as much of the plagiarized information was interesting and well written. We should leave a link on the article's page to those sources for those who want more information. Uucp 20:36, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Plagiarism

message: There was a claim that Carl Lewis tested positive and a citation to this article: http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2006/12/05/johnson-lewis-conspiracy.html which says no such thing. I have removed the false claim.  (Of course someone could act a valid citation).—Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.174.220.98 (talk) 01:19, 15 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  False Claim 

message: In the following link, Ben Jhonson said that the drug was a conspiracy and was sneaked into his food.
http://www.cbc.ca/olympics/athletics/story/2008/05/16/f-olympics-athletics-benjohnson.html  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Coolsafe (talk • contribs) 00:53, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Olympic Scandal: Not Accurate 

message: I have added the POV-section tag. The discussion of the other
(true or alleged) PED users is factually disputable and lacking in
neutrality. There is, for instance, no proof of deliberate
and non-trivial PED use in the case of Carl Lewis---a positive
test notwithstanding. "Of these, only Johnson was forced to give up his records and his medals.", again, misses the point: Johnson
was the only one to be tested as positive in the relevant
championship (with some minor reservation for Christie), and
everything went according to the rule-book. Christie's one
clear-cut cheat occured some ten years later, e.g.
Other similar examples exist.
94.220.247.12 (talk) 17:35, 17 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Christie failed two drug tests during his career. He tested positive for a banned stimulant at the 1988 Olympics but was cleared 11 votes to 10 votes by a panel after claiming to have ingested it in a cup of ginseng tea. Then he was banned for two years by the IAAF in 1999 after testing positive for nandrolone. 
Nonetheless I have cleaned up the section to remove some of the obvious POV and attribute certain claims to invididuals, not to Wikipedia.--Yankees76 (talk) 22:11, 25 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Olympic scandal/POV 

message: Is it just me or is there something about this story that comes across as a perfect failure?TonyMath (talk) 20:32, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Perfect Failure? 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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