On Second Thoughts: Linford Christie

It's 1993. Graham Taylor's England haven't qualified for the World Cup. Graham Gooch has resigned the captaincy after being humiliated in the Ashes. And Linford Christie is the fastest man on earth: the Commonwealth, European, Olympic and world 100m champion. Christie was a phenomenon, and for a time we were obsessed with him. There has been no more successful individual British sportsman since. It seems almost freakish now, his dominance in that period is startlingly unfamiliar to a British public since re-accustomed to mediocrity. What Christie did in that two-year span of 1992-93 should rank him as one of the greatest sportsmen in our history. The very idea of a British athlete, or heavyweight boxer, or tennis player doing anything equivalent now is so unlikely as to seem preposterous.

Remember how the camera would linger on his face at the start line, like a tourist trying to draw the gaze of a Buckingham Palace guardsman? No one has ever brought a cliché to life like Christie did tunnel vision. He was 32 at the Barcelona Games, the oldest man ever to win the 100m title. And he did it, as he always seemed to, in the final 40 meters. Watching Christie race was an exquisitely brief agony: he'd lag for what seemed an age and then smoothly move up into the lead. The way he ran made the 100m track seem so much longer.

So why do I have to go to YouTube to remind myself of his greatest races? Why are the public profiles of Denise van Outen and Konnie Huq getting a greater boost from the Beijing Olympics than that of Christie, a man who won 16 medals at major competitions for England and Great Britain? Everyone knows the answer. Drugs. Nandrolone. Christie passed more than 100 in-competition drugs tests during his career, and failed two. And those are the two that people judge and remember him by.

The first time that Christie failed a test, in Seoul '88, he was cleared by the IOC. The second time, in 1999, he was cleared by UK Athletics. That verdict was later contradicted by the IAAF. Indisputably though, Christie had been retired for two years at that point and was running at a meaningless indoor meet in Dusseldorf. He said he was settling a bet with the athletes he was coaching. Whatever his reasons might have been for taking steroids at that time - and he has always maintained his innocence - they had nothing to do with winning gold medals.

The sprinter's explanations of the two positive tests - in Seoul Christie blamed a cup of ginseng tea - have never been given as much credence as other stories about him, tales of his reluctance to submit to a test in Barcelona '92, and how he missed one test altogether in 1993. This imbalance between the currency of the two versions of Christie's history has been influenced by the fact that he was seen as something of an asshole.

This tag was partly because Christie didn't like it when the tabloids turned his penis into a national joke. It was exacerbated by his disqualification in the Atlanta '96 100m final, one of the most anti-climactic sports moments of the 90s. Mainly though, it was because, well, he often acted like an asshole. When he was racing, and winning, he wasn't chivalrous. He was intense and arrogant. Given that in later years he hosted, of all things, Record Breakers and Garden Invaders, there's no doubt that the man had a severe case of white-line fever. The ugly side of his persona was what he used when he was competing, and it was what helped him win. It also meant he wasn't cut much slack when it came to the coverage of his failed tests.

The retrospective judgment of Christie's career has been irrevocably tainted by that one failed test, two years after he had retired, seven years after he won gold at Barcelona. Given his acquittal by UK Athletics it could not even be called a conclusive judgment. And yet right now he's persona non grata. I can understand that, but on the back of it the man's history has been re-written: his photographs have had the word 'cheat' airbrushed into them.

If Christie was cheating at Barcelona and Stuttgart, if that dead-eyed glare actually was the same as that of the hopped-up muscle-freak Shadow from Gladiators, then we should know. Is the condemnation of the athletics community based on some common, but unshared, knowledge? Right now, we're just rubbing Vaseline on the lens and hoping that his feats will get even fuzzier in the memory. If that official guilty verdict is there then it must be made public. Otherwise Christie's legacy as the greatest British athlete, the world's best sprinter of his time, should be restored and cherished.

Go on, watch him run again and remind yourself just how glorious he was.