Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg)
Martin Gillingham
18 October 2002
Johannesburg — Shaun Bownes, the conqueror of world 110m hurdles record holder Colin Jackson at this year's Commonwealth Games, has come clean about his drugs past. Though he stops short of naming names, Bownes has revealed how an African hurdler based in the United States and a doctor from his home town of Potchefstroom guided him down the murky path to doping shame.
It's virtually a world first for an athlete who has failed a drugs test to go on to admit that he or she actually took drugs. Just last month, for example, British pole vaulter Janine Whitlock was suspended for two years and, although she acknow-ledged that traces of an illegal substance were in her urine, she claimed that she had never knowingly taken anything against the rules.
Some of Bownes's other contemporaries have constructed elaborate and sometimes fanciful alibis. Dieter Baumann, the German middle- distance runner, went to court claiming he failed a test because the banned substance had been injected into a tube of his toothpaste.
Just about the last public outpouring of honesty was at the inquiry that was set up by the Canadian government in the immediate aftermath of Ben Johnson's drugs failure at the 1988 Olympic Games.
One of the Canadian athletes to confess to long-term drug abuse at the inquiry was sprinter Angella Issajenko. She said that the understanding among athletes in the aftermath of a positive dope test was to "deny, deny, deny".
Fourteen years later Bownes has broken that code of omertà. He says: "I was in an African team to compete against the Americans at a meeting in Durham, North Carolina. There I met one of the African athletes who studies in the States. I'm not going to tell you his name but he's still competing. We shared a room and he started talking about steroids and he told me that he was using the stuff, that he was being monitored, and that was why he was doing so well.
"I ran there and struggled to break 14 seconds ... everyone knows that if you break 14 seconds then you're starting to move in the right direction. I got back home, went to my doctor and said, 'Eh, listen, let's talk!'
"He gave me these tablets for two weeks that raised the testosterone level in my body and which he said would help get me used to it before he'd then put me on a month of injections."
Bownes says: "Each afternoon you go to the track and the guys make jokes about steroids and the guilt that it makes you carry inside. It's as if the whole world knows you're on the stuff. So by the time I got to the point when I had to get the first injection I told the doctor I couldn't go through it."
But the pills that the mystery doctor had given him were themselves illegal and when Bownes turned up to compete at his first meeting of the 1995 season at Germiston the testers were waiting for him.
This is an edited version of a story that will appear in the November issue of SA Sports Illustrated
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