In 1988, Erskine King was sports editor at the Voice of Barbados and he covered the Seoul Summer Olympic Games for the Caribbean Broadcasting Union, filing daily audio reports. Twenty -four years later, King is now Director of Sports at the National Sports Council. These are his recollections of those Games as told to Sherrylyn A. Toppin.
The greatest difficulty was the time difference, because you were talking about a ten-hour difference [between] Seoul and the rest of the Caribbean.
It was tough from the standpoint that when the Games were finished, you had to go to the Main Press Centre (MPC) to do the report to send back to Caribbean Broadcasting Union (CBU) to disseminate across the region.
This meant getting back to the Media Village like 1 a.m., then getting back up for Seoul time to cover all of these different disciplines, particularly the ones where there was Caribbean representation – track, boxing, sailing, shooting – it was really, really hard and I was the only person covering for the CBU.
Those were the Games that would be remembered for Flo-Jo [Florence Griffith-Joyner], Ben Johnson and the positive test. They would also be remembered for Antony Nesty [of Suriname] winning the gold medal in the pool. And I remember some of my fellow journalists not knowing where the hell Suriname was, calling all sorts of names despite the fact that he was doing reasonably well in the heats.
It made you feel very proud as a Caribbean person to have someone other than track and field winning a medal because it wasn’t anticipated. The pool was dominated by the Germans, the Aussies and the Americans. So it was expected that all of the swimming medals would come from those countries.
The track was dominated by the Americans, with Carl Lewis in the 100 [metres], but when Ben beat him, that is when the whole thing started.
A lot of people were looking forward to the 100 metres and I remember it was being run around 1 p.m. We left the Media Village around 11 a.m.
The Korean authorities had told Koreans not to drive into Seoul that Saturday because the traffic really was horrendous. We got on the bus and around midday, we were still about two miles or so outside of the stadium. People had ignored the warnings not to drive into Seoul.
100-metre fears
Some friends of mine from Australia, journalists, said: “We are going to miss this 100 metres if we don’t get off this bus.” And we attempted to get off the bus but the security on the bus, a very young fellow, said: “You can’t get off.”
There was a lot of talk and voices were raised. The fellow just opened his jacket and we saw two very large guns on his hip and we all sat back down. He went on a walkie-talkie, some outriders came and cleared the way for the bus to get into the stadium.
The atmosphere was charged because everyone wanted to see this showdown although leading up to the final, Ben was not doing too well in the rounds.
People who would have seen the footage would remember that when Carl was looking to his right at that point in the race at 60 or 70 metres [thinking] that he would have been ahead, but Johnson was ahead. At 90 metres, Johnson just raised his right hand.
It was something else.
Positive test
Two days later, I remember I came back from the MPC, it was like two o’clock in the morning. I was in a three-bedroom apartment and there were two African journalists staying in the other rooms.
They came and knocked on my door saying: “We just came out of the restaurant and we heard that Ben [had tested positive].” I knew [Dr Jamie] Astaphan and they said make a call, but I said: “Who the hell am I going to call at three o’clock in the morning to find out if it was so?”
They also heard that he was heading to the airport, so we went downstairs about 3:30 or so and went to the airport, about an hour-and-a-half drive. And when we got there, there could have been about 2 000 journalists.
The story was all over the place about what had happened. The spokesperson for the International Olympic Committee made the announcement that [Johnson had tested positive]. I tried getting his handlers but I couldn’t get anybody to find out what had happened.
It threw a bit of a damper on the Games but it did not take away from the whole excitement of the Olympics because the Koreans had done, to my mind, and I still think, one of the better Games from an organizational standpoint, because everything worked like clockwork and the facilities were excellent.
They also started, which has since continued, what is referred to as the Olympic family lane: as long as you had your accreditation, your vehicle, you could go into that and get from point to point relatively quickly rather than having to battle with all of the traffic.
What was phenomenal to me the NBC booth to do their broadcast was right next to us but they had about 3 000 people. Here I was, as a sole person and I remember Bryant Gumbel, who was the presenter, his wardrobe was set up there and they had all of those props. Our booth was like an old-time telephone booth and you went in there with a light overhead and I had to operate with two tape recorders because there was no editing equipment.
It was really a tough assignment as well having to get those reports back for morning Barbados time so that when people woke up they had the reports because of the time zone and so forth, but it was an interesting Games.
