With the Paris Summer Games starting on Friday, July 26, Dubbo Photo News is taking a nostalgic look at some of the highlights and heroes, controversies and clashes, of one of the world’s great sporting extravaganzas, the modern Olympics.

By David Dixon

Just 9.79 seconds, that’s all it took for one of the most-anticipated and controversial sporting rivalries of the 20th century to explode.

While the Seoul Summer Games were the last Olympics in which sport acted as a proxy battle between America and the West against rivals the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, it thankfully lacked the political controversies that had plagued the previous two decades.

But just as the Cold War was winding down, the never-ending fight against drugs in sport was now becoming critical, with an until-then unknown Australian athlete, later dubbed the 'Cappuccino Kid', caught right in the middle!

The suggestion that Seoul bid for the games originated with dynamic and eccentric South Korean dictator Park Chung Hee who wanted the then-developing country to be considered for high-status world events. It achieved this by successfully hosting the huge Miss Universe contest in 1980 and the 1986 Asian Games, demonstrating that it had the appropriate capability for such occasions.

Only thirty-five years after the Korean War had devastated the split nation, Seoul was chosen to host the Summer Games with a dominant 52 votes to 27 win over the pre-vote favourite, Nagoya in Japan.

While the boycotts that had blighted previous games became a thing of the past, a clearly-envious North Korea stayed home, as did five other socialist countries, including Cuba and Albania. Nonetheless, the much larger boycotts seen in the three previous editions were avoided, resulting in the largest number of participating nations during the Cold War era.

The spectacular opening ceremony — the last to be held during the daytime — featured a mass demonstration of taekwondo, as well as a skydiving team descending over the stadium and forming the five-coloured Olympic rings. The skydiving team had hoped that their opening ceremony appearance would set the stage for the sport to become a medal event by 2000.

The ceremony was also one of the last times that live doves, representing peace, were mass-released, with a number apparently being incinerated by the lighting of the Olympic flame.

In competition, women's judo and 10-pin bowling were held as demonstration sports, with the popular Asian pastime table tennis also introduced with China and South Korea both winning two titles each. Lawn tennis returned to the Olympics after a 64-year absence, as Steffi Graf of West Germany added gold to her four Grand Slam victories.

This was the first Olympic Games where women's sailing was its own event. It was won by Americans Allison Jolly and Lynne Jewell. Also, for the first time in history, all the dressage events were won by women.

Performing for his last major event under the flag of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Artemov won four gold medals in gymnastics. Daniela Silivaş of Romania also won three gold and equalled compatriot Nadia Comăneci's record of seven perfect 10s in one Olympic Games.

Anthony Nesty of Suriname won his country's first Olympic medal by finishing first in the men's 100-metre butterfly, prevailing over American Matt Biondi by .01 of a second and thereby thwarting Biondi's attempt to match Mark Spitz's record seven golds at one Olympics, with Nesty the first black athlete to win an individual swimming gold.

Swimmer Kristin Otto of East Germany also won six gold medals, competing for a country that would no longer exist four years later, with Biondi winning a total of five medals, and Janet Evans, three.

With an explosion in the number of records falling before the games, and increasing calls for mandatory blood-testing of all athletes, it was an obscure Sydney boy who first fell under the unwanted cheating spotlight.

Straight-up amateur Alex Watson had emerged as a sudden early medal chance for Australia in the modern heptathlon — comprising fencing, swimming, show-jumping, shooting, and running — when a bombshell dropped. 

“We were at the second-last event, the shooting, and my manager Bob Barry told me, ‘You have to get back to the village and see the AOC, because you’ve failed a drug test’,” Watson later recalled.

Watson was immediately disqualified for excessive levels of caffeine, admitting later, that he had been dosing-up at a coffee van provided for athletes during the gruelling day of events, thereby earning himself the light-hearted sobriquet, 'The Cappuccino Kid'.

Utterly shocked, he was sent home, but was eventually cleared of any cheating, and was later allowed to compete in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.

The most controversial moment of the games, however, came in the much-anticipated 100-metre men’s final. Canada’s Ben Johnson was everyone’s favourite, having beaten Carl Lewis in a number of previous events.

Lewis’ perceived prickly arrogance had the whole world cheering for the humble Canadian, who had come from the clouds to threaten the American legend’s status as the fastest man on earth.

Johnson smoked the US champion in a world record time of 9.79 seconds, with British runner Linford Christie coming-in third. However, two days after the event, Johnson was disqualified after testing positive for stanozolol, with the crest-fallen athlete claiming that his positive test was the result of sabotage.

Flamboyant and equally-controversial US female sprinter Florence Griffith Joyner ('Flo-Jo'), also set an Olympic record (10.62) in the 100-metre dash and a still-standing world record (21.34) in the 200-metre sprint to capture gold medals in both events. To these medals, she added a gold in the four-times-100-metre relay, and a silver in the four-times-400-metre relay.

However, the apparent ease with which the previously-unknown athlete set world records — some of which still stand today — her abrupt retirement after mandatory blood-testing became the rule after Seoul, and her sudden death in 1998, aged only 38, leave a cloud over her achievements. 

In other cheating news, two Bulgarian weightlifters were stripped of their gold medals after failing doping tests, with the team withdrawing after the scandal.

Overall, the soon-to-disappear nations of the Soviet Union and East Germany bagged the first two spots on the medal tally, beating the Americans into third, with host nation South Korea coming in fourth with 12 Gold.

With both the Eastern Bloc and the Americans both back on board the Olympics for the first time since 1976 at Montreal, the Australians had a relatively lean run in the medal count, with three gold, six silver, and five bronze medals, to finally land at 15th place on the table.

Standouts included 400-metre hurdler Debbie Flintoff-King who won a silver medal at the 1987 World Championships and also became the first Australian athlete to win an IAAF Grand Prix Final in that same year.

Primed for Seoul, she won the gold medal against two drug-tainted Soviet and East German runners, despite having received news of her sister, Noeline's, death just  before the race. Her Olympic record time of 53.17 seconds still stands as the current Australian record.

Duncan Armstrong also surprised the champion American star Matt Biondi in the 200-metre freestyle, effectively surfing in Biondi’s wake until the last 25 metres to snatch gold. In the 400-metres, he was pipped in a photo-finish for silver by an East German swimmer who set a new world record.

The Australian women’s hockey team also won gold for the first time, after defeating the favoured South Koreans 2–0 in the final.

Other outstanding Australian results included Martin Vinnicombe winning silver in the men’s track time trial for cycling, Dean Woods coming second in the men’s individual pursuit for cycling, and Lisa Martin winning our first-ever women’s marathon medal, a silver after coming in second to Portuguese star Rosa Mota.

The games came to a hugely-successful close to much relief, no doubt, of IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch, who began in Seoul to utilise the untapped commercial potential of the games for increased television rights and sponsorship.

But the world was about to change — imminent collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall barely 12 months later — heralding a new war against drugs in sport, that was just beginning to heat up.