We are humans, we are bound to make mistakes.
Yohan Blake
I have arranged to meet the man who calls himself ‘the Beast’ in Hope Gardens in Kingston, where – just as in Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce’s hair salon – another side of the city is very much in evidence.
The botanical gardens are spread over 200 acres, with palm avenues, manicured lawns, a bandstand, lush green hills rising up in the distance, a zoo next door. It is a place that reeks of affluence, the tranquillity pierced only by the cries and screams of young children -a primary school sports day. Yohan Blake’s agent, Timothy Spencer, whose son attends the school, tells me not to worry that his client is late: he is on his way. ‘This is really unlike Yohan. He’s not usually late.’ Turns out Blake had taken the wrong road and got lost in the neighbouring zoo.
While we wait, I chat to Spencer, who, in his shades, designer jeans and white shirt, top two buttons undone, looks like he might have stepped out of a wine bar in Chelsea. He’s chatty, friendly, and wonderfully indiscreet. When he hears that I write about cycling, he is particularly interested in talking about Lance Armstrong’s doping, mouth opening and head shaking slowly as he hears about the extent and sophistication of Armstrong’s cheating. Spencer is a member of the Jamaican middle class: a successful businessman in Kingston, who seems to help Blake as a favour. He tells me that he’s more involved in running Blake’s foundation than in acting as his agent on a day-to-day basis (Blake has a US-based agent, Cubie Seegobin). Spencer seems more like a big brother, an impression confirmed when, on a later visit to Jamaica, I met him in a hotel bar. On that occasion, Blake phoned him in a state of panic: he’d heard a noise outside his house and wanted Spencer to call the Ministry of National Security. Spencer shook his head, laughed, and told Blake not to worry.
This didn’t seem very Beast-like. The nickname dated back to the autumn of 2008, when Blake began training with Glen Mills and Bolt said he was struck by the eighteen-year-old’s work ethic: ‘Watch out for Yohan Blake. He works like a beast. He’s there with me step for step in training.’ ‘You know why Usain calls me the Beast?’ Blake said. ‘Because when you’re sleeping, I’m working, I’m toiling through the night. It’s what great men do.’
Finally Blake appears, ambling self-consciously towards the grass where the kids are holding their races. The MC excitedly introduces him: ‘It’s our Olympian – El Centro’s favourite! Uncle Yohan “the Beast” Blake!’ Children swarm around him, and Blake signs autographs and poses for some pictures with their mothers, all the time looking distinctly uncomfortable.
He is no more relaxed when he breaks off and saunters over towards Spencer and me. He wears baggy jeans and trainers, an oversized baseball cap covering his cornrow hair. He keeps a Bluetooth device in his ear, like a cab driver. As we sit on a bench, I tell him that I was in his home town, Montego Bay, a couple of days earlier. ‘Montego Bay is where it all started for me,’ Blake says intently. ‘The wanting to get to the top, this drive for what your parents is going through, the suffering, and you want to take your parents out of that. I said I wanted to do something and God answered my prayer.’
Blake’s shyness is apparent as his eyes flicker and then focus straight in front of him; he avoids eye contact. He seems more cat than beast; graceful and feline, with small, gentle features and dark, sparkling eyes.
Blake’s parents, Veda and Shirley, are still together, though there have apparently been some rocky moments (and children with other people). ‘My dad was a drinks mixer,’ Blake says, ‘my mum was a domestic worker: that was the jobs available at the time and that’s what they did.’
It was cricket Blake loved when he was growing up – he still does. In fact, he gives the impression that he would rather be a cricketer than an athlete. When he was twelve, the family moved to Clarendon, on the same side of the island as Kingston, though his parents are back in Montego Bay now. ‘In a nice home that I bought for them,’ Blake says. ‘That was the plan, you know? But they don’t like the whole glamorous thing; they stay humble, quiet.’
They must be proud of him. ‘Every day,’ he says softly.
In Clarendon, Blake went to Green Park all-age school. ‘I wasn’t an athlete then, I was a cricketer. That was my focus. I didn’t know anything about track and field. Then I was running up to bowl really fast, and my teacher said, “You know, man, this boy can really sprint.”’ The principal told him he should go to one of Jamaica’s top athletics schools – Calabar, Kingston College or St Jago. He recommended St Jago on the basis of the coach there, Danny Hawthorne. ‘Mr Hawthorne is a very good coach,’ Blake says. ‘He took me under his wing and made me run a Champs record and a national junior record.’
Blake missed cricket, but seemed, at a very young age, to take a pragmatic view, seeing athletics as a means to an end. ‘Track and field was what was presented to me at the time, and I was getting what I wanted really fast. I was running really fast, so I used that as a drive to help my family. They needed help and they needed it fast.’
So the motivation was to earn money to help them? ‘Yeah, that was it. That was the drive: to get my mum out of poverty, to get myself out of poverty, to help poor people.’ And running fast, even training hard, beats collecting empty beer bottles to sell, which is how he raised money as a kid. How big is his family? ‘In all there’s eleven of us kids,’ he says, and giggles. ‘Back in the day there was nothing to do but have fun.’ Naturally, he is one of the youngest – with lots of older brothers. ‘I’m seventh – somewhere in the middle.’ Three are half-siblings. Shirley Blake is father to eleven children, Veda is mother to eight.
It was Asafa Powell who inspired Blake. The schoolboy was fifteen when Powell, still living and training in Jamaica, broke the world record. Around the same time, Blake ran 10.65 seconds in the final of the world youth championships in Marrakech as he trailed in seventh, three tenths behind the winner, Harry Aikines-Aryeetey of Great Britain. The next year saw a big improvement: Blake ran 10.33 to win the Central American and Caribbean junior championship, then he took a bronze medal in the world junior race in Beijing. But 2007 was the breakthrough, when he claimed Raymond Stewart’s twenty-eight-year-old national junior 100 metres record by a hundredth of a second with 10.18 in the first heat at the Carifta Games. In the final he lowered it further, to 10.11. He was still only seventeen. ‘My first time at the world juniors, when I came third, I thought: There’s a future for me. You see Asafa Powell and all them running and I think, You know what, I can do something in track and field.’ But the following year he returned to the world juniors and slipped down a place, finishing fourth. There was a silver lining to that disappointment, says Blake. ‘It teach me how to lose.’
The programme and workload at school was intense and punishing for a seventeen-year-old. ‘I was running the 4x100, the 200, the 100 and 4x400. That was a lot for my body to take.’ In 2007, when he set a new record at 100 metres (10.21) and won the 200, Blake also helped St Jago to a record in the 4x100 – their time of 39.80 beat the Glen Mills-coached Camperdown, and was the first time any Jamaican school had gone below 40 seconds – and then he anchored the triumphant, record-breaking 4x400 squad. With his hair shorn, it was a youthful-looking Blake in the yellow vest and green shorts of St Jago, far less muscular than the powerful-looking senior athlete of a few years later.
In his final year at school, Blake was approached by Jamaica’s national coach, Glen Mills. ‘Coach Mills said to me, “There’s a future for you but you need to know what you’re going to do.” He didn’t say, “Come train with me.” But I made a choice from there.’ The choice was to join Mills’s club, Racers. ‘And up to today I don’t regret it,’ says Blake, ‘because I’m the second-fastest man not only in the world but in the universe.’
Blake joined Mills in the summer of 2008 – just as Bolt was rewriting the record books in Beijing – but in doing so he walked out on Hawthorne, quite literally. He had been living with his high school coach for three years, and Hawthorne was planning a future for the pair of them: he wanted to look after his star sprinter as he entered the professional ranks – he was convinced Blake was going to be bigger than Powell, bigger than Bolt. But 2008 had not gone as well as 2007: Blake was beaten in the 200 metres at Champs by another St Jago sprinter, Nickel Ashmeade. This, perhaps, was why Mills was concerned, and also why Blake was receptive to his approach.
Hawthorne, still head coach at St Jago today, was devastated when Blake left him. ‘I don’t know anything,’ he told the local press on being informed that Blake had teamed up with Mills. ‘Nobody has said anything to me.’ Hawthorne was called later by Blake’s parents explaining their son’s decision.
When Mills first cast his eye over Blake, he was not impressed. ‘The first thing when we got him, he had a back and a hamstring problem that we had to attend to,’ Mills said. Perhaps all the training and racing at St Jago was catching up with him. Then, in his first outing as a Racers Track Club athlete, Blake seemed to suffer stage fright. As Mills put it: ‘When he started in his first meet, he froze. The gun fired and he didn’t run. So we had to be patient with him and work on him both mentally and physically. We corrected his back, strengthened his hamstrings and then once that was in place, we started to work on him bio-mechanically.’
The effects were almost immediate. ‘What I achieve in one year with Coach Mills,’ Blake shakes his head, unable to find the words to describe his transformation. ‘I was nineteen when I ran my first 9.94’ – in May 2009 in Paris – ‘the youngest man to go under 10 seconds. That proved the decision I made was right.’
What is Mills’s secret? ‘His secret is the love for the athletes,’ Blake says. ‘The time he puts in and the technical stuff he do. Every day he say: “Yohan, you need to eat this, you need to do that, you need to keep ahead of that.” He draw a diagram of all you need to do; little things. It’s twenty-four hours. He drives to every athlete’s home and talks to them. That’s the kind of person he is.’
Mills also suggested some changes to his technique. ‘Yeah, because in high school I ran with my arms at my chest. I didn’t move them. Technically now I’m getting really good.’
I spoke to Zharnel Hughes, the eighteen-year-old who is also coached by Mills and who broke Blake’s 100 metres record at 2014 Champs. Hughes said that he can be training and unaware that his coach is watching him when, as if from nowhere, he will hear a voice: Mills’s. Blake smiles at that. ‘Coach Mills is like a ghost. He appears when you don’t expect him, or you hear him when you don’t even know he’s there. “Lift your knees!” That’s all you hear, and you don’t even see him.’
Blake says he enjoys training. ‘I love it. If you don’t love it, you won’t do it. I try to enjoy it even when the programme is hard. We’re human and I would tell a lie if I said I don’t get moments of not wanting to do it. But every time I get that moment I have to remind myself why I do it.’
A month after his sub-10-second 100 metres in Paris, the Beast was derailed. At the national championships in June, which served as a trial for the 2009 world championships in Berlin, he tested positive for methylxanthine, a stimulant in the same family as caffeine, though also a drug that can dilate the airways to aid breathing. The substance wasn’t on the banned list, but was closely related to one that was, and after some deliberation, it was considered a doping offence. Another four Jamaican athletes, including the sprinters Marvin Anderson, Allodin Fothergill and Lansford Spence, tested positive for the same substance. Fothergill and Spence were also members of Mills’s Racers Track Club. They were initially cleared by Jamaica’s anti-doping disciplinary panel. The Jamaica Anti-Doping Commission (JADCO, which had only come into existence on the eve of the Beijing Olympics) then appealed the decision of the disciplinary panel. In the end the athletes were suspended for three months. For Blake, it meant missing the world championships. It also left a blot against his name.
Even more worryingly, Blake was a member of Racers. He was coached by Mills. The bottom line: he trained with Bolt, the man single-handedly restoring the lustre to a sport tarnished by a succession of scandals, from Ben Johnson to Marion Jones and Justin Gatlin.
The headlines said it all: ‘Usain Bolt’s training partner linked to positive Jamaican drug tests’ (Guardian), ‘Bolt’s friend Blake named as one of five athletes to have failed a drugs test’ (Daily Mail). Patrick Collins in the Mail compared the news to a dark cloud appearing over athletics: And the entire sport of track and field shivered in apprehension.’
It was a red flag: others would follow.
It was September 2010. Shelly-Ann Fraser was at UTech, coming out of an advanced communication course, when her phone rang. She glanced at the screen: her coach, Stephen Francis. ‘Where are you?’ he asked. She told him she was at university. ‘That painkiller you took in China,’ said Francis. ‘Did you write it down?’
‘No, I didn’t write it down because it was a painkiller.’
‘You tested positive.’
‘No, you’re crazy.’
She hung up and nearly collapsed. ‘I remember my legs went weak. I sat down and I called my husband: “Where are you, I need you to pick me up.” I was crying, I was hysterical. No, this is impossible! At that time I questioned my faith, I questioned everything. I told myself, but I’m not cheating! It was unfair.’
What happened, she says, was that she delayed dental treatment before a Diamond League meeting in Shanghai in May. ‘I had braces at that time and needed root canal [work]. But because I was flying to China the next week my dentist told me she couldn’t do full root canal. I had semi root canal so I could travel.’
On the plane to China she began to suffer from severe toothache. She had some Aleve with her, but it did nothing. When she arrived at her hotel she turned the lights off, put a hot towel on her face, then went to see the doctor. By now her face was swollen. The doctor gave her antibiotics and painkillers. These didn’t work either.
‘I went to Coach,’ she recalls, ‘and said, “I’m in such pain.”’ Francis gave her a painkiller he was taking for kidney stones. That did alleviate the pain, though she ran poorly, finishing second to Carmelita Jeter in 11.29. But the painkiller contained oxycodone: a powerful opioid-based narcotic, sometimes used as an alternative to morphine, that isn’t considered to be performance-enhancing but is on the banned list. When she was drug-tested after the race she was given a form on which to list any medications she was taking. She neglected to write the painkiller Francis had given her.
When the Jamaican athletics federation notified her that she had tested positive, they asked if she wanted her B-sample tested. She said no. There was no point; it wasn’t a mistake, I remember vividly taking the painkiller. I just didn’t think to write it down.’
The worst part of it, she says, was the coverage of her case. She published a statement, but few seemed prepared to believe the one about the athlete who took her coach’s painkiller. ‘I went on every media, I read every newspaper article, and I saw ‘Jamaican sprinter tests positive for doping”. I was like, “doping”? That sounds like I test positive for steroids or something. No, they can’t report that. My coach sat me down and said, “Shelly-Ann, you can’t stop persons from saying what they want to say. Even before this painkiller thing came about, the fact you won the Olympics in 10.7, the fact you ran 10.8 and persons didn’t know who you were . . . they were saying you were on drugs.”
‘But I was so hurt. This is not supposed to happen to me. I worried what persons would say about me, what my sponsors would think. I sat there in front of the federation and told them what happened. I didn’t want them to feel sorry for me. I was young and I think I was very naive. I said to myself, There’s no need to hide because I’m telling the truth. But it was hard.’
She was given a six-month suspension. She recognised she had made a mistake and knew that another one would cost her her career. ‘For me, I tell you, when that thing happened, I didn’t want anything to come near my mouth, I swear. If something happen to me, God forbid, that’s it for me.’
As with Blake, a second doping offence would see her banned for life. ‘So I can’t be careless. The only thing that passes my mouth are vitamins and that’s normal vitamins because I’m so scared about what’s out there. You never know.’ She says she doesn’t take any supplements.
Her case was one of six in Jamaica in the space of a year. And since then there have been others, many of them, according to the athletes, because of ‘mistakes’: mainly, as in Blake’s case, supplements that don’t list any banned substance in their ingredients.
Some excuses seem as far-fetched as ‘the dog ate my homework’. Yet the cases of Blake, Fraser and others in Jamaica have seemed less than clear-cut. The result of carelessness and cock-ups rather than part of some wider, more sinister conspiracy. Or is that too charitable? Or just plain naive? Blake explained at the time that he had taken energy-boosting tablets whose ingredients did not list methylxanthine (in any case, the stimulant was not banned – though it was later added to the WADA list).
He says that he had checked it out and believed it was a legal supplement. But he concedes it was a mistake. ‘We are humans, we are bound to make mistakes. You can’t kill yourself about it. But my mother say prevention is better than cure, if you know what I mean. Before you do anything, just be careful.’ He says that since then he has been ultra careful about what he puts in his body.
‘When you see these cases happen, it heightens your awareness,’ Shelly-Ann tells me. ‘You hear athletes taking supplements that are contaminated. I read a story about someone, not an athlete, taking a B12 vitamin and they got facial hair and everything; they found it was contaminated. Now, if an athlete took a contaminated B12 and that happened, would you say they were doping?’