DONOVAN BAILEY'S BITTERSWEET ANNIVERSARY

Certain athletes, for good or ill, always get defined by their relationship to someone else.

Donovan Bailey, who won the Olympic 100-metre dash in a record 9.84 seconds for Canada and himself (in that order) 10 years ago today on a sweltering summer night in Atlanta, Ga., can never be divorced from Ben Johnson. Sad but true.

No sooner had Bailey roared across the finish line that night than NBC's Bob Costas, to help Americans stomach the news that a Canuck from the frozen north was the Fastest Man Alive, dropped a "Ben Johnson." The first question Bailey was asked at his post-race press conference dealt with Johnson.

It wasn't cruel. It was the story, since Johnson's disqualification in Seoul in 1988 cast a pall over Canada's track and field program which arguably is still being felt to this day. So we never really celebrated Bailey, since the spectre of Johnson was always out there in the ether, and hero-worship isn't something we know how to do in Canada, unless it's a hockey player.

Must have been confusing for Bailey: Trying to figure out why people in a country where the population views the Olympics as an opportunity to bitch and whine about how "we" aren't winning enough medals were reluctant to celebrate the champion who supposedly exorcised the ghost of Ben Johnson.

That said, it's hard to read into his post-Atlanta career arc whether he's bitter or just content to lead a quiet, normal life as a self-described entrepreneur in the Toronto area. Maybe that's admirable, that he's been able to put that part of his life behind him and moved on, knowing all the while that the first line of his obituary is already written. Perhaps today isn't bittersweet for him -- he has friends and associates to celebrate it with. It's bittersweet for us, because we didn't pay the proper amount of attention.

Ironically, Ben Johnson is more often seen in the public eye these days, thanks to that terrible sports-drink commercial. He haunts us still.

Bailey left almost as quickly as he came. Canada, in an odd oversight, never made him the flagbearer for any subsequent international competition -- not at the following Olympics in Sydney, or the Pan-Am Games and world track and field championships that were held in Canada within the next five years.

We never celebrated his feat enough at the time, so to make any kind of big deal of it just because exactly one decade has passed rings hollow.

(Lastly, isn't this a little ironic that the 10-year anniversary of Bailey's bittersweet win coincides with the news that Floyd Landis, the U.S. Tour de France winner who's defined as not being Lance Armstrong, gets busted for doping? This time the other way around -- the successor got busted.)

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