Levelling the Field:  Charlie Francis and the legacy of the Dubin Inquiry.

My guest in this episode is my very own spouse Alan Pratt, who in 1988 was the co-counsel with R. Roy McMurtry, former Attorney General of Ontario and future Chief Justice of Ontario, as the lawyer for sprint coach Charlie Francis at the Canadian Dubin Inquiry.  As the coach of Ben Johnson, whose world record time of 9.79 seconds in the 100 metre final (the same time of the top two finalists in 2024 in Paris!) and Olympic gold medal were erased due to a positive drug test, Charlie became the Inquiry’s key witness and chose to expose the role that performance enhancing substances played in world elite sports.  He argued to the inquiry that both health and fairness rationales for the steroid band needed to be carefully examined and argued that the elite sports world had become infused with hypocrisy.

Alan describes a man of great intelligence and encyclopedic knowledge and tells how Charlie gave up a lucrative career to coach underprivileged youths, often subsidizing them out of his own pocket before developing that group of athletes into a world leading team, eventually producing the greatest sprinter of the time, Ben Johnson.

Sadly, Charlie passed away in 2010 but his widow Angé has maintained the website charliefrancis.com, where among other things you can purchase his e-books Speed Trap, which details his life story and his reaction to the Seoul positive test, and the Charlie Francis Training System, written before the steroid controversy and demonstrates the depth and breadth of his knowledge of training.