‘I am so proud of being British,” says Linford Christie. Watching this painful hour and a half-long portrait of one of Britain’s most accomplished yet controversial athletes, it’s hard to figure out why. England’s footballers may be enduring 58 years of hurt, but Christie runs them a close second.
When Christie sensationally won gold in the 100m final of the 1986 European Championships in Stuttgart (“I must have been ranked about 15th”), he celebrated on track by draping the union jack over his shoulders – only to be ticked off. Now 64, Christie recalls being told by a British official that it was not the done thing: “He meant it was not the done thing for a Black person.”
Back home in London, the Jamaican-born athlete wore his team tracksuit proudly on the street, on the tube, everywhere. Until one day a policeman stopped him and asked a question that still pains Christie. “‘What’s a nigger like you doing wearing a British tracksuit?’ It hurt a lot.”
The Metropolitan police, lest we forget, has had more than its fair share of racists bent on ruining Black lives rather than doing what we pay them to do, namely solving crimes. During his preparations for the 1988 Olympics, Christie was informed there had been a break-in at his home. The police didn’t investigate the crime. Instead, they would go on to falsely accuse Christie of driving a stolen car.
Half a lifetime on, Christie appositely quotes Maya Angelou’s paean to personal indomitability, And Still I Rise: “You may write me down in history / With your bitter, twisted lies, / You may trod me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I’ll rise.”
And Christie did rise. At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, he came third in the 100m metres behind Canada’s Ben Johnson and the US’s Carl Lewis, his bronze elevated to silver when Johnson was disqualified for failing a drugs test. Christie went on to become the only British man to have won gold medals in the 100m at the Olympics, the World Championships, the European Championships and the Commonwealth Games.
After winning the 100m gold at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, though, Christie felt conflicted, not least because of how his achievement was celebrated in the Murdoch-run Sun. “The day after I won the Olympics, they talked about how big my dick was,” he says.
Wait, what? The Sun branded him Lunchbox Linford, and produced a photo spread with fruit stuffed down a tight pair of athlete’s shorts, purportedly to simulate Christie’s manhood. That old racist trope. “Because of that story, women thought it was OK to come and grab my dick.” Due to British racism, a man’s privates became public property.
One of the most heartbreaking moments in the programme is when he and two of his eight children, Briannah and Kian , watch in tears old footage of when he went on a chatshow and complained about this racist fetishisation of his genitals. The show’s hosts, ex-footballers Jimmy Greaves and Ian St John, clearly didn’t comprehend his hurt. Christie’s kids watch their dad break down in frustrated tears, incapable of getting these white men to understand his experience.
Fellow Olympian Sally Gunnell reckons Christie’s achievements came down to more than talent. “I’ve seen a lot of natural talent that doesn’t quite make it. You’ve got to have sometimes some adversity in your life that creates the hunger, the determination. Watching Linford come through, you could see the hunger in him.” Certainly that talent was spotted by his coach Ron Roddan. “He believed in me more than I believed in myself,” says Christie fondly of Roddan, who died last year.
What Gunnell means, I suspect, is that he was spurred to rise coming from a humble background (this film includes archive footage of him running to sign on before running off to the track to train) and to kick against the racists.
Maybe something else gave Christie’s feet wings. Ever since he was banned from athletics after testing positive for nandrolone in 1999, Christie has been seen as a drug cheat, including by several of his athletic peers, though he denies taking banned substances to enhance his performance. Even though he was cleared by UK Athletics, the International Amateur Athletic Federation (now called World Athletics) upheld the ban.
I don’t pretend to know the truth of the allegations, though I do wish the makers of this programme had been less indulgent and pushed Christie harder to explain why he didn’t defend himself against the IAAF ruling to clear his name. I hope he didn’t knowingly take drugs. Everyone who isn’t a racist wants Linford Christie to rise – but not that way.
Linford aired on BBC One and is now on iPlayer.
