by Mark Austin
In 1989, he regained the Test captaincy for a home series against Australia. Once again, it didn’t go well. England were 2–0 down by the time of the fourth Test at Old Trafford. I was covering the game with the ITN cricket camera team – Derek Seymour, the cameraman, and Alan Florence, a soundman, who had also started doing a bit of camerawork at square leg, side-on to the pitch, to give us a few more picture options. The BBC wouldn’t in those days give us access to their outside broadcast coverage.
On the Saturday, England were in the field and under the cosh. Australia were piling on the runs and Gower’s team were staring at another defeat. At the end of the day’s play, I was editing our material and putting a report together for the main evening news. Halfway through the edit, Alan Florence appeared and offered us his tape from square leg. ‘There is something you might be interested in,’ he said. ‘David Gower flicked a V-sign at some fans who were barracking him. I got the shot but I don’t know what it’s like.’
We had a look at it. It was a pretty good shot, and I thought it showed the pressure that the England captain was under. Also, it had not appeared on the BBC coverage, so they seem to have missed it.
I thought about whether to use it, whether it was fair on Gower. I decided that if he did it in the middle of a Test match with cameras everywhere, he must have expected it to get picked up. Anyway, use it I did. Not in any sensational way, just as a shot in the middle of the piece.
A few minutes later, David Norrie, the cricket correspondent for the News of the World appeared. He had heard we had the shot and was asking to see it. Norrie was a mate, so I agreed.
‘That’s our back-page splash, right there,’ said Norrie.
Our piece aired at ten o’clock that night and I didn’t think any more of it. We headed off for dinner and a few drinks. The following morning, my hotel room phone rang. It was the England captain. He was furious. Beyond angry. There was a lot of swearing. He said something about Ted Dexter, the chairman of selectors, phoning him the previous night about the incident. Gower wanted me to come to his hotel later that day – which, being Sunday, was a rest day.
I went to meet him and he was still fuming. Dexter had wanted him to apologize and he’d refused. He thought it was wrong to use the picture, it was making far too much of a trivial incident and it was pure mischief-making.
I felt bad. After all, this man, though I didn’t tell him, was my cricketing hero. I mumbled something like, ‘Well, what did you expect,’ and he made it pretty clear he wanted me out. I left.
On the way back to my hotel it occurred to me that, with Gower refusing to apologize, I may have cost him the captaincy. I thought it was pretty clear that Gower was again fearing for his job.
I may well have contributed to that fear coming true. He was sacked at the end of the series, which England lost, 4–0.
Gower and I have since become friends. We’ve never really discussed the V-sign affair. I think he forgives me. But I’m not entirely sure.
I have covered six Olympic Games and I have loved them all. Seoul because it was my first one; Barcelona because of the majesty of the city; Athens because, despite the chaos, it was the birthplace of the Games; Beijing for Usain Bolt; and London 2012 because it was in the city of my birth.
But my favourite Games of all, so far, has to be Sydney in 2000. It was an uplifting festival of sport, outstandingly organized in a breathtaking city that welcomed the world with a warmth and a spirit that has not been surpassed.
And I also witnessed one of the most memorable Olympic moments of my lifetime: the women’s 400-metre final, won by the Australian runner Cathy Freeman.
A few years before those Games, I had reported on Australia’s Stolen Generations – Aboriginal children stolen from their parents and placed with white families. It was state-sanctioned racism that caused enormous suffering and pain. Cathy Freeman’s grandmother was one of the stolen infants.
So I was aware of the long journey that Freeman and her Aboriginal people had made, from appallingly persecuted natives to citizens battling for equality and fair treatment. And I was aware how much Australia wanted Freeman – the country’s foremost Aboriginal athlete – to symbolize the Sydney Olympics. They wanted her to be an icon of national unity; to symbolize reconciliation between black and white.
It is why she was chosen to light the flame at the magnificent opening ceremony. She carried the torch and the hopes and expectations of an entire nation. It was an extraordinary amount of pressure placed on an athlete about to run the most important race of her life.
So the final of the women’s 400 metres on Monday, 25 September 2000, was no ordinary event.
Freeman took to the track in the Australian team uniform of green and gold. But on her feet were track shoes of yellow, red and black. Yellow for the sun, red for the land and black for Australia’s indigenous people, the Aborigines.
I will never forget the noise. It sounded as if the whole country were roaring as one. Deafening. And then they were away. It was difficult to take your eyes off Freeman in that stadium. She was in lane six, wearing a kind of space-age hooded bodysuit, and she was flying. In the lead at 200 metres but then she slips back. Is the pressure too much? Britain’s Katharine Merry is ahead of her, or so it seems. Maybe this is the story, a British gold… I know Katharine and I am sure she won’t mind me saying that I hoped it wouldn’t be. I can’t believe I’m writing that. But that is how I felt watching this race.
Freeman wasn’t finished. She came back and powered clear. As she crossed the line, the look on her face was just remarkable. No real joy, just a shake of her head and she’s on her haunches. A penny for her thoughts. Everything she has worked towards has just become real. She is an Olympic champion. And more importantly perhaps, she has fulfilled her obligation to Australia. An unfair obligation, but an obligation all the same.
She rises to her feet and the pressure seems to drain away. She smiles and heads off on her lap of honour. In her hand, both an Australian flag and an Aboriginal one.
I can’t think of an athlete who has run a race so weighed down by the burden of expectation. But she ran and she won, and Australia should love her for that.
But if the Olympic Games made a hero out Freeman, they made a villain out of Ben Johnson…
I was drunk. There is really no way to pretend otherwise. There were too many people there with long memories, and every reason to put me right if I deny it. They were drunk too, but they’ll still remember, just like I do. Because, in the end, it was one of the most sobering experiences of my life on the sporting road.
It was the night before a rest day for athletes in the middle of the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, and ITV were throwing a party. A big one. We took over a nightclub in the city centre, invited the world, and the world came. The boss lost his credit card during the evening (apparently) and one of the cameramen proffered his. The bill came to over ten thousand pounds; it was that sort of night. We were having a good Games, with several exclusives, big interviews and great access to the medallists.
But when it happened, we were not prepared for one of the biggest sport stories of the century.
I didn’t believe it when I first heard it. It was about three in the morning when the phone rang in my room in the athletes’ village. It was the foreign desk in London, and through the alcohol-induced fog, I could tell they were in a state of some considerable agitation. ‘Ben Johnson’s been done for drugs, we need a piece and a live in two hours’ time.’
‘I assume this is some sort of joke,’ I remember saying.
It wasn’t. Within minutes, the editor of News at Ten, Nick Pollard, was on the phone. ‘Mark, I need this done quickly. I’m going to lead on it.’
These were my first Olympics. I was twenty-nine years old, the biggest sports story of the twentieth century was breaking, and I was in no shape whatsoever to do it.
Three days earlier, I had stood overlooking the 100 metres finishing line and witnessed what I thought was the single most amazing piece
of sporting theatre I had ever seen. It was a perfect duel. Lewis v Johnson, head to head in front of 100,000 people in the stadium and a billion or so watching on television around the world.
Carl Lewis had beaten Johnson in the LA Olympics four years earlier. But since then, Johnson had set a new world record of 9.83 seconds. Then in early 1988 he injured a hamstring and struggled to recover. It was touch and go whether he would make the much-anticipated showdown with Lewis.
That he did was, with hindsight, probably due to recovery-enhancing drugs. But he was there all right, bulked up like a well-muscled boxer and with burning ambition in his eyes.
The starting gun, the roar, the almost-subliminal spectacle. The red vest of Johnson, the agonized face of Lewis, the dip for the tape, the outstretched arm and the index finger pointing at the sky. It was an unforgettable moment – and a moment was all it was. But it is there, ingrained in my memory.
Everybody looked from Johnson to the trackside clock. And up it came… 9.79 seconds, a new world record. We all knew we had been watching something special; now we knew we had been watching history.
Johnson was the fastest man in the world… ever. What a race! What a man! What a day!
But three days later, as I hauled myself out of a bed I would not see for another twenty-hour hours, I knew the whole event had been a sham. And so began the most dramatic day of my sports reporting career.
The man who was to save my skin in the next couple of hours – our picture editor, Bill Frost – met me outside as, miraculously, a taxi drew up and tipped out another well-refreshed journalist returning from the bars of Itaewon.
It was Mike Collett, a good friend and then the correspondent for the agency UPI. ‘My God, where are you off to?’ he said. Mike obviously hadn’t a clue what was happening. ‘Haven’t you heard?’ I said rather cruelly. ‘Ben Johnson’s been done for drugs.’
With that, we raced to the ITN office and edit suite. As I drank bottles of water, gathered what thoughts I could muster and tried desperately to sober up, Bill was calmly putting together the pictures he knew I would need. He didn’t wait for my words. He just laid the pictures as he saw fit. It was the best way to get it done. I needed all the help I could get.
I will never forget the opening. The starting gun fired, the deafening crowd noise and then my words: ‘Three days ago the world watched Ben Johnson become the fastest man on earth… tonight we learnt it was all a fraud.’
The video report wasn’t the problem. The problem was the live report straight afterwards. The news presenter, the legendary Sir Alastair Burnet, had agreed the question with me. It was to be something about ‘late developments in Seoul tonight, Mark Austin can bring us up to date… Mark…?’
That would leave things pretty open for me to say what I could put together coherently.
In the event, it was nothing like that. What Sir Alistair said was: ‘Early hours of the morning in Seoul as you can see… Mark Austin is there. Mark, exactly how many athletes are on drugs?’
Now there are two things about that question. One, when he said ‘early hours of the morning… as you can see’, the only thing they could see was my face (in a studio). So I must have looked like it was the early hours of the morning. Charming.
Two, ‘exactly how many athletes are on drugs?’ was not the expected or the easiest question. It is what is known in the business as a ‘hospital pass’.
I must have worn a look of astonishment, followed by fear, followed by agony. I mumbled something about it being very difficult to tell and then resorted to the answer I had prepared. I got through it, and no one has ever mentioned that I looked or sounded the worse for wear. But I knew I should not have been broadcasting.
It was the only time I have ever broadcasted worse for wear. And I will never do it again.
The next hours were frantic, with Johnson’s chaotic departure from Seoul airport, an extraordinary press conference by the International Olympic Committee, and the realization that sport, or certainly athletics, would never be the same again.
It was further proof, if ever it were needed, of sport’s power to change things… and the following year, events within football proved it again.
*
As a sports correspondent, you don’t expect to turn up at a football ground to find scores of bodies lying on the floor of a gymnasium that has become a makeshift mortuary.
But that was my experience in 1989 at Hillsborough. It was a story that was, in the most tragic way imaginable, to sum up everything that was wrong with English football in the eighties. Poor policing, inadequate and dangerous terracing, and fans fenced in like animals.
I arrived at Hillsborough in the early evening. The terraces were clear of people. All that were left were mangled crush bars, torn fencing, clothing and shoes scattered across the concrete steps. Men’s shoes, women’s shoes, children’s shoes. How many of the people who had been wearing them were dead? Just because they went to a football match. Just because a wretched football ground had been transformed into a cage; a death trap.
Yes, such appalling conditions were the culmination of a decade of violence and unsocial behaviour by a minority of football fans across the country. But they were also the result of years of neglect by the footballing authorities. One of the richest sports provided the direst facilities for spectators. These were dark days for English football.
It formed a grim backdrop for the 1990 World Cup in Italy. The English team were written off as no-hopers, and the Italian authorities were braced for trouble from English fans.
So it was with some trepidation that I flew into Rome to begin reporting on what we firmly believed would be a short-lived tournament for England. We even justified renting a top-notch, budget-busting BMW 7 Series for the long road journeys, by convincing ourselves England wouldn’t last beyond the group stage.
After a 1–1 draw with the Republic of Ireland in the first group game, our prediction was on course. But another draw with the Dutch and a win over Egypt meant England somehow topped the group. We extended the 7 Series rental for a few more days and headed to Bologna. A David Platt volley put England through to the quarter-finals, and we had to start planning our explanation to the bean counters in London.
Off to Naples for the quarter-final against Cameroon. By now we were winging it. No hotels were booked because no one had thought England would progress so far.
I managed to get one, but there was a hitch. When we turned up they denied knowing anything about the booking. They asked for my name several times. And several times I told them: ‘Mark Austin… A-U-S-T-I-N… Austin.’
Nothing, and the hotel was now full. I was not pleased but they were adamant. ‘Do you have the spelling as O-S-T-I-N?’ I asked. Nothing.
And then, as we trudged towards the door to leave. ‘We have a booking tonight for a Mr Stin,’ said the receptionist. ‘Marco Stin?’
‘Well, that’s probably me,’ I said. It was. They had my number against it and my credit card. The crew called me Marco for the rest of the trip.
Needless to say, Cameroon were swept aside, setting up a semi-final in Turin with West Germany.
It was to be no ordinary football match. It was a game that transcended football. In short, it was a game that changed English football in ways that would have been unimaginable months earlier.
To us, camped in our edit van outside the Stadio delle Alpi, it seemed like a very important (and hugely unexpected) football match. The biggest since the World Cup final in 1966. It was, however, far more significant than that.
The country was behind England like they had not been for decades. And not just soccer fans. Lots of people – different people, of all classes – suddenly got interested in football. Watching the games became a family affair. Back in the UK, it was all-consuming. Flags, horns blowing, parties, houses painted in red, white and blue, and Luciano Pavarotti’s ‘Nessun Dorma’ – the official World Cup song – sounding from a million homes.
The game itself
was extraordinary. England played like a team possessed. Gary Lineker, in particular, was outstanding. It was 0–0 at half time, but England were on top.
For the second half, I nipped from the edit van into the ground. The action was not to be missed, even though we had to do a huge edit for News at Ten in London.
But on the hour, a disastrous piece of luck for England. A fluke of a free kick, a massive deflection, and the ball looped over Peter Shilton and into the net. 1–0 to West Germany.
Back to the van, to put together a piece on the inevitable German win. But after eighty-one minutes, a clinical finish from Lineker levelled the score. 1-1, and nine minutes left. My God, England were tantalizingly close to a World Cup final.
All square after ninety minutes. Extra time came and went with near-misses, heart-stopping moments and Gazza’s famous tears.
And then… penalties. Lineker scores, Beardsley scores, Platt scores. And then Pearce has his saved. Germany have scored all theirs.
It is down to Chris Waddle. He smashes it over the bar and falls, crestfallen, to his knees. England are out. They don’t deserve to be. But they’re out.
It must have been horrendous to watch in the stadium and at home. In a cramped edit van, with the pressure of getting the story put together with the clock ticking away and editors in London screaming at me to have it ready for the top of the programme, it was very different.
I was so engrossed in the process, the drama sailed over me much as Waddle’s penalty flew high into the stands.
I was there but I missed it, that’s the only way I can describe it. I tell everyone I was there to witness it. But in my heart I really wasn’t. I was in a van in a state of exasperation and tension, trying to get my job done.
England lost, but strangely English football won. People realized this was a sport that could unify the country. It was a sport that could exhilarate people. It was a sport that you could be proud of. The team weren’t quite as bad as we thought. And in Bobby Robson, we had a manager so thoroughly decent that it seemed the national game might be worth fighting for and salvaging from the doldrums.