Simon Barnes: Ben Johnson, Seoul,1988

I’m sorry. You’ll probably think I have made my choice out of sheer perversity. But I can’t help myself. Every time I am asked about my most vivid Olympic memory, the same image fills my mind. It is burnt into my retina: that blazing day in Seoul, the light hurting your eyes and the yellow-eyed, shaven-head human bullet taking the stage to turn the world upside down.

And then, 9.79 seconds later, he had finished, the last two strides floating, celebrating, finger pointing to the skies. Ben Johnson had won the 100 metres, redefining our understanding of human potential. The terrible beauty of that moment will be with me for as long as I have anything to do with sport.

Ben Johnson was the shatteringly brilliant winner in Seoul in 1988. And of course, a few days later, we heard that he had failed a dope test. The shock was not that athletes took drugs, but that the greatest of them all had been caught. The glory and the danger and the folly of human aspiration were spelt out of us in letters of fire. Sport is great, sport is also dreadful. Sport is not a safe and cosy world, cut off from human iniquity; it is there to tell us tales of the wonders and fallibilities of men and women. That is why I am bound up with sport and the Olympic Games to this day.

Back to reality for golden generation

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BACKGROUND

• How the Brits became world beaters

• London double-decker arrives in Beijing

• Olympics proves capacity for greatness

• New dawn for British sport as Olympic sun sets

Multimedia

• Simon Barnes in Beijing

• Bring back the tug-of-war

• Top 100 Olympic athletes of all time

Related Links

• Capturing Johnson in all his glory

• Olympic timeline

Owen Slot: Cathy Freeman Sydney 2000

It is the lights that I recall in particular. That and the emotions that she left in the track when she was done.

But Freeman’s was a story that stretched way back — because of her Aboriginal roots and the fact that she was made the face of the Sydney Games and then, to cap it all, was the girl to light the flame at the opening ceremony.

Some complain that she was made a political pawn, moved around from politics to media and back again and manipulated by both ends. Indeed she was, but that only intensified the pressure on her to deliver in the 400 metres. And the way she did so was majestic.

Darkness had fallen on the Olympic Stadium when her race was run. When she leapt from the blocks in her bodysuit, the lights started; people all around the arena were using flash cameras to capture their moment of her life and as she circled the track, the lights followed her round like a pyrotechnic Mexican wave. Beautiful.

And then, when it was done, she sat on the track, head down, attempting to comprehend the immensity of the task that she had just executed, winning the Olympic title on home ground in a time of 49.11 seconds. That was beautiful in its own way, too.

Craig Lord: Ian Thorpe, Sydney, 2000

Ian Thorpe’s favourite Olympic moment is shared by many who watched him make history on the opening night of a home Games. After breaking the 400 metres freestyle world record to claim his first Olympic gold medal, Thorpe, then 17 — an age to match his shoe size — entered the water last for Australia in the 4 x 100 metres freestyle relay, half a body length ahead of Gary Hall Jr, an American sprinter more than a second faster on paper and a rival who had claimed that the US quartet would “smash the Aussies like guitars”.

Thorpe believed otherwise. In a gladiatorial atmosphere, with more than 17,000 people on their feet, he let Hall Jr catch him and pass him before striking back with a phenomenal turn of speed. Thorpe snatched victory at the last stroke and ended a great US tradition: America had never lost the event since its introduction in 1964. The Australians celebrated with a show of air guitars. It was an electric moment. With his speed and his feet, Thorpe had done what Mark Spitz and his moustache, Michael Gross and the wingspan of an albatross, Dawn Fraser and her defiant brilliance and Johnny “Tarzan” Weissmuller had done before him: put swimming on the international sports map.

Jenny MacArthur: Mark Todd, Seoul, 1988

Mark Todd winning his second successive gold medal on Charisma for New Zealand in the three-day-event, against considerable odds, tops the list. He was on the brink of losing the ride on Charisma after his 1984 win in Los Angeles when the horse's owner offered him for sale — but refused to sell him to Todd.

Thanks to an intermediary, who stepped in to buy the horse and then returned him to Todd, they were reunited in time for the Seoul Games. Even so, many considered that, at 16, the horse was past his prime and too old to repeat his 1984 success. Only one horse — Marcroix who won for Holland in 1928 and 1932 ridden by Charles Pahud de Mortanges — had achieved the dual feat.

Todd, however, silenced the critics in style. The best dressage test of his life was followed by an iconic cross-country round — Charisma skipping round the course like a two-year-old.

By the start of the showjumping on the final day — in which he needed a clear round for the gold — the entire showground was willing him on. Charisma was capable of making the odd mistake in the showjumping, but not on this occasion. He produced a faultless round and jumped into history.

Kevin Eason: Mary Rand, Tokyo, 1964

It was all so incredibly exotic for a lad from Middlesbrough, peering at flickering black and white images from halfway around the globe. And she was a blonde goddess who could run and jump and still look like a movie star. Mary Rand was the pin-up girl of British athletics at the 1964 Games in Tokyo, an extraordinary faraway place that reeked of mystery with the foggy pictures from the BBC illuminated by a young David Coleman at his cracked voice best.

And he had plenty to talk about. Rand stepped up to become the first British woman to achieve a track and field gold medal, winning the long jump with a world-record leap of 6.76 metres. Then she polished off silver in the pentathlon, only defeated by the infamous Irina Press, whose career was plagued by suspicions that she was actually a man and ended abruptly when gender verification was introduced. But Rand was not finished and added a bronze to her Tokyo collection in the 4 x 100 metres relay.

Her career slipped quietly away and out of public view not long after that. Today, Rand would be a multi-millionaire superstar after an achievement that has not been surpassed by any British woman 44 years on and, even now, still looks safe from challenge.