Tim Montgomery: ‘99% of athletes who aspire to be the fastest in the world must take performance enhancing drugs’

Former world 100m record holder, Tim Montgomery says 99% of athletes who aspire to be the fastest in the world must take performance enhancing drugs or their dreams will never be realized.

Ben Johnson, Tyson Gay, Yohan Blake, Asafa Powell, Justin Gatlin, Christian Coleman, Nesta Carter, Marion Jones, and a few others are examples of sprinters who have laid claim to being the fastest at one time or the other and have all violated World Athletics anti-doping rules, one way or the other.

But there are others who have risen to the pinnacle of the blue ribband event like Usain Bolt, the world fastest man, and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, who have never failed any drug test.

Montgomery is however convinced you cannot aspire to be the best and run in the final of the Olympic Games without spiking your system with performance enhancing substances or methods.
‘In track and field, to be the fastest man on earth or the fastest woman on earth? I just don’t see how you can do that clean,’ Montgomery said in an article in the Daily Mail of England.

Now 49, Montgomery, who in 2002 set a new 100m world record of 9.78 also believes you can’t run in the final of the Olympics if you are not on any performance enhancing drug or method.

‘If you’re in the finals of the Olympic Games, I’m going to say there’s a 99 percent chance you’re dirty,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t even try to train you for it… I know pharmacology when I see it.’

Reigning Olympics 100m champion, Lamont Marcell Jacobs, is one of the Olympic athletes who have denied accusations of taking performance-enhancing drugs like Montgomery has insinuated.

Like a bolt of the blues, the Italian won a shock gold medal at Tokyo 2020 and has told those who cared and who still care to listed that his success was down to ‘extreme hard work’, having only broken the 10-second barrier in May 2021, six weeks before running 9.80, now the 13th fastest 100m of all time, at the Games in Tokyo.

Like Ben Johnson before him, Montgomery also denied spiking his system with performance enhancers.

He never failed a drugs test. But both he and his former wife, Jones were brought down in the notorious BALCO steroid scandal.