Running Risks

Janet Money is Sports Editor of the Woodstock Daily Sentinel-Review.

Fed up with denials of Ben Johnson’s steroid use immediately after the
Seoul Olympics, Issajenko “blew the whistle,” telling the world that
she, Johnson, and other Canadian track stars had used
performance-enhancing drugs regularly for years.

Running Risks is an elaboration of that whistle-blowing, combined with
an autobiography of Canada’s greatest woman sprinter. Framed by an
account of her testimony before Canada’s Dubin Inquiry into drug use
in sports, the book describes Angella’s Jamaican childhood,
immigration to Canada, and increasing obsession with track and field.
Her self-described “addiction to winning” prompted her to embark on
a drug program, and although she kept careful records of what drugs she
used with what effects, she never seemed to consider that her increased
rate of injury might have been related to drugs that allowed her to work
out harder than ever before.

Even in retirement as she raises two daughters, Issajenko does not
seem, if this book is any indication, to have gained any perspective in
hindsight. Was the health risk worth the titles she won, considering
that the long-term effects of steroid use are still unknown? Is the
obsession with winning encouraged by Canada’s sports system harmful?
Her account of an eat-sleep-train-race lifestyle is a grim one that
suggests little compensation in dollars or in happiness.