Jamie Astaphan, 60, By: The Canadian Press
Doctor was at centre of Ben Johnson steroids scandal
TORONTO — George Mario (Jamie) Astaphan, the doctor who provided Olympian Ben Johnson with the performance-enhancing drugs that helped fuel his rise and fall as an athlete, died suddenly last weekend in his native St. Kitts. He was 60.
It is believed he had three children, all born in Canada, the Toronto Star reported on Aug. 21.
An autopsy will be held to determine cause of death. The funeral was set for Aug 22.
As the man who doled out the steroids from his general practice in Toronto, Astaphan was a central figure in the Johnson steroid scandal.
He’d teamed up with Charlie Francis’ Mazda Optimists Track Club in 1984 and supervised the drug regimen used by the athletes, including Johnson, Angella Issajenko and later Desai Williams and Mark McKoy.
Astaphan testified at the Dubin Inquiry in May 1989 that he injected Johnson with steroids between 50 and 60 times over five years leading to the Seoul Summer Games in 1988, where Johnson blew away the 100-metre sprint field with a 9.79 clocking, only to be stripped of his Olympic gold days later after testing positive for the banned steroid Stanozolol.
Astaphan, who attended the University of Toronto medical school, said he was totally justified in his decision to prescribe the muscle-building drugs to the athletes.
‘‘The axiom among track and field and other athletes was: If you don’t take it you won’t make it," he told the inquiry. ‘‘So if I didn’t monitor them and if I didn’t give it to them they were going to get it elsewhere, and most of them had got it elsewhere. They came to me for advice and for supervision and I thought it was my responsibility to do this."
Astaphan was a boastful man and his large ego was on display at the inquiry, where he bragged he could easily ‘‘beat any test" and that athletes from 12 countries flocked to him for his expertise in the area.
He initially denied vehemently ever giving drugs to Johnson, even showing up unexpectedly at the CBC studios just days after the news broke in Seoul to give a memorable interview to Barbara Frum in which he progressively began to twitch more and more and developed a facial tic.
Astaphan spoke glowingly of Johnson.
‘‘He’s like the son I would want."
Astaphan was banned for practising for 18 months and fined $5,000 after being found guilty of professional misconduct by the College of Physicians and Surgeons in June of 1991.
Astaphan, who returned to his native St. Kitts after his release from prison, once told The Canadian Press that he’d wished he’d followed his initial inclination to become a sailor.
As a teenager, he worked as a deckhand on his father’s ferryboat, the Rosal, which travelled between St. Kitts and its sister island of Nevis.
‘‘If my parents hadn’t pushed us — particularly my mother — I would be home running a charter boat," he said in the days after Seoul. ‘‘I would have been a hell of a lot happier."
