Former world's fastest man says 99 PER CENT of Olympic sprinters cheat (2024)

It is a Friday lunchtime and Tim Montgomery is back behind the wheel. Back on the 'road to redemption'. That's how he refers to this work trip - a short drive south to see a client in Orlando.

Sometimes he will rack up 660 miles going to and from Miami. Occasionally he will travel cross country, all the way to Arizona. It's a real slog – particularly for a man whose work once took fewer than 10 seconds. A man who once moved faster than anyone else on earth.

Fortunately Montgomery has grown used to long journeys. Now 49, and after a punishing fall, he's been climbing back up the mountain for more than a decade.

'I can actually say that I'm happy now,' Montgomery says. After learning how to save milliseconds and then how to pass time. After wearing medals around his neck and then shackles around his wrists.

Along this winding road, Montgomery has gone by many monikers: Tiny Tim, Olympic champion, the world's fastest man, inmate No 56836-083. And now? 'Pastor' - of sorts, anyway.

Soon the American will release a vegan protein shake and another mystery product he promises will 'change the face of sports'.

Day to day, though, Montgomery trains athletes and amateurs. Hence the long drives. 'The name of my company is "NUMA Speed" - Never Underestimate My Ability. I underestimated that I was more than just a track runner,' he explains. 'When you take on coaches… it's like if you go to church and you have a pastor.' But? 'A pastor cannot preach to me unless he came through what he's trying to bring me through.' This coach has dined at both at the top table and in the prison canteen.

Back in 2002, Montgomery set a new 100m world record of 9.78. He lived a life of opulence as one half of sprinting's royal couple – alongside Marion Jones.

But 20 years ago this summer, the South Carolina-native was charged with doping offences. He was banned from the sport, his records erased. Before long, he was behind bars for fraud and then for dealing heroin.

'Looking back, I don't miss anything,' he says of those glory days. 'Every day I was closer to death… it felt good at the time.' But? 'It was absolutely nothing. Because all of the (people) I had fun with… when I went to prison, none of them was there.'

Doping came with a life sentence: among the side-effects of performance enhancing drugs, Montgomery claims, is that he will have to take testosterone until his death. For his crimes away from the track, he served four-and-a-half years.

While behind bars, Montgomery harbored dreams of racing Usain Bolt. Instead, he emerged with only $500 and the odd regret: 'I cannot go back and see how great I could have been,' he says. 'But had I not gone through that, this might have been a different story.'

Now Montgomery pours all that he has learned into his clients. Some are NFL players, some play in the NBA. Some just want to lose weight. None, however, has Paris in their sights.

'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.'

For his athletes, success might mean a college scholarship or a future in a different sport - 'the right way'.

'But 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,' he says. The authorities agreed back in 2005, when they wiped Montgomery's world record. No matter that the American insists he was clean back then.

The unfortunate truth is that sprinting and drugs have been entangled for much of his life.

As a kid, Montgomery was a runner, ferrying marijuana and crack cocaine away from the police. He took on men for money in illegal street races; his handler used the winnings to deal drugs.

Montgomery sold crack cocaine and saw a man shot in the head over $50. A few years later, he became the first teenager to break the 10-second barrier.

The dots are easy to join - between transporting drugs and selling drugs to taking performance enhancing drugs.

'That's what I'd been taught: run away from the law,' he says. 'You get numb to the fact.' You realize that selling drugs pays and so can using them.

'It's almost like putting a twin turbo in a car,' he says of PEDs. 'Mentally, it puts you in a mind frame that no one can mess with you.'

That mattered, because Montgomery's doping was fueled by an insatiable desire to catch rival Maurice Greene. 'There's just something about him that really, really gets me going. It still does,' he says. 'You said the name (and) my heart started beating really, really fast… if I just think about him in the weight room, I lift heavier.' Surely that will fade? 'I don't know how to make it go away.'

He eventually broke Greene's world record by 0.01 seconds. And in his prime, Montgomery was making $60,000 a race. He had eight cars and a house worth $2.5million. He won relay gold at the 2000 Olympics. He never failed a drugs test. But both Montgomery and Jones were brought down in the notorious BALCO steroid scandal.

Ahead of the Sydney Olympics, under the guidance of Victor Conte, he was taking testosterone and human growth hormone. Montgomery and Conte worked on a plan entitled 'Project World Record' (his protein shake, incidentally, will have the same name). It succeeded but in late 2005, he was banned for two years.

That might have only paused his career. Instead? 'My pride got in the way,' he says. 'So I took to the streets.'

He explains: 'I was making decisions thinking: there ain't no way I go to jail. I'm too smart for the police… I'm Tim Montgomery. I can't let these people see that I'm losing money and I have to give away this and that.'

But Montgomery's legal fees began to spiral. 'So I tried to make a quick flip and a quick flip turned into another flip to another flip, to prison.'

That's a rather abridged version of events, which began when a friend said he knew someone who could make bogus checks. The sprinter had reportedly made just $20,000 by April 2007, when he pleaded guilty to his role in the $1.7m scheme. He was sentenced to nearly four years in prison. While awaiting his fate, though, Montgomery slid further into the underworld.

'I own a nightclub in Virginia called Encore,' he explains. 'And the people that hang around the nightclubs, buy bottles of champagne and throw money around are usually athletes or drug dealers.'

He has been both. And Montgomery crossed that divide once more after an associate asked him to act as a go-between.Soon he was selling heroin. 'Racing gives you a certain amount of adrenalin and a feeling of competing. The streets give you that same type of feeling.'

Montgomery began 'trying to go to the mountaintop inside the drug game'. He met infamous figures such as 'Big Meech' (Demetrius Flenory), who co-founded the Black Mafia Family.

'Being an athlete, they seem to trust you more,' Montgomery says. 'I remember getting pulled over one time and I had had some drugs in the car. Luckily I had a USA Track and Field magazine with me.' He showed the cover to an officer. It carried his picture.

'He let me go,' Montgomery recalls. 'That was a warning. A warning always comes before destruction… I would ride around with the magazine in the car every time I was doing transactions or whatever, and it became a cat and mouse game.'

Eventually Montgomery walked into a trap – an associate was wired up and soon he was facing another five years behind bars. Soon his life hinged on the tiniest margins once more – in prison, 'you're at the mercy of something happening to you in a split second'. Soon he was back to sprinting.

'They put on races and guys get trophies,' he recalls. Maybe a 60-yard dash to win a case of soda. 'I had to do it or I wouldn't have heard the end of it,' Montgomery says. 'There was some decent guys in there that could run… but not on my level.' He laughs. 'Every time somebody got off the bus, they were asking: 'Do you run?' he continues. 'They're always looking for entertainment in prison.'

Because, day-to-day, life can be so boring and brutal. Even in the minimum-security facility in Alabama where Montgomery swept leaves – for 12 cents an hour.

'It's terrible,' he says. The fights. The rapes. The time he beat a pedophile to avoid looking soft.

'One time, they came in and raided the cell block and had us on our knees,' he recalls. The spark? 'We refused to turn our trays in because they turned the TVs off and took the phones away.' The result? Inmates were struck with shields that gave them an electric shock. That was nothing, though, compared to the fright Montgomery got when he contracted MRSA.

'I was in my cell… about ready to die,' he says. 'I had a boil on the back of my butt that was huge.'

All those long days, until his release in 2012, did at least provide Montgomery with a new perspective. The 49-year-old now cuts off anyone who fails to keep their word. He is in bed by 8.30pm most nights. 'In prison, the faster you go to sleep, the quicker the next day comes, the less trouble you get in. So I kept that.'

He kept his new pals close, too 'All my friends are from prison,' he says. 'We built a bond that you cannot build on the streets.'

Unfortunately, his struggles strained other ties. 'My relationship with my kids is not the best,' Montgomery says. 'That's where I suffer.' He has five children by four women. Some are outstanding athletes. He has coached a couple - one had lessons in the prison visitation room. But Montgomery has no relationship with Jones. He claims she has changed the name of their son – Tim Jr.

'Now I just pour everything I got into the kids that give me the chance,' he says. That means hitting the road to redemption guided by a three-letter mantra: 'PPT'.

'The people, the places I go, the things I do,' Montgomery says. 'If the people are not of the (mindset) of being successful in the right way, I don't want to be around them.

'If the places I go are going to make me resort back to being the old me or put me in danger, I don't want to go.And if the things that I'm about to do are going to put me back to where I was in the past, I don't want to do them.'