ATHLETICS:Ben Johnson has claimed steroids only ever worked primarily as a placebo, in that athletes usually run faster because they know they're on drugs, writes IAN O'RIORDAN

HE NORMALLY salutes me as soon as I round the corner into Ward 3, but when I stopped by on Wednesday evening shortly after teatime Con Houlihan was sitting back in his chair, lost in his own thoughts. He had the look of a man who had just been delivered some incomprehensible news, and in many ways he had.

He told me he’d been thinking all day about Moss Keane, his old friend from that little heartland of Kerry known as Castleisland, who had died the day before. I never met Moss Keane, but I can easily imagine him sharing many of Con’s qualities – two giants of body and soul, with the sharpest of minds and wit. Con’s brother had given Moss Keane his first job at the creamery in Currow, sometime in the late 1960s, and both families have had close ties ever since.

What obviously troubled him most was that this sporting colossus was dead at age 62, more than 20 years Con’s junior. Con has been in St James’s Hospital for the past few weeks for some physiotherapy, to improve his mobility, but two months shy of his 85th birthday – on December 6th – he is in otherwise positively rude health. He has no sickness or disease. Even more remarkably, his mind continues to outwit the so-called younger generation.

Truth is, this wasn’t a random visit. Con’s illustrious publishing house, Boglark Press, recently won the bidding rights to publish my new book about distance running, Miles to Run, Promises to Keep – and I know Jonathan Franzen is losing a lot of sleep over that.

Anyway, part of the deal was that Con gets to write the foreword, and that was the main purpose of my visit on Wednesday evening.

Given his state of mourning for his old friend, I briefly wondered if Con was up to it, but, like the true poet that he is, he was soon dictating words of brilliantly spontaneous prose, while I hurriedly typed them into my laptop. He talked about running being the purest of all sports, about Ireland’s great milers and marathon runners, and then worked in a tale about the local sports in Currow – no doubt thinking of Moss Keane. Then without any prompting he talked about performance-enhancing drugs.

With that I stopped him for a moment and reminded him that we’d agreed this wasn’t a book about drugs, or at least he didn’t want it to be. In fact, Boglark Press insisted that I remove the entire chapter on drugs, which I was actually glad to do. So why was he now bringing drugs into it?

I think Con pretended not to hear me.

“I believe that there is an era coming when the use of performance enhancing drugs will be looked upon as very old-fashioned,” he dictated to me – and I waited anxiously for the next line. “There will be a new way of improving performances. Scientists and chemists will give way to psychologists.”

What? Psychologists? Was Con perhaps losing his mind after all? Now read on . . .

“When a man is running from a tiger or even a lion he produces times that do not compare with his times on the track. In trying to save his life, he produces something extra. You can be certain that some psychologist

will discover a way of creating that mental attitude, even when there is no lion or tiger – or girlfriend for that matter – from whom to escape. And there is nothing that the authorities can do about it.”

Interesting, indeed, and Con then added – off the record – that he reckoned some psychologists were already successfully applying this method of performance enhancement. Okay, remind me to think of a former girlfriend next time I run a marathon.

Actually, this is perhaps not very far-fetched after all – by cosmic coincidence, Ben Johnson is also about to publish a new book, and this one is almost all about drugs. It’s now 22 years since the burly Canadian famously won the Olympic 100 metres in Seoul in a then world record of 9.79 seconds, and then, two days later, infamously tested positive for the anabolic steroid, Stanozolol.

At last, Johnson is ready to reveal all in his autobiography, Seoul to Soul, due on November 2nd. In an interview which will be published in The Irish Times this Monday, Johnson claims he now has evidence to prove his drugs sample from Seoul was spiked by a rival sponsor, and at the same time hardly conceals his theory that this sponsor had ties to the Carl Lewis camp. All shall be revealed on that matter, apparently.

What Johnson claims in the meantime is that he went off the drugs at least six weeks before Seoul, and never even used Stanozolol, but rather an obscure East German designer steroid called Furazobol. He says he wouldn’t be that “dumb” to take anything so close to an Olympic final, and that the amount of steroids found in his system could have killed a normal man. The great mystery, he says, is why he tested positive for Stanozolol when he was using other steroids.

Then, in perhaps a more startling revelation, Johnson claims the steroids only ever worked primarily as a placebo, in that athletes usually run faster because they know they’re on drugs, rather than because of the drugs. In other words, the drugs provide nothing more than a psychological boost.

“If an athlete just uses what is naturally inside them I believe they can achieve their goals,” says Johnson, and maybe he does have a point there.

Either way, it looks like Con Houlihan figured that out for himself, probably a long time ago. Perhaps the next designer steroid won’t be a little pill, but rather a psychologist’s mind game to create that feeling of being chased by a lion or a tiger – or girlfriend, for that matter. Although all this will probably come too late to save the reputation of the likes of three-time Tour de France winner Alberto Contador, and definitely the likes of Ben Johnson.

And which also has me thinking: are there any lions or tigers in Jamaica?