Massive indeed. I think myself and other journos almost equalled the Canadian’s newly-established but phoney 100 metres record of 9.79sec in the dash to get tom the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) hastily-summoned dawn press conference.

Goodbody, who has always had a sniffer dog’s nose for a sporting drugs bust, had been tipped off by Agency France Press (AFP) for whom he had previously worked and who had in turn been told by an IOC source that Johnson had tested positive following the infamous dash for glory in which he had set what seemed to be an unbelievable time.

And as it transpired, unbelievable it certainly was.

The Jamaican-born Johnson was sensationally stripped of his gold medal amid understandable outrage, not least among his adopted country's citizens who had screamed with delight at seeing him stick it to America by obliterating the reigning champion Carl Lewis, finishing almost a metre ahead of the multi-medalled American.

The embarrassed IOC rushed Johnson onto a plane back to Canada. Despite several other controversies, nobody talked about much else for the rest of a Games that almost died of shame.

It is now 30 years since Johnson's fall from grace, from hero to zero, from being the fastest man on earth to the ignominy of handing back his gold medal in front of his sobbing mother just three days later.  

Not that news of Johnson's positive test was a not complete surprise, especially to Goodbody. When Johnson won, he has sprinted up the stairs in the stadium to remark to some of his colleagues: "I don't know about anabolic steroids but it looked to me as if he was on rocket fuel."

In fact Johnson had been given pharmaceutical assistance by his coach Charlie Francis in an attempt to overcome a late training injury.

Also, a few days before we had attended Johnson's press conference, and noted how red his eyes were. Was it an infection? It turned out to be steroid rage.

The race itself was riveting. You wanted to believe the time was real but the look of shock on Lewis' face when he stared up at the board suggested something utterly unreal had happened.

Until the Russians embarked on their corporate scale drugging programme Johnson was the biggest cheat in Olympics history.

Looking back Seoul was not the most exotic or exciting venue to have staged any of the dozen Games I have covered - being somewhat soul-less you might say - but there is little doubt that though not as enjoyable as Tokyo, Barcelona, Sydney, Athens  London et al, they ranked high among the most eventful.

The men’s 100m final alone created enough talking points to last an Olympic lifetime. It was labelled "the dirtiest race in history" with five of the eight finalists, including Lewis and Britain’s Linford Christie, guilty of drugs offences later in their careers.

Indeed, Christie, who was to become the 1992 Olympic 100m champion four years later in Barcelona,  actually failed a test in Seoul at the same time as Johnson when traces of the stimulant pseudoephedrine were found in his system.

Christie insisted the banned substance was contained in ginseng he was taking and was officially given "the benefit of the doubt" after a 11-10 decision by the IOC Medical Commission.

Then there was the women’s sprints. After having demolished the world record in the 100m at the Olympic Trials in Indianapolis, American Florence Griffith-Joyner set an Olympic record of 10.62 in the 100m and a still-standing world record of 21.34 in the 200 to capture gold medals in both events. She added a gold in the 4×100m relay and a silver in the 4×400m.

Griffith-Joyner had been a glamorous and successful sprinter in the years leading up to Seoul but had always finished among the minor medals.

But In 1988, her physique noticeably altered and her voice deepened dramatically, both signs of possible steroid abuse. "She sounds like Louis Armstrong," exclaimed one journalist at her news conference in Seoul.

Of more enduring significance were the times she set in that unreal year. No woman, even 2000 Sydney Olympics triple champion Marion Jones, who eventually confessed to years of systematic doping, has even come close to Griffith-Joyner's times for the 100 and 200 metres respectively.

Flo-Jo, as she was known, announced her retirement in 1989, the year mandatory random drug tests were introduced. She died in 1998 aged just 38 after an apparent heart attack.

It was not just on track that controversy abounded.

When competition started in the boxing tournament the sport immediately found itself deep in disarray.

Firstly the two ring system caused a host of problems when fighters and referees were confused as to which bell or buzzer, was active in their bout. One fight even had to be replayed when a fighter was knocked down by his opponent while mistakenly believing the round had ended.

More serious were the events that occurred at the end of the featherweight clash between Aleksandar Khristov of Bulgaria and home favourite Byeon Jeong-Il. The Bulgarian’s points victory was only possible due to the deduction of two points from the South Koreans total by the referee for alleged head butts.

When the result was announced pandemonium broke out in the arena and referee Keith Walker of New Zealand was attacked by members of the Korean coaching team. Spectators and even security guards weighed in in support of the local hero and Walker had to be protected by a cordon of his fellow officials as objects, including a chair, were hurled at him.

Then arguably the worst decision in Olympic fistic history came in the final of the light-middleweight division when Korean Park Si-Heon was awarded the gold medal over American Roy Jones Jnr.

 Jones had clearly outfought Park throughout the three rounds, landing almost three times as many punches for a score of 86-32. Later it was revealed that several of the Seoul boxing judges had been given bribes.

But Park’s 3-2 decision was never rescinded even though Jones was given the Val Barker Trophy as the best boxer of the Games. Subsequently he became one of the greatest professionals ever, winning multiple world titles before his retirement this year at 49.

There was plenty to write home about in several other sports, too.

American Greg Louganis won back-to-back titles in both diving events, but only after hitting the springboard with his head in the 3 metre final, his blood spattering into the water. Some years later Louganis revealed he knew he was HIV-positive at the time, but did not reveal it.

However, since HIV cannot survive in open water, no other competitors were in danger.

Elsewhere Christa Luding-Rothenburger of East Germany became the first – and only athlete - to win Olympic medals at both the Winter and Summer Games in the same year, adding a cycling silver to the speed skating gold she won earlier at Calgary.

Anthony Nesty of Surinam claimed his country's first Olympic medal by winning the 100m butterfly, scoring an upset victory over America’s 11-times Olympic medallist Matt Biondi.

And another drugs bust saw British judo bronze medal winner Kerrith Brown disqualified. Despite his ban he later became chair of the British Judo Association.

Inevitably, too, Seoul had been bedevilled by politics, like, so many other Games. In the run-up to 1988, the South Korean Government ordered Seoul's "vagrants" to be cleared from the street. Thousands of people, many of them small children, were sent to a "welfare facility" called the "Brothers Home", where allegedly they were subject to human right violations such as severe, often fatal beatings and routine rape.

Student demos about this and the spiralling cost of the Games were ruthlessly put down by riot police while the political and diplomatic rapprochement of the Pyeonchang Winter Olympics between North and South Korea was in stark contrast to three decades ago.

Back in the summer of 1988 it was a geopolitical hotpotch with riots, boycotts and the mid-air bombing of Seoul-bound Korean airliner.

On November 29 in 1987, two North Korean spies boardes a South Korean plane in Baghdad. The pair had used fake names and forged passports to pose as Japanese tourists. They’d also convinced security to let them keep the batteries in their carry-on "radio," which they’d turned on to demonstrate to security that it was harmless.

In fact it was also a battery-powered bomb.

The spies planted it in an overhead bin, then left the plane at a stopover in Abu Dhabi. Once Flight 858 was back in the air, the bomb exploded and killed all 115 people on board, most of them from South Korea.

The authorities tracked down the spies, who tried to commit suicide with cyanide cigarettes. One of them died; the other survived and was extradited to South Korea - the same country where the Olympics were set to begin in 10 months.

North Korea’s attempts to disrupt the Olympics began in the mid-1980s, after the IOC had already selected South Korea to host the 1988 Games.

Astonishingly North Korea approached South Korea and the IOC with an unexpected proposal: could they co-host the Olympics with South Korea, splitting the events 50-50 between the two nations?

It was a bizarre request, considering that no country had ever officially co-hosted the Olympics with another before. And it was stranger still that this was coming from North Korea, whose tight control on visitors seemed logistically incompatible with a multi-country event like the Olympics.

"It is difficult for me to think that North Korea can open its borders to more than ten thousand journalists and to all the members of the Olympic family," declared Juan Antonio Samaranch, then president of the IOC.

South Korea suggested North Korea could host certain events in tournaments for sports like football, table tennis, and archery. But the offer was a much smaller part of the Olympics than North Korea had wanted.

The country desired to stage several full sports; not just a few tournaments within a sport. By the autumn of 1987 it was no clear there would be no deal.

Yet for North Korea, the most disappointing aspect was that they still unable to convince the Soviet Union and China to boycott the event. In early 1988, both countries announced that they would be among the 159 countries attending...though North Korea and fellow Communist travellers Cuba stayed away.

Another milestone for Seoul  was that these were the  last Olympic Games for the great twin sporting powers of the Soviet Union and East Germany, as both ceased to exist as such before the next Olympic Games in Barcelona as the Iron Curtain lifted to reveal a brave new world.

And for South Korea, the fact that so many countries were participating was a diplomatic victory. The nation had only just transitioned from a military dictatorship to a democracy in 1987, and was eager to use the Olympics to introduce itself to the world.

Which it did quite remarkably, if mainly thanks to a certain Benjamin Sinclair  Johnson trying to pull a fast one.