Over the last week cracks have started to appear in the resistance to dope-tainted sprinter Dwain Chambers making a full return to competition.
Last week the Paris Golden League meeting said they may invite the Briton, who completed a two-year drugs ban in 2006, to their event next month despite the Euromeetings group’s call for its members not to host athletes who have been caught doping.
Four days before that Chambers was selected by Britain for the European Team Championships, signalling an attitude change from UK Athletics
Chambers helped Briton to third place in Leira at the weekend, winning the 200 metres as a late replacement for the injured Rikki Fifton.
Previously the sport’s governing body in Britain had only picked him for events where it was obliged to because of trial results, such as March’s European Indoor Championships in Turin, where he won the sprint title.
Many will view this stance-softening with dismay. It must be hard for athletes who have been clean throughout their careers to line up to race against someone who admitted in his autobiography to having taken a cocktail of more than 300 drugs in one year.
And after cases such as Tim Montgomery and Marion Jones, what does his presence in the starting blocks do for the sport’s credibility?
It has also been suggested that Chambers is effectively being allowed to cash in on the notoriety he gained by cheating.
These are all legitimate concerns.
But it is also true that Chambers has served his punishment, is repentant and has to earn a living somehow.
If athletics officials feel they must defend their sport’s credibility by extending the one-strike-and-you’re-out policy it has taken with false starts to giving all drugs offenders life bans, it should change the rules.
In the meantime, it might be better to end Chambers’s sporting limbo.
Last weekend’s Berlin Golden League meeting, for example, snubbed him after its initial consideration of an invitation met with disapproval from Euromeetings.
Many former athletes are among Chambers’ fiercest critics, but today’s top sprinter seems relaxed about his comeback.
“I’ll challenge anyone,” Usain Bolt told La Gazzetta dello Sport when asked about the prospect of meeting Chambers in Paris. “It’s not up to me to decide if someone with his past can race or not.”
PHOTO: Britain’s Dwain Chambers reacts after winning the 200 meters at the European Team Championship in Leiria city stadium in Portugal June 21, 2009. REUTERS/Jose Manuel Ribeiro
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If Chambers wishes to pursue a career as a private professional athlete at those meetings which will have him, I’ll give him a break. But for so long as he insults me by pretending to represent me, my country and my values, I won’t. It’s as simple as that.
Though I must say that the behaviour of the BBC’s august (and presumably respected by young school and club athletes) TV commentators over a breach of the rules by another UK athlete who ran outside his lane was equally reprehensible.
- Posted by Ian KemmishIn reply to Mr Kemmish I believe that neither Mr Chambers nor indeed any other young club/county or indeed any recognized British athlete for that matter, has any interest in representing your values. In fact Mr Kemmish, I may even go as far to say the only person out of the current 6,706,993,152 people currently inhabiting this planet who has any interest in representing your values, of which you personally seem to hold in much regard, is yourself.
However Sir, the main reason for this reply was not to belittle you, nor your petty, myopic, blinkered views, however, the reason for this reply was to draw attention to your lack of compassion for a man of great talent and much remorse. Your stance and view, does even less for the sport i love then you did when you where an athlete. The air of an envious man is apparent in your views and whilst i don’t blame you for that, i do blame you (and others of your mindset) for the recent slump of quality we have witnessed over the years in British athletics.
- Posted by Tom Flynn