Victim or villain: Brian Dick argues why Chambers deserves a second chance.
Dwain Chambers is set to discover whether he can join an elite group of athletes whose names have entered the lexicon as a shorthand for a legal ruling that changed an entire sport.
Much as football has become used to players switching employers ‘on a Bosman’ or rugby clubs mould their recruitment around ‘Kolpak’ players, so too future generations of Olympians could ‘do a Chambers’ by returning from a drugs ban to reach their sport’s pinnacle.
But while Jean-Marc Bosman, the Belgian footballer and Maros Kolpak, a Slovak handball player, are viewed in some ways as pioneers of the Sport Sans Frontieres movement having enhanced workers’ rights in the European Court of Justice, Chambers is embroiled in a much more personal and - let it be said, grubby set of proceedings.
The 30-year-old is challenging a British Olympic Association by-law that prevents him, and presumably other post-suspension competitors, from ever participating in the Games. He is arguing the regulation is an ‘inherently unfair restraint of trade’.
The issue is not likely to be solved one way or the other for several months, all that Chambers wants in the short term is an injunction to allow him to go to Beijng. If he is successful it will send shockwaves through several sports in this country and could inspire a host of further appellants.
To describe the issue as difficult does not even begin to untangle the many threads that have become so twisted. The High Court will decide on the legal position, whether Chambers can go to Beijing, but there is no one to arbitrate the moral case. Should he be allowed?
The answer to that depends on an individual’s beliefs about the what is good for athletics and what is good for Dwain Chambers the person.
Clearly as a human being Chambers knows he has done wrong and is contrite but more importantly clean of the seven banned substances he once used to cheat himself, his friends and his rivals.
There may be a physiological legacy of the drugs he has taken and some mental benefits having experienced certain high pressure situations he might not otherwise have reached. Both are valid concerns but as things stand neither can be proved - or disproved.
What we are left with, therefore, is a series of related issues each of which seem to point towards Chambers being allowed to run in Beijing.
There is apprehension about the message it would send out, a fear that other, younger athletes would look at his case and deduce that a two-year ban is a small sacrifice to pay for a shot at an Olympic gold medal.
That theory breaks down because if they serve a ban they will have been caught and will have been stripped of their medal.
Ask Chambers whether he feels it has all been worth it. His response is unequivocally negative. He has been castigated, victimised and pilloried and is virtually unable to earn a living. What better message to send out than that?
That message will become even more resonant if he does well in China. Unlike every other disgraced sprinter Chambers is actually able to run as fast clean as he was dirty. He has yet to pull out a 9.87 seconds but his legal personal best of 9.97secs is impressive and the 10.00 secs he produced in Birmingham last weekend was incredible.
With no one to chase and only Simeon Williamson for company, Chambers showed that whatever people think about him as a person, as an athlete he has bucket-loads of talent.
Indoors he has done even better. The 6.54secs he recorded to win World 60 metres silver in Valencia in March was faster than he ran when he was on drugs.
Aspiring Olympians can look at that, listen to what he says and believe they can succeed without chemical enhancement.
There is also disquiet that he may cheat again. We can, however, only deal with the facts that are before us rather than Donald Rumsfeld’s Known Unkowns.
Chambers might do it again but so might anybody. As difficult as it seems we have to accept that everyone on the starting line is clean until proved otherwise, even when 100 metres champions fall from grace like Tour de France riders fall not from their bicycles but from their pedestals.
Our increasingly over-bearing justice system has not yet reached the stage where convictions can be made purely on the basis of fear and we must assume if he’s ‘juiced up’ again he will be caught by the testers if not by his compatriots.
And finally I wonder sometimes whether I am the only one who feels disquiet at the role played by the BOA. There are already inconsistencies in their stance on the issue.
Mark Lewis-Francis has successfully appealed against the lifetime ban after testing positive for cannabis while Tim Don and Christine Ohuruogu having been given reprieves having been suspended for missing three drugs tests.
The waters are, therefore, already cloudy and a body that jealously guards what it considers to be its intellectual property – the whole concept of the Olympics and everything to do with them from the rings to the word itself, seems to me to be more concerned with money than the purity of any Corinthian ideal.
All of which means Chambers has done his time for the crime and should be afforded the platform to pass on his hard-learned lesson.
