CHAMBERS REVEALS ALL- BUT BAN MUST STAY
Dwain Chambers
By Jim Holden
DWAIN CHAMBERS must be commended for revealing all the squalid details of his drug taking to the authorities.
He is to be pitied for the desperate decision to go to the High Court and try to overturn the British Olympic Association ban on him competing at the Beijing Games this summer.
The truth is that Chambers is forever tainted in the eyes of the public for his cheating. The full scale of his confession, however welcome that is, only serves to reinforce the contempt of the ordinary sports fan.
How could that be otherwise when you are confronted by the full catalogue of deceit – the THG liquid steroid consumed under the tongue, the testosterone cream rubbed into the forearm, the HGH human growth hormone injected three nights a week, the EPO injected in routinely to increase his red blood cell count. And that is only a part of the drugs cocktail consumed by the sprinter.
Chambers may or may not win his shameful legal case. He cannot win back the hearts and minds of the British public – and without that he cannot win glory at Olympics.
If he were, heaven forbid, to claim a medal, there would be no cheering, no celebration and no wonder in the way there was for Kelly Holmes when she was successful at the Athens Games four years ago.
There will be no redemption on the running track, whatever happens there. A medal would invite only still further scorn for defying good sense and the BOA’s sensible rule that proven drugs cheats should not represent Britain at the Olympics.
Redemption for Chambers can only be found in an arena away from the public gaze. That is in the backrooms – where he can warn young athletes against the temptation of cheating, where he can work with anti-doping authorities as a poacher turned gamekeeper.
His confession is already useful. It is useful in removing scales from the eyes of those people unwilling to acknowledge how serious and widespread the cheating has become.
It is useful to reinforce the message that zero tolerance on doping is the only option in fighting the curse that could kill the sport.
It is also particularly useful in revealing how athletes try to manipulate the system whereby they are allowed to miss two drugs tests before a third miss brings punishment.
This is called “duck-and-dive”, and the relevant section of Chambers’ confession explains how athletes deliberately give a false location to the drugs testers when they are in a spell of taking banned substances so that they aren’t caught. They can take the risk of missing two tests and get all the benefits of illegal drugs.
Aware of this, will sports lovers be more or less inclined to give the benefit of doubt to athletes like Christine
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