When Dwain Chambers summoned that great gold-toothed smile atop the podium at Turin ’s Lingotto Oval on Sunday, it marked one of British sport’s most extraordinary comebacks.
Simultaneously however, the spectacle also offered one of its most gnawingly uncomfortable sights.
For the first time in British athletics, a self-confessed cheat was seen clutching an individual gold medal once again.
Victim or victor, clean or tainted, cynical or naive, an example or an embarrassment. Make your own mind up.
But like any drug’s cheat before him, Chambers served his time – that expired in 2005.
Where he goes from here remains to be clarified. If anything it is out of his hands. But now it’s his newly published book that is the hanging offence.
Its newspaper serialisation has ruffled a few feathers - you cannot hope for a quiet life when you bring out a book that indiscriminately fires bullets at John Regis, Sebastian Coe and Kelly Holmes– all athletes who were exceptional examples of how
the sport can be run ‘clean’.
And in two weeks time, an IAAF council meeting in Berlin will address his comments and decide whether Chambers has embarrassed the sport enough to warrant a disrepute charge, and impose what would effectively be a lifetime ban from athletics.
It seems ridiculous to suggest that you can lie, cheat, take drugs and serve a two year ban, but it is only when you talk about it and get personal that you bring the sport into disrepute.
“I’ve written my name into the history books for the right reasons,” he said, following Sunday’s events. And you have to applaud the sentiment.
Yet at the same time, the ‘walking junkie’ may have written himself into a corner too.
And the man who thinks he can’t win probably can’t.
Most will argue that Chambers should be refused an easy ride back into athletics. After all life is not an etch-a-sketch. You can’t just get up one morning, erase your history and start again. Chamber’s knows that. But the rules state that he has a second chance.
An awful lot of debate could have been spared, however, with a zero-tolerance stance towards drug abusers in athletics.
Get caught with anything in your system from blood components to cold treatments and you are out. No excuses permitted.
Had the demon of the moment known that the penalty was absolute, that he could not pull on a vest of any hue again, then he may not have been as cavalier with the cocktail of banned substances that he took.
But the UK ’s zero-tolerance approach to drug cheats has always been injudicious. Missed drug tests and denial have served athletes well over the years. Carl Myerscough, the British record-holder in the shot put, was welcomed back with open arms after serving a two-year ban.
Christine Ohuruogu, banned for a year after missing three out-of-competition drug’s tests, had her lifetime ban from running in the Olympics overturned on appeal. She went on to win gold in Beijing . But perhaps just as importantly, her past was forgotten and her achievement admired.
Chambers on the other hand competes justifiably having served a sentence and people still complain.
Maybe it’s because he came clean. But as such, he is converted from a sinner to a victim when in fact he is the wrong target – those who set the rules are.
Let him compete. You don’t have to be pleased for him when he wins, but he has as much right as any under the current laws. And perhaps this man’s story can finally put to bed that steroid use is the only way of competing.
After all, the duty of athletics is to live with the ugliest of its past and the most threatening of its present. Chambers, for all his sins, is doing this – the people who seek to banish him are not.
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