Dwain Chambers
So the athletics authorities are considering whether to take action against DRUG CHEAT Dwain Chambers (call it double emphasis) over his autobiography, published to coincide with his successful Italian 60-metre job.
In the book, the muscle-bound Englishman divulges that he took combinations comprising over 300 performance-enhancing drugs in a 12-month period, and, most worryingly, passed all tests before being caught advertently as part of the ‘Balco’ scandal.
The argument by those levelling the disrepute charge seems to be that he is wrong to boast about such gross unsporting conduct. That basically he should just shut up about the whole affair at this stage and just get on with running; indeed faster now than he was than when fuelled by enough drugs to flatten any number of 100m champions over the past quarter-of-a-century or more.
The newly-clean Chambers says he’s just a messenger and shouldn’t be shot at. (Though as Eamon Coghlan observed, there must be a suspicion that such massive dosages have a residual effect on a person’s performance long-term. It’s not as if he’s shrunk that much since kicking the junk, is it.)
Surely though if anyone has brought the sport into disrepute it’s those who made the decision that Chambers should be allowed to resume his running career, albeit not at Olympic level, after serving his two-year ban. He should have been barred from athletics for life, and then see how many copies of ‘Race Against Me’ he’d shift. ‘Sub-10.0′ perhaps.
