POSTED: July 28th 2010

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NEIL WILSON: Athletics wants to have its Chambers cake . . . and eat it

THE NEIL WILSON COLUMN / An exclusive, authoritative series from Sports Features Communications

LONDON, Jul 27: Seated alongside UK Athletics’ chief coach Charles van Commenee, sprinter Dwain Chambers, the IAAF world indoor 60 metres champion, was paraded before the world’s media by UK Athletics in Barcelona this week as one of their prospective medallists at the European championships.

As the coach has made clear many times, Chambers has served his time for doping and is now an accepted and respected member of the British team.

Next week, when athletics’ commercial circus moves to London for UK Athletics’ Diamond League promotion at Crystal Palace, there will be no sign of Chambers. He is unwelcome, an untouchable,  banished from the scene because a collective of meeting directors calling themselves EuroMeets recommends to its members that those who have served two year suspensions should not be invited to its meetings.

So while van Commenee’s department at UKA accepts him, its commercial department rejects him. It is a state of affairs  as bizarre as that at the IAAF which allows Chambers to run in its championships but not its Diamond League.

The EuroMeets recommendation is ignored where it suits promoters. The Barcelona meeting this year invited Chambers. Paris’s Diamond League meeting invited France’s own Hind Dehiba who completed a two-year ban for doping only last year but not Chambers whose ban ended in 2006.

Paris overruled

Paris’s director Laurent Boquillet is sorry for Chambers. He has spoken formally to IAAF president Lamine Diack and to EuroMeets but says he is over-ruled by the weight of objections to Chambers.

“I feel with Dwain Chambers we are talking about something only against Dwain Chambers,” he told me.  “Everything goes on Dwain because he wrote a book and was honest about what he did. The IAAF has a rule which says two years suspension. Why add a different penalty, I said to Diack.

“I have argued it with Wilfred Meert (vice president of Diamond League) and he says: ‘You are young, you don’t know how bad it was for our sport what these people did.’ But this is not to do with sport. It is a human thing. Why punish one man?”

Boquillet says he will invite Chambers next year whatever others say but the real anomoly is the attitude to Chambers within Britain. If a man is sufficiently rehabilitated in the public mind to bring honour in his country’s colours for whom he gives his services free, is he not worthy of payment by the same national federation when there is money to be had?

I ask only because I believe that UK Athletics and the IAAF cannot have it both ways.

NEIL WILSON reported his first Olympic Games in Munich in 1972. He has since covered another nine summer and nine winter Olympics for various newspapers, including The Independent and the Daily Mail with whom he has worked for the last 19 years as Athletics and Olympic correspondent. He was Britain's Sports Journalist of the Year in 1984 and is the author of seven books.

Keywords · Neil Wilson · Chambers · Diack · IAAF ·

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