POSTED: May 3rd 2011

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NEIL WILSON: Ducks could swim to Chambers's aid in London 2012 bid

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

LONDON, May 04: Dwain Chambers, the British sprinter who served a two-year doping suspension, will compete at four meetings in Brazil this month as the invitation of the Brazilian Athletic  Federation. One is an IAAF Challenge meeting.

Later in the summer he will not be invited to compete in two IAAF Diamond League meetings organised by his own national federation, UK Athletics. It takes the contrasting view that no athlete who has been suspended should be invited to earn money at its IAAF meetings.

Chambers’s advisers see this is an additional sanction forbidden by the Code of the World Anti Doping Agency to which the IAAF and all its affiliates are parties. UKA’s advisors believe it is within its rights to decide eligibility for invitations to its meetings.

So both will be watching closely this summer now that the Court of Arbitration for Sport has been asked to rule whether the International Olympic Committee’s so-called Unpublished Memo, Rule 45 of its Charter, is an illegal additional sanction or a matter of eligibility.

The Memo, introduced in 2008, bans all those suspended for more than six months for doping offences from competing in the next Olympic Games following their suspension. The United States Olympic Committee and the IOC jointly have asked CAS whether this complies with the WADA Code to avoid challenges closer to the Games.

They made their requests in the case of Olympic and world 400 metres champion LaShawn Merritt, who will complete a 21-month ban this July and wants to compete at the next Games in London, but it will equally influences other cases, such as that of Chambers.

Additional sanction

Opinions differ on the advisability of Rule 45. The UK Anti Doping Agency takes the view that Rule 45 is an additional sanction that “confuses and impedes our work because it removes the incentive (to athletes) to cooperate.”

WADA itself, in a submission to the American Arbitration Association which heard Merritt’s appeal, said tartly that the IOC did not consult it over Rule 45 and added “any signatory must comply with the Code."

Legal opinion is similarly divided on its validity. CAS, in the case of Latvian bobsleigher Sandis Prusis, ruled against the IOC, saying that an extra sanction after a suspension was against the Code but later issued an “advisory” that it was not a sanction but a matter of eligibility. That advisory opinion is at odds with the published opinion of the IAAF legal commission’s own advice.

The American AA panel of three lawyers which banned Merritt for 21 months was particularly vicious in its condemnation of Rule 45. It ruled it was an extra sanction with the words “if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.”

And if it is a duck, it will not only be Merritt who will be celebrating but Chambers. Not only will UKA find it difficult to keep its stance afloat but the British Olympic Association’s life-long ban on the Olympic selection of men such as Chambers will sink without trace.

Which way will it go?

I am no lawyer but a precedent was set in 2008 when CAS ruled that the European Athletic Association was imposing an extra sanction by excluding suspended athletes from its next European championships.

I think that the IOC, the BOA and UKA are about to find they are ducks in a row to be shot down.

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 · WADA · IAAF · CAS

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