Today’s drugs panic relates to Dwain Chambers, who has once again showed he can run 60m faster than anyone else in Britain, after a two-year ban for use of a banned substance.<\/p>\n

The big names in British athletics (yes, that is a very llocalised meaning of the words “big names”) are engaged in an unseemly scramble to distance themselves from him<\/a>. Plus today’s BBC website<\/a> says that a promotion group won’t have him at events.<\/p>\n

How fair is this? His real crime seems to have been to have said that it was impossible to win the Olympics without some chemical assistance.<\/p>\n

He was banned for two years. This time is over. It’s not as if athletes have twenty year careers, so that they can just be out of their sport for a few years and lose no ground. <\/p>\n

In my limited understanding of the term, he was never “cheating” anyway. He outran everyone who he raced against. “Cheating” would involve tripping up his rivals or bribing the timekeeper. <\/p>\n

It’s tough to distinguish between a fair and an unfair advantage. I can guarantee that no amount of chemical enhancement would put me in the Olympic class for swimming. (For a start, I can’t really swim.) Why are some things that give an athlete sporting advantages “cheating” while other things aren’t? Good genetics for running – unfair, but we don’t all have them. Aerodynamically enhanced sportswear? Expert coaching? Good diet? These all provide sporting advantages that aren’t equally available to everyone.<\/p>\n

For most sports, access to the opportunity to do them at all rests on having an unfair advantage: your own eventing horse, a tennis racket, snow, an athletics club that you can afford to go to, an Olympic-size pool, time to train, a national commitment to providing facilities and so on.<\/p>\n

So, clearly, the whole issue rests on where you draw the line. The athletics associations drew their line to exclude whatever pharmaceutical letter combination Dwain Chambers was caught taking. Fair enough. He was competing under their rules. They applied a penalty. Also fair enough. He accepted the penalty and kept to the testing rules while he was banned from competing.<\/p>\n

So why is the man now being blamed for everything from being a bad influence on future sportspeople to keeping a good non-cheat out of the England squad by selfishly winning enough races to get into it? (Arguments on BBC Breakfast.) <\/p>\n

One commentator claimed that he had modified his physique by taking the banned substance 3 years ago, so would have inherent unfair advantages for the rest of his career. I don’t know what magical substance Dwain is supposed to have taken, but, if such a product exists, surely doctors all over the world would be clamouring to get it it to treat the physically weak.<\/p>\n