Is Chambers the Tip of the Drugs Iceberg?

The sad Dwain Chambers affair, just reminds us that the drug cheats are still around in the world of athletics and that our testing laboratories are playing catch up to try and find the new performance-enhancing substances. Victor Conte, head of the California-based BALCO Lab, recently said: “The vast majority of athletes in Beijing will be using performance enhancing substances, but they will be undetectable”.

What chance does the ‘honest’ athlete have? And you’d like to think that there are some still out there. Certainly you look at some of our top athletes in the UK and it would be hard to believe some of them are ‘dirty’, but we’ll probably never know for sure.

Talking of our top athletes, one came out of the woodwork yesterday to comment on the Dwain Chambers affair. Linford Christie was once described by one of his fellow Olympic competitors as the most balanced athlete in the world – he has a chip on both shoulders! I'm not sure what Mobilis thinks about this but, I’m not sure why he felt anybody cared what a former convicted drugs cheat (and as a current coach of a convicted drugs cheat) thinks, but he put his two-penneth in today anyway. He believes that British athletics has brought this on itself by not having enough good sprinters to beat Chambers.

I think he’s missing the point really, but then he returned to his usual tack by saying, “A lot of people have given their opinion, but I only look after myself and what I do”. There speaks a true team player and people’s champion. One thing he did say that was quite insightful though was, “at Beijing we should not concentrate on the medals we win, we should be looking at the performances. Our young athletes should be getting the experience they need in Beijing ready to look for medals at the London 2012 Olympics.”

Does this refreshing attitude make him a future Performance Director of UKA? Perhaps not, but he’s absolutely right, with the lack of experience of our younger athletes it would be unrealistic and unreasonable to load the pressure on them to win medals at Beijing, but with the experience from that Olympics, we could be looking at a formidable team in 2012 if we nurture our young athletes physically and mentally over the next four years.

Lets see what happens between now and the World Indoors, lets hope athletics has some good stories to tell in the build up.