by Kurt Barling
BBC London's Special Correspondent
Last weekend Dwain Chambers ran in the European Indoor Championships in Turin. He demolished a long-standing European record and became the first former drug cheat to return to the top of his sport. But for him it was much more than a 60m sprinting race.
Recovering the European Champion crown which he lost in 2003 because of his drugs abuse is part of a journey of personal redemption. Despite having supporters it’s not going to be easy to redeem himself totally in the eyes of many sports fans.
He says it was the first time, since returning from a sporting ban for using performance enhancing drugs, that he felt he was been running with the support of the Athletics authorities.
He is never likely to be their favourite athlete though because he is a constant reminder of the damage that is being done to the sport by performance enhancing drugs.
For Chambers it has been a long and uncomfortable journey back to sporting prominence.
It will always be difficult to escape entirely from his past. Many athletes and athletics administrators believe what he did was fundamentally unsporting and he should not be allowed to compete at the highest levels again. That is not the view of the new head of UK Athletics Charles van Commenee. He is a plain speaker and says Chambers has served his ban now he must be left to be selected on his own merits.
Chambers is also a plain speaker and some of the things he has written about are bound to embarrass some people and infuriate many more. He has shown in abundant detail how easy it was to cheat the system of drug testing despite being on a daily drug regime one would normally associate with a sick elderly relative.
It is this bluntness which will not win him any more friends amongst the athletics authorities. Particularly when he points the finger at people he believes should have been more forceful with him when he first went to train in America like his agent John Regis.
BBC London's Kurt Barling
I first met Chambers back in 2000 in the run up to the Sydney Olympics, as he was emerging from the Junior ranks to the world of Senior athletics. This is traditionally the toughest transition a senior athlete makes.
It is where commitment and dedication count for more than natural talent precisely because everyone has it.
I was making a film for the BBC, The Faster Race. He was a nervous and insecure character who had a lot of front but couldn’t articulate himself particularly well. He was certainly unprepared for the world of sharp suits and sharks that he entered not long after.
It is not surprising, with hindsight, that he was persuaded by the charms of Victor Conte. Conte was the pharmacologist who worked with leading American athletes and ended up in jail for supplying them with illegal performance enhancing drugs.
It was he who convinced Chambers that could not be caught because there was no test for THG (the Clear and the Cream). It was Conte who convinced him he was only using drugs to enhance recovery. He still had to work hard to improve his performances on the track.
In trusting Conte Chambers shows how naïve he was. To a degree he still thinks of Conte as someone who helped him despite recognising the duff advice he gave him.
In his autobiography Chambers puts a lot of store by the absence of a strong father figure to guide him through his early life. When his sprinting career looked like it had reached a plateau in 2001 and he was searching around for a new coach who could take him beyond 4th place in the Sydney Olympic final, Conte seemed to give him the answer.
Chambers now recognises the colossal error of judgement he made. Conte’s answer was to use drugs to improve his recovery rates so he could train harder. If he didn’t he was in danger of being cheated by those ahead of him, whom Conte said were all on drugs themselves.
Throughout 2002 and early 2003 he subjected himself to a brutal regime of injections and ingestions which probably would have brought him closer to his maker if he hadn’t been caught. He developed a muscular physique put on weight and actually hardly got any faster. He now says it was an athletics mistake as well as an ethical one.
Dwain Chambers
It was a mistake that cost him dear. Chambers lives in a modest house in a less affluent part of the London Borough of Enfield. It’s a far cry from the lavish lifestyle he was able to fund with sponsors knocking on his door before he started on his journey to the dark side of drug-fuelled sport.
That world came tumbling down when he received a phone call from the drug testers telling him he’d tested positive after a sample had been taken from him at a meeting in Saarbrucken. As he puts it everything he had worked for since the age of 14 was about to be undone. Dwain Chambers only has himself to blame for that catastrophic mistake; something he freely accepts.
In November 2003 Chambers was banned from his sport for two years. The following two years he says brought him to the brink of despair. He contemplated suicide on at least two occasions and almost as a therapeutic aid began to cover his body in tattoos. He also regrets that.
Just before the media storm broke over his positive test he met his current partner, Leonie, and it’s clear that he attributes his personal redemption to her loyalty and guidance. It was Leonie who, as he fell spectacularly from grace, kept the family with three children afloat financially and who has supported his continuing athletic ambitions.
"In his autobiography Chambers puts a lot of store by the absence of a strong father figure to guide him through his early life"
Kurt Barling
Dwain Chambers the athlete can still pull a crowd. I went with him to an event where he was the speaker at Keble College, Oxford University, run by the Athletics Union. For a man who has no formal education qualifications he certainly held his own. The general feeling among the students was that he was impressive in his honesty and clear in his responsibility for his own demise. They were also impressed with his desire and dedication in rising to the top of the sport once again.
But Chambers ambition to run in the London Olympics in 2012 is dealt a heavy blow by the common view that having broken the athlete’s code of only competing when clean, he has forfeited the right to be an Olympian. This is the constituency that Lord Sebastian Coe belongs to. He was incensed when Chambers tried unsuccessfully to overturn the British Olympic Association byelaw which bans British athletes for life from the Olympics.
In his autobiography Chambers has taken this personal feud with Lord Coe to a new pitch. He accuses Coe of judging him morally for his drugs mistake when he says Coe has proven through marital infidelity that he too is capable of making mistakes in his life. Chambers point is that Lord Coe should not be judged by his mistakes in perpetuity any more than he should for his drug taking errors. As he characterises it there are other people in the athletics establishment living in glasshouses and they too shouldn’t throw stones.
This anger at his treatment is mixed with a frustration by what he sees a set of double standards in dealing with drug cheats by British Athletics authorities and the media. He points out that there are other athletes who have returned from a ban who also competed in Turin. He laments they are not perennially at the centre of media attention.
Of course the 100m is the Blue Riband event in track and field; perhaps the one event which guarantees you global fame if you reach the top. Perhaps the colossal benefits that come with being the best in that event - the fastest man in the world - are a reflection of the disgust people have felt with the whole cheating episode. Chambers also admitted to taking a bewildering array of pharmacological products which put him in the spotlight. He also seems to have the ability to rub people up the wrong way; I suspect that is partly to do with other people’s paranoia about being tarnished with the same cheating brush.
Nevertheless Chambers is now back flying the flag for British sprinting; all this without lottery funding or any other public funds. Although the Athletics authorities have effectively redeemed him as an international competitor, he is still not able to make any money out of his outstanding performances on the track. It is clear that there are still ambiguous feelings about his presence in the GB athletics squad among some fellow competitors. It is difficult to see how this open wound in the sport can be easily healed.
Ten years after first meeting Chambers it seems to me he’s a much changed man. I would say growing up under the harsh spotlight of failure has given him a more rooted approach to what he does. Probably the biggest change is that he no longer fears failure. Having lost that fear he is also a more relaxed athlete, which probably accounts for his current run of good form.
But Chambers has also gained a unique insight into the mind of a drugs cheat, precisely because he was one. He no longer displays the selfish and self-obsessed behaviour of the young thrusting sprinter he once was. He believes he has valuable advice to pass on to a younger generation of athletes. The fall from grace has been humbling.
A key theme he returns to over and again in his autobiography is the importance of educating young elite athletes about the perils of success including the temptation of using performance enhancing drugs. Who better to tell them than someone for whom drugs provided no athletic benefit and ruined his career.
Despite his unsuccessful forays into NFL American football and Rugby League, Chambers says he simply wants to continue making a living from the sport he remains passionate about and good at. He remains philosophical saying he was born to run.
His book is insightful and honest but not particularly really revelatory. It’s a little self-indulgent but not whingeing. It has all the hallmarks of the lawyers editing pen to avoid him getting into too much trouble. It’s his spin on a pretty unpleasant sporting debacle.
He is clearly in a race against time to reach his full sprinting potential as well as to make peace with himself.
Chambers is looking for redemption. It is not clear he will get it from all the people he wants to in the Athletics establishment. But his quiet integrity and dignity in dealing with the consequences of his own mistakes should not be lost on all those want to improve the education of young athletes.
In the meantime he has one last thing to prove to himself, that running clean he can get somewhere drugs couldn’t take him, to the top of world sprinting. If he breaks a record or two in the meantime he may actually forgive himself for almost throwing all that natural talent away. His next big target is the World Championships in Berlin later this summer and beating the man that has set a new standard in world sprinting, Usain Bolt.
Competing on home turf in London 2012 at the age of 34 must remain a dim and distant fantasy for the moment.
Inside Out
Watch Kurt Barling's full-length interview with Dwain Chambers on Wednesday's Inside Out programme on BBC One at 7.30pm.
