[THIS IS A WELL-WRITTEN ARTICLE TOUCHING ON A TOPIC BANNED (TO COMMENT) ON THIS FORUM, SO PLEASE STICK TO REACTING ON THE MORE TRADITIONAL ELEMENTS. DWAIN CHAMBERS HAS SOME THOUGHTS ON THE JAMAICANS AND BELIEVES ASAFA POWELL WILL REGAIN THE 100 WR IN 09. KK.]
The Times (London)
Rick Broadbent, Athletics Correspondent
In his pomp, Dwain Chambers would settle down into his starting blocks as a rival spat in front of him. This was life in the fast lane, a non-contact punch-up between pumped-up individuals with a point to prove. Nothing has changed for a man who has become a spittoon for sporting bile. But after the spit comes the polish. Chambers may have been banned from the Olympic Games for life, but he will run for Great Britain next year and he is trying to deconstruct the myth of Usain Bolt as a superhero. “Cut him and he bleeds,” Chambers said.
He needs to run for money, with Rocco, his new baby, to support, earnings of only £1,500 from the past six months and a £130,000 bill from the IAAF, the governing body of athletics, outstanding. He needs to run for his mental health, too, and with the British Olympic Association (BOA) barring him from the greatest stage of all, he has not ruled out running for Jamaica, the country of his parents’ birth, or the United States, the country where he was stained by drugs.
“It’s been mentioned, but it’s not something I’m thinking about right now,” he said in a pub in Holborn, Central London. “Maybe down the line.” Given that it would take up to three years for Chambers, 30, to become eligible for another country, it sounded a hollow threat.
After struggling during his High Court challenge to the BOA bylaw last summer, there will be no further appeal. He cannot afford it. That leaves him in an invidious position. On the one hand he is free to compete at the European Indoor Championships in Italy in March and the World Championships in Berlin in August, but on the other, Euromeetings, the umbrella body for the sport’s top promoters, has an unwritten agreement not to invite convicted dopers to its lucrative meetings. In effect, he can run for his country but not for himself.
You can argue that he deserves what he gets because he cheated. Victor Conte, the brains behind the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (Balco) that supplied Chambers with performance-enhancing drugs, said that he opened his eyes in 2002 by telling him: “This is what Marion Jones does.” Chambers said: “It’s like in The Matrix when Morpheus meets Neo and offers him the red or blue pill.” The blue pill would make life carry on as normal while the red would answer the questions of the matrix. “All I’m offering is the truth,” Morpheus says.
Ditto Conte. But Chambers is not bitter. “I was the one who turned the handle and walked through the door,” he said. “Victor never once forced me down this road, although he was a very good salesman.”
Chambers took drugs because he thought that it was the truth. Before the Games in Beijing, three of the previous five Olympic 100 metres champions had tested positive. It would take performance-enhanced naivety to believe that they were the only ones. “A lot of athletes are forced into it,” Chambers said. “They have no choice. It’s peer pressure, knowing the guy on your left and the guy on your right are on it, knowing that if you’re not then you’re going to lose your contracts.”
He believes in jail sentences for the dealers, but added: “I’m not the only one and they cheat in every sport. Footballers dive to win penalties and affect results; in cricket they tamper with the balls; in Formula One we had McLaren fined for spying. It starts from the grass roots. I saw a magazine the other day with cheats and tips for playing computer games. Instead of working through it on your own, it gave you the answers. I also got a message from a woman saying she’d seen her 15-year-old son doping. It’s a mindset that needs changing.”
In the book What Sport Tells Us About Life, Ed Smith writes “as some crimes are upgraded in our imagination, others are downgraded”, leading to misplaced moral outrage.
Chambers said: “Rio Ferdinand [the Manchester United footballer] misses a test, is big news one day and it’s gone. He doesn’t get it. Christine Ohuruogu doesn’t get it. I was honest about it; I’m not saying she’s lying, but it’s forgotten.”
Two wrongs do not make a right, but seven suspended Russians on the eve of the Beijing Games and 1,000 samples retested for a new drug called Cera do provide context. “What I did was bad, but the way it was dealt with was bad, too, because it’s showing kids that you mustn’t forgive,” Chambers said. “Life has taught me a lot and it’s been painful and harsh, robbing me of everything. I will never get back to the financial state I had. I have a ten-day-old baby, a three-year-old son and a 15-year-old stepson. My partner is on maternity leave. I just want to make a living.”
It is why he dallied with rugby league this year. He had won a silver medal in the 60 metres at the World Indoor Championships in Valencia, but the $10,000 (now about £6,600) went straight to the IAAF. “I’ve been doing some coaching down at Picketts Lock [in North London],” he said. “I enjoy that. I enjoy sending these kids down the right road. I had nobody telling me not to do it.”
Chambers said he has been depressed, but he uses those feelings to spur him on. UK Athletics (UKA), the domestic governing body, nominated him for Valencia only because it was bound by its selection criteria. It then issued a statement saying that the selection panel unanimously opposed its own decision. “I thought these people are really showing their cards now,” Chambers said. “They said they would treat me like any other athlete, but they did not want to pay for my flight or physio.”
Charles van Commenee, the new head coach at UKA, has said that Chambers is welcome back and the sprinter is hoping that this message will lead to a change in thinking. Having run 10.00sec at the Olympic trials, he believes that he could have won a silver medal behind Bolt in Beijing. “It was gut-wrenching to watch because I could have been there and got the fifth [British track and field] medal,” he said. “I can run 9.8s. I ran 6.54 for the 60 metres and that equates to 9.89 [over 100 metres].” He is training alone, with no coach, because he wants to stay close to his family, but he watches regular videos of Bolt.
He has dismissed the argument, put forward by one Swedish university, that the effects of doping can be lifelong. “I carried the gains of what I took for six months and, after that, you’re done,” he said. “You start from scratch again. It’s five years since I took anything and I’m still dealing with this crap.”
It is why he has written a book, which is due out in March. Quirkily, given his ban, 2,012 signed copies are available for pre-order from sjdent.com. The “crap” was fuelled by the interview he gave to the BBC in which Sir Matthew Pinsent, the former rower, asked if anyone could win gold clean. “It’s possible, but the person that’s taking drugs has to be having a real bad day,” Chambers replied. The damning remark, he said, was blown out of proportion.
“You put a Ferrari up against a Mini, then which is going to win?” he said. “But I’ve been clean and beaten people on drugs. I am sure Matthew Pinsent has, too. I was not disparaging his achievements. I said the person on drugs had to have a bad day and that’s the truth because he’s been able to train harder and recover quicker.”
Is he worried about his health? “There were concerns, but we were checked regularly,” he said. “From that aspect he [Conte] was pretty safe. I felt I had a God-given talent, but I felt I needed to take drugs to prove it because the playing field wasn’t level and I wanted to kick the Americans’ arses.”
The field is still uneven and the rehabilitation of Chambers and Co remains a moral quagmire. He knows that he has come across as cocky, but said that it was part of the sprinter’s make-up. “You need the swagger to put the fear into your opponents,” he said. “That’s why athletes spat in my lane. It’s all psychology. I probably shouldn’t say this, but when Jason Gardener [a former British rival] blinked a lot I knew he was gone. You need a good poker face. When Usain Bolt dances and combs his hair, everyone else is on the line quivering.”
Chambers is still running in anger. Sometimes he spits blood over the belief that he has been singled out for vilification. Most of the time he grins and bears it. His sport may have mixed views, but the Oxford Union gave him a standing ovation when he spoke there, while outside the pub we bumped into Barry McGuigan. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” the former world champion boxer said. Chambers grinned. “I won’t.”
‘Asafa Powell let Bolt off hook in Beijing’
Chambers says that there is “no way on earth” that Bolt should have won the Olympic 100 metres final in Beijing. The British sprinter says that Asafa Powell, the previous golden boy of Jamaican athletics, had the ability to take the title but blew the mental battle.
“I don’t give a damn how fast Bolt ran, Powell should not have lost that medal,” Chambers said. “I watched his last leg of the 4x100metres final and that was awesome. He’ll get the world record back again next year. It will be crazy with Bolt there, too; I want to be there hanging on to their coat-tails.”
Chambers worked with Bolt in Jamaica in 2006. Given the sport’s reputation and Jamaica’s lack of an anti-doping body, eyebrows were raised after Jamaica dominated the sprints in Beijing, so what does Chambers think? “Well, they haven’t tested positive,” he said. “That’s all you can say.”
Conte has been more outspoken. “Victor is not afraid to speak and I obviously have to be careful,” Chambers said. “He understands it far greater than I do. He’s been in this industry a long time and knows what goes on.”
Chambers, who says that “attention to detail” in coaching has been the key to Jamaica becoming the sprint capital of the world, is confident of beating Bolt in 2009. “Usain can do the 100 metres in 41 strides,” Chambers said. “I would take 43 or 44. But I have better stride frequency: 4.96 per second compared to 4.65. To beat him I need to maintain my frequency and improve my stride. Beijing was his time to shine, but he’s only human.”
