Sports Books Blog

Am I alone in hoping Dwain Chambers uses the High Court to challenge the British Olympic Association?s ban on competitors who have served suspensions for drug offences?
While not condoning the taking of drugs, or the avoidance of tests, in any way it has always seemed to me unfair that only the British and the Norwegian Olympic authorities impose such bans. (although it seems you should never believe stuff written by someone with a false name. I now understand that the Romanians have such a draconian rule as well, although with their past they’d have been hard pressed to put out a team had the ban been in place a few years ago)
Someone needs to challenge the ban in a court. It is surely against all concepts of natural justice that an athlete pays the penalty demanded by the international governing body of his sport and then faces a another imposed by a body composed of the national governing bodies.
Of course the two year ban on Chambers was not long enough. But that?s what the IAAF has decided and the BOA should abide by that.
Mind you had various bodies that have run British athletics not been so weak in the past the situation might never have arisen. But UK Athletics runs a system whereby the athlete who wins the trial is automatically selected for the international team. It makes for excitement on the day ? and good TV ? but it leads to headaches.
It was introduced as a means to make sure the top athletes turned up for the trials. When the selection was purely by committee the best athletes would miss the trials, arguing that an off-day could lead to them missing out on the Olympics or European Championships.
So the trials became meaningless and the first past the post system was brought in. It meant that only the really top athletes, sure of their place, would miss the trials. So various other rules were added saying that everybody had to turn up and take part whether or not in their event. That led to lots of doctors? notes.
So should we go back to the system which saw the team picked by selectors? It would have meant they could have refused Chambers selection to the World Indoors on the grounds that his presence in the team would be divisive and no one could reasonably have challenged that argument.
Sounds good, then. But those of us with long memories in the sport ? unlike the trio who run UK Athletics at the moment ? can remember back to 1988 when Seb Coe wasn?t picked for the Seoul Olympics. The selectors voted 7-0 that he should defend his 1500 metres title. But the committee that was to ratify the selectors? decisions voted 12-11 that he shouldn?t. His was the only selection challenged.
The casting vote was from the chairman whose claim to fame was that he started in athletics by running the tea stand at Cardiff AAC after his daughter had decided she wanted to become a sprinter. And one of the committee decided Coe shouldn?t be picked on the grounds: ?have you seen the size of his house??

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I never thought I’d feel sympathy for a drugs cheat. But the way UK Athletics has behaved over Dwain Chambers has made me feel almost sorry for him.
The facts are Chambers admitted taking banned substances and served a two-year ban from 2004. He then tried a comeback, was not as successful as he would have liked and said he was going to try American football. The UK authorities decided he had retired and took him off the drugs register. It is a rule that all athletes submit themselves for random testing.
But Chambers hadn’t retired. He continued to tell the world governing body, the IAAF, where he was so he conformed to the rules. American football wasn’t for him and he decided to try again at sprinting.
When he wanted to run in this year’s UK Indoor championships and try for the World Indoor team UK Athletics was appalled and tried to ban him. Of course they couldn’t and lo and behold Chambers won the trials and a place in the team.
We then had the unedifying spectacle of the UK Performance director Dave Collins saying that he was not happy that Chambers was in the team and that he (Collins) wanted to give athletes who stood a chance of competing in the Olympics – Chamber’s can’t because the British Olympic Association has a rule that any one who has served a drugs ban cannot compete for them – a place in the indoior team. Collins knew that as he was talking to the TV cameras that the team also contained Carl Myerscough a shot putter who was banned for two years after “a cocktail of banned substances” was found in his blood.
Collins also knew that he was the one who suggested that Linford Christie, twice found guilty of drug absue, should become a technical coach to young athletes.
The row rumbled on after the selection when Fast Track, who organise the athletics meetings in the UK, and other European meet directors said they would not welcome Chambers or any other drug cheat at their meetings although (and they didn’t admit this and weren’t pressed on it) they welcomed him back in 2006 when he’d served his time.
So Chambers is entitled to feel he is being victimised. Of course he deserves criticism. He took drugs. But he has served the punishment the sport feels is appropriate (the ban used to be four years but the IAAF reduced it to two) and I can see restraint of trade actions blooming.
And Chambers admitted taking drugs. I don’t know whether Myerscough admityted his offence but I do know that most others protest their innocence. Marion Jones did, for years until she was sent to prison for lying about it to a Grand Jury. Dennis Mitchell said his positive test was down to sex and beer. Most of the others blame the supplements they take.
But the IAAF insist that an athlete is responsible for what ever is put into their bodies – so why wasn’t Christie banned in Seoul? He took the ginseng.
The sport didn’t like Chambers saying on BBC TV that the drug takers would have to have a bad day for a clean athlete to win an Olympic gold and he doesn’t seem to have flagellated himself quite enough for some people.
But contrast the reception he has got to that given to Myerscough when he thought about challenging the BOA’s rule on not picking those who have served bans. In December 2003 the UK performance director, Max Jones, said: “We have sympathy with his case and it seems the BOA is out of culture with everyone else.”
I can understand why athletics is thrashing around like this. The Marion Jones case splashed bad publicity all over the sport and Chambers is suffering because of it.
But I can’t help feeling that the sport in the UK brought this upon itself. If they’d just abided by their rules instead of scrambling to get on the radio and TV and show how tough they were there would have been none of the negative publicity of recent days.
I think the problem is that the chairman, the chief executive and the performance director all come from outside the sport. There’s no one with a sense of history who can point out that if they try to stop Chambers from competing at the World Indoors then they can hardly pick Myerscough.
And maybe it’s because I tend to watch the sport on TV than in the stadiums these days but I see Dave Collins and Nils de Vos on screen far more often that I used to see Nigel Cooper or Frank Dick.
But please don’t get me started again on the subject of the pathetic way our national broadcaster covers athletics.

Someone on television said the other day that you can remember where you were when you heard President Kennedy was assassinated and when you heard about the Manchester United Munich disaster.
Although I have tried to wrack my brains I can’t for the life of me remember where I was when Kennedy was shot. But I can still vividly recapture the moment I heard about United’s tragedy.
I was lying in bed at school when my best friend, who came from Manchester, popped his head around the door and said: “Seven United players are dead.“ Just like that.
Of course I didn’t believe him. I thought he meant they were out of Saturday’s match because of injury. In those days there was no rolling news and we didn’t have access to radio or television. So the events of Munich 1958 came to us slowly in rural Kent.
This was, of course, before the tribalism that so disfigures football these days and it was possible to appreciate a team without supporting them, much as it is with Arsenal these days, unless you are a Tottenham fan.
Anyway my best friend came from Manchester and I was besotted with football. Roger Byrne was my favourite United player. Both of us were left backs (he was rather better than me) but although I had only seen the team play on newsreels I felt the loss personally, as did the great majority of the football fans in England.
We read about the cup victories over Sheffield Wednesday and West Brom. For some reason I saw bits of the latter game. Surely not on TV unless we were allowed unexpected access to the only set at school; in one of the masters’ houses. But I can’t remember. And I watched the Cup final defeat by Bolton at home on our black and white set.
Anyway, this long preamble is a means to bring me around to two stories in the papers today which shows how United are intent on squandering the legacy of Munich, the fact that the deaths of the eight players (the greatest of them all, Duncan Edwards, died in hospital two weeks later) gave them a profile around the world and a unique place in English football.
In The Times Kevin Eason profiles how United have again let down their supporters. After making them pay for cup matches when they purchased their season tickets, the club have now told season ticket holders that they will have to enter a ballot for tickets for the plum fifth-round tie against Arsenal. “When it really gets interesting we are told that we have no automatic right to our seats because they are needed for Arsenal supporters – even though we sit in a different part of the stadium,” one supporter said.
In the Daily Mail Charlie Sale (sorry he’s Charles now) reveals that Sir Alex Ferguson has again linked up with his son Jason in a business venture. There would be nothing wrong with that of course were it not that United’s shareholders forced Jason to stop acting as an agent for United’s players.
Perhaps worst of all, though, is that a new plaque at Old Trafford to commemorate the 23 who lost their lives at Munich fifty years ago has been sponsored.

Strange to see my name in print again. When I was a sports reporter it used to be in all the time but now it’s only when I summon up the energy to write to the publishing trade press. Which is what I did after reading an article in Publishing News by the editor Liz Thompson about the reaction of certain publishers after hearing that their Arts Council grants were being threatened.
I sent her an email saying I was astonished at the figures mentioned in the article and she invited me to write a longer piece about my reactions.
You can read it here and I hope it isn’t too much of a rant. My considered and reasonable views – I must admit some people thought I came across as the love-child of Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbitt – prompted a response from Gary Pulsifer of Arcadia one of the threatened companies.
You can read it here and you can read my response here except that PN cut my attempts at humour. I actually wrote:
So Gary Pulsifer agrees with me, but then again he doesn’t – that’s not surprising as he didn’t read the piece properly. Who said editors earn £60,000 a year? That’s totally different from a fee of £250 a day. Obviously he does not understand the financial dynamics of a sector of the world he is operating in! I hate ending a sentence with a preposition but it was his sentence and that’s foreigners for you!
It would have been far more enlightening had he used his letter to justify why his company deserves regular ACE funding rather than attacking me and patronising my area of publishing.
Of course we all think the government wastes money at times and, as I said, I agree with public spending on the arts; I just don’t think it should go to all the same people all of the time. Mr Pulsifer failed to suggest why he thinks it should.
And as he mocks the sub-genre of horseracing poetry, what poetry subjects does he think worthy of subsidy – trains or cats perhaps? It was a new sub-genre for him he sniffed and a “voyage of discovery” for ACE. Does that make it less or more worthy of a grant?
I notice there was no reaction from the Arts Council to my article. So no list or explanation from them, then.
Has it achieved anything? I’m not sure. The Arts Council did not respond and other than Arcadia the other charity cases (as one publishing acquaintance calls them – kept well below the parapet.