Dope cheat sprinter Dwain Chambers will be welcomed back into the British team, the new national head coach said on Tuesday.
Chambers has a lifetime ban from the Olympic Games after testing postive for designer steroid THG and in July saw London’s High Court reject an appeal which would have allowed him to compete in Beijing.
“Dwain has served his sentence, he is more than welcome back in the team,” Charles van Commenee told the BBC.
PHOTO: AFP
“He’s a very good athlete,” the Dutchman said. “Everybody who serves their sentence is welcome. I’m fully aware of the restrictions given by the BOA [British Olympic Association] and we’ll live by that as well. If an athlete wants to challenge that, that’s okay, and we’ll live by the result.”
Following his ban, Chambers admitted to taking the performance-enhancing substances and subsequently revealed he started taking THG 18 months before he was caught cheating.
That led to him losing the 100m gold medal the Londoner won at the 2002 European Championships and also cost his team-mates the gold they’d won in the 4x100m relay.
Following his return to athletics, Chambers won the 100m at the British trials earlier this year but was unable to overturn his Olympic ban.
London 2012 chairman Sebastian Coe, an admirer of Van Commenee, has been adamant that there should be no place in athletics for the likes of Chambers.
“I am clear cut on the Chambers case — I don’t think there is room for drugs cheats in sport,” double Olympic 1,500m gold medalist Coe said before Beijing.
The BOA by-law contrasts with the position of track and field governing body the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), which says athletes guilty of doping offenses can return to competitions when they have served their bans. There have been challenges to the BOA by-law, notably by Christine Ohuruogu. However, the 400m runner — who won Britain’s only track and field gold medal in Beijing — was appealing against a lifetime Olympic ban for missing dope tests rather than producing a positive finding.
Van Commenee, 50, replaced Dave Collins, who has already quit his now defunct position of performance director at UK Athletics.
In China, Van Commenee was the chef de mission of the Dutch team, which gave the Netherlands their second most successful Olympics, winning 16 medals including seven golds.
He knows British athletics well from his previous stint as technical director and coaching heptathletes Denise Lewis and Kelly Sotherton to Olympic gold and bronze medals respectively.
“There is genuine talent here in the UK, and my challenge is to ensure that potential translates to medal success,” Van Commenee said.
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