Last updated 11:44, Wednesday, 16 July 2008

YOU’D have hoped sprinter Dwain Chambers might have done the decent thing when he was found guilty of being a drugs cheat and held his hands up before trying to restore his tarnished reputation well away from the athletics track.

Winner and sinner: Dwain Chambers blitzes home in the 100m final at the Norwich Union Olympic Trials and UK Championships in Birmingham

Having succeeded in dragging both his name and his sport into the gutter, he should have accepted his lifetime ban from athletics in a dignified manner.

As if he hasn’t done athletics enough harm, he’s now dragging the British Olympic Association through the courts in an attempt to have the ban overturned so he can be on the plane to Beijing.

Chambers is a man who clearly knows no shame. Let us remind ourselves precisely why he was hit with a lifetime ban two years ago.

He built up muscle and power by taking an illegal cocktail of performance-enhancing drugs, which enabled him to train longer and more intensively.

Not even his fellow athletes want him in the British team and our greatest competitors like Dame Kelly Holmes and Colin Jackson have rightly spoken out at their dismay that Chambers’ ban could be lifted.

Rather than hanging his head in shame, Chambers appears totally unrepentant and even has the audacity to claim that the ban is a restriction of his right to work, which means tomorrow he will heap further embarrassment on athletics by challenging the punishment in the High Court. Well, if he believes the ban is unfair, imagine the sense of injustice felt by those athletes he defeated on the track when they later discovered he cheated his way to victory.

Chambers, who won the 100m at the Olympic Trials in Birmingham on Sunday in a new championship record of 10sec, could have said NO to drugs.

He would probably have excelled on his natural talent – but we will never know because his career has been forever tainted by drugs.

Instead, he said chose to cheat and he should accept the consequences for his decision.

The British Olympic Association deserves so much credit for punishing athletes who rely on needle and tablet.

Only by taking a hardline stance on drug cheats will they send out the strongest of deterrents to athletes who try to gain an unfair advantage.

It will be a sad day for British sport if the ban is lifted and Chambers is allowed on that plane to Beijing.