Coe: Ignorance is no defence for Chambers

Former Olympic champion Lord Coe today warned Dwain Chambers that ignorance is no defence in his battle to clear his name after a positive drugs test.

Chambers has blamed the California-based nutritionist who is at the centre of a drugs scandal that is rocking the sport after traces of a new designer steroid were found in his system.

But the European 100 metres champion has been told he must accept responsibility for the test which leaves him facing the prospect of a two-year ban that could wreck his hopes of striking Olympic gold in Athens next year.

Lord Coe, a member of the council of the International Association of Athletics Federations, stressed it would not be necessary for the authorities to be able to demonstrate that an athlete knew that THG (tetrahydrogestrinone) was a performance enhancing drug in order to ban them.

“The responsibility of every athlete is what they consume. You cannot move an iota away from that,” Coe told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“Once you do that then you are into ‘my auntie spiked my tea, granny stuck a tablet in my cornflakes’.

“The responsibility of the sport is to make sure that athletes are competing on a level playing field, and you cannot move from the responsibility of the athlete as to what they consume.

“This is actually the first occasion when a drug has been systematically produced a), to avoid detection and b) to enhance performance.

“This is absolutely a conspiracy and an attempt to pervert human performance, and we have to stamp that out.

“If people sitting in the stadium do not believe that what they are watching is legitimate then we are on the way to hell in a handcart, and very quickly.”

Chambers insists he is no drugs cheat and blamed his California-based nutritionist Victor Conte for the positive test.

A statement from Chambers’ lawyer Graham Shear yesterday revealed that the sprinter had “immediately challenged” Conte after failing the test.

Conte’s San Francisco-based company, the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, has been blamed for the emergence of THG which was only discovered when a coach sent a syringe containing the substance to anti-doping officials.

Chambers, 26, now faces an anxious wait for the result of the ’B’ test after testing positive for THG in Germany on August 1.

The Londoner was tested at his pre-World Championships training camp at Saarbrucken after the world governing body, the IAAF, were tipped off by the US Anti-Doping Agency.

UK Athletics and Chambers were informed of the positive weeks after the test but the delay was due to the newness of the drug.

THG has been specially created from two other proscribed drugs but tinkered with by scientists in an attempt to avoid detection. Steroids build muscle and help athletes recover quicker from heavy training.

The sample was then sent to an International Olympic Committee-accredited laboratory at the University of Los Angeles which had only recently established a test for the drug.

Drug testers only became aware of the new substance after an anonymous coach in the United States sent them a syringe containing traces of the steroid.