Dwain Chambers - cheat

If so, he is the monster of the sport's own creation. When the British Olympics Association excused 400 metres world champion Christine Ohuruogu and top triathlete Tim Don from their Beijing ban on convicted drugs cheats or banned test evaders, they surrendered not only the moral high ground within world athletics but the finishing line to Chambers.

Since, in the statute book, missing three tests is as much a crime as being caught drugspositive, no wonder British fans applauded Chambers yesterday as loudly in Sheffield as they cheered Ohuruogu in Tokyo.

They are as confused as they are misguided. The officials will be in a legal pickle themselves if they refuse to pick Chambers, all the more so if he goes on to sue for the right to Olympic selection citing Don and Ohuruogu as his precedent.

And they will have only themselves to blame. Can there be a more morally corrupt sport? As if the drugs abuse wasn't enough to damn athletics, or the financial black hole of London 2012 which forces us to take money from deserving causes and carry on paying for decades so people can round round in circles, this year's spectacle in China is simply sickening.

Thanks heavens for men of principle like Steven Spielberg.

Football is regularly accused of being without any sense of shame or decency. But athletics is a sport which, at its core, prostitutes itself to the demands of tyrants and cheats.