So Long Dwain

Clearly being a drugs cheat in sport is something that you can never be forgiven for. Unless we really like your haircut (Abel Xavier), or your country doesn't have anyone else as good (David Millar), you're just conveniently dead (Marco Pantani), or you can convincingly claim that it wasn't your fault (Ooh Aah Camara and Waterford Crystal. But they are horses.)

And let's face it, Dwain Chambers' friends are looking few and far between at the moment. He was the subject of one of the first questions on last weekend's Fighting Talk - should he be allowed back into the sport now that he's served his two year ban?

At first the answers were firmly against Dwain:

• "He's a disgrace and arrogant with it"
• "The British team members say they want nothing to do with him"
• "The rules are on his side but morally he is in the wrong"
• "Sportswise he's on the scrap heap"

Moving to the entertainingly scathing:

• "He's going to go the same way as Tonya Harding" (porn films and celebrity boxing?)
• "Victor Conte defending him is like getting a character reference from Osama bin Laden" or "like getting Rose West to do your landscape gardening"

And ending up at the pleasingly bizarre suggestion:

• "Fill him up with drugs and send him to Iraq"

However the dissenting voices talked sense, saying that "he's served his two year ban and done his time" and that the governing bodies were to blame - they would have known that he would qualify easily to get back into competition when his ban was up.

Doping in sport isn't an offence like paedophilia where offenders need to be put on a register and monitored even after they're deemed to have completed their punishment. The sports bodies - particularly athletics - need to grow some balls and ban people for appropriate lengths of time rather than rolling over every time someone says "restraint of trade."

(Download the Fighting Talk podcast.)