Paul Lewis: No Merritt in CAS decision

LaShawn Merritt. Photo / AP

It is to be hoped that British 400m hurdler Dai Greene lives up to his threat if he comes across US Olympic 400m defending track champion LaShawn Merritt at this year's London Olympics: "I'll happily go and find him at the start and tell him to his face: 'You're a cheat and you shouldn't be here."'

Amen to that - and yet a Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) finding later this month is expected not only to tacitly underline Merritt's participation in London but also give a free entry pass to two other drug cheats, sprinter Dwain Chambers and cyclist David Millar.

The CAS ruling, due in two weeks, is widely anticipated to be in favour of the two British athletes - but that won't stop it from being wrong.

It comes after the British Olympic Association (BOA) asked CAS to uphold the BOA bans on Chambers and Millar. They were banned from the Olympics for life under a BOA rule which says any British athlete banned for six months or more by the World Anti Doping Authority (WADA) is permanently excluded from sport's pinnacle event.

WADA's maximum ban is for two years and they resisted the BOA's stance - Britain being the only country in the world who imposes a harsher penalty on top of that of WADA. It's a weird scenario: the drug busters battling against Olympic authorities who do not want the Games sullied by cheats.

The problem is consistency. Our world is not a consistent place and sport, in particular, is not internationally consistent. Merritt was allowed by the CAS to defend his title in London after serving a 21-month ban for testing positive for a steroid in 2010. The argument is that, if Merritt can compete, why can't Chambers and Millar? Because they are cheats, that's why.

The BOA are quite right. It was back in Seoul, at the 1988 Olympics, that the full force of the cheats hit home. Ben Johnson, the sprinter born in Jamaica and fuelled by steroids, ran an astonishing world record which would have been even faster than his 9.79s had he not raised his hand at the end to signal his glee at beating Carl Lewis. It was a truly amazing event; it seemed more than historic. Johnson appeared so superior, the world gasped.

Three days later, we found out why he was so astonishing. A heaving, massing media scrum formed as Johnson, stripped of his title, his times, his reputation - everything - left the country. There have been so many drugs cheats exposed in so many sports since then that perhaps we have all become a little inured to it.

Banned for two years? Just wait it out and, hey presto, you're back on the world stage, earning bucketloads of cash and it's like it never happened. That's the message the current system sends to young athletes.

We've all got used to it. For some athletes, the motivation of riches, fame and immortality has proved too much. Top athletes take drugs because the competition do. Their motivation was and is financial and selfish. If they are stripped of their medals, many already have financial security.

There is no real deterrent, in spite of the real progress WADA have made in catching the cheats. Surely that has to be backed up by an even bigger stick so users don't figure that only two years out is a risk worth taking. Oh, there's morality - but who cares about that?

It is a fraud, when all is said and done. A professional athlete on drugs defrauds his or her country, employers, sponsors, endorsers, fans and certainly the greats who have gone before and did not do it out of a bottle. It would take a huge international effort to criminalise doping offences and, for that reason, will probably not happen but maybe the time has come when governments and sporting bodies should cooperate to do so. Italy already have.

I'm with the BOA on this one. Why should an Olympics host competitors who have deliberately set out to bastardise Olympic ideals? Please don't feed me the line about someone paying their debt to society.

I mean, you don't see a director of a dodgy finance company restored to his or her previous high position once they have served their sentence. Their credibility in that field is destroyed.

So it should be with athletes and other fraudulent wrong-doers, like match fixers in cricket. Some say it won't happen because harsh sentences could dissuade athletes from passing on information. But it's time for some real clout.

Athletics authorities have for years past played fast and loose with the facts. To go back to Seoul in 1988, the injured party in Johnson's race was gold medal favourite Lewis. But he ended up exposed a few years ago when it was revealed he tested positive three times for banned stimulants during the 1988 US Olympic trials. Lewis went on to win two gold medals in Seoul.

If the letter of the law had been applied, Lewis would have been banned and out of the Olympics but the US Olympic Committee ruled that his misuse of the stimulants was inadvertent. The promise of glory overrode all else and the permissible level of stimulants in the human body was later raised to a level where Lewis would not have returned a positive test.

So we come back to the point - why hold an Olympics where athletes proven to be cheats are allowed to compete? They may have paid their debts, apologised and promised never to do it again.

But this isn't about individual rights. It's about an Olympic movement that actually means something; that stands for real achievement as opposed to a springboard for the discredited.