Book Review: Race Against Me by Dwain Chambers

You might feel like you have heard enough about Dwain Chambers. Most of his story has become familiar: he went to train in America in 2002, was introduced to performance enhancing drugs and used them undetected for 18 months before testing positive on 1 August 2003 after a tip-off. He was banned for two years and then, when his ban ended, everyone seemed to decide it hadn’t been long enough and complained whenever he tried to race.

If the story is familiar, why read his book? The candid account of his drug taking makes the book worth reading for anyone interested in athletics. When you realise how easy it is to get away with taking steroids, EPO, testosterone, and human growth hormone, you can’t really watch athletics in the same way. Chambers cheated, but there are others to blame as well.

Race Against Me, like the whole issue of drugs in sport, is morally confusing. Cheating is wrong, but how wrong? On the one hand, it is only sport. On the other, clean athletes are cheated out of fame and fortune by drug cheats. Why is drug taking seen as the worst kind of cheating - worse than, say, diving in football?

Chambers has done wrong, but he has also been wronged in his treatment after the expiry of his ban. Clean athletes trying to make a living from the sport, and fans, are wronged not only by cheats but by administrators who have failed to introduce effective testing and by the journalists who fail to hold the administrators to account. The same journalists and administrators that condemn any athlete that is caught.

The book describes the temptations Chambers felt as a clean athlete realising that others were taking drugs and getting away with it. On his arrival in America, his training group contained Chryste Gaines (olympic gold medallist) and Kelli White (double world champion in 2003), both of whom were using drugs with apparent impunity. He succumbed to the temptation, and the salesmanship of Victor Conte, and started on Conte’s programme. Chambers describes his regime in detail - the book includes his diaries, showing what he took and when.

Chambers also describes his difficulties in returning to the sport after his ban expired. It seems obvious to me that a two year ban is insufficient. But if those are the rules they should be enforced. Why don’t the likes of Lord Coe and Steve Cram, who have been critical of Chambers, use their energy instead to campaign for an extension of the bans?

Most of the drugs which Chambers took were things which he was being tested for. But he only got caught when a rival coach, Trevor Graham (coach of Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery), told Athletics USA what Chambers’ group were taking. The book describes how the infrequency of out of competition tests means that athletes who deliberately avoid tests when they have drugs in their system accumulate missed tests so slowly that a ban for missing three tests is unlikely. You can read a summary of the methods in this letterwritten to UK Sport by Chambers’ supplier, Victor Conte.

A clear message from the book is that missed tests should be taken seriously. My favourite bit of the book is the foreword by Oliver Holt. Holt is a football journalist for the Daily Mirror who has also written about drugs in athletics (unlike most athletics journalists). Holt travelled the route between Christine Ohuruogu’s home and the Olympic Medical Centre where she missed her test. Given an hour to meet the tester, she said there was no way she could make it. Holt says he drove it a few minutes under the hour, without breaking any speed limits. Holt’s view is that Chambers has been punished for his honesty: “athletics loves denial because it allows it to claim that cheating is not endemic and that many positive drugs tests and missed drugs tests are just a series of terrible mistakes”

There isn’t much to suggest that anything has changed since Chambers provided information to the authorities on how to avoid a positive test. Usain Bolt reported in an interview on 11 April that he has been tested 3 or 4 times so far in 2009 - he may as well not be tested at all. The Guardian reported this without comment. Why is athletics’ biggest star subject to so little scrutiny?

The truth probably is that too few people care whether athletes take drugs or not. It suits nearly everyone - sponsors, administrators, television commentators, journalists and most fans - if the sport appears clean except for a few bad apples. Rashid Ramzi’s positive must be great news for these people: the sport looks tough on drugs, no need to think about the weakness of the testing.

It’s unlucky for Chambers that he is such a convenient example of a bad apple. The realisation that it is so easy to cheat makes me less interested in watching athletics. But I do keep watching, so I am part of the problem too. Until the commercial death of the sport comes closer, reform remains unlikely. It seems safe to assume that the positive tests are the tip of the iceberg in athletics. Testing for drugs in cycling is a long way ahead of the testing in athletics and it was commercial pressure, after the whole iceberg was exposed, that started reform.

More than anything, Race Against Me is a sad book. I ended up feeling sad for Chambers and sad about the state of athletics. Whatever else Chambers has done, in exposing the weakness of official anti-doping efforts, he has done athletics a service.