With the Beijing Olympics just weeks away, the disgraced sprinter Dwain Chambers is set to launch a legal claim to lift the ban that stops him taking part in the Games.

Chambers, who failed a drugs test for the designer drug THG in 2003, is prevented by a British Olympic Association (BOA) bylaw from representing Team GB, but his solicitor, Nick Collins, confirmed this week that “legal papers are with his barrister and we are anticipating serving them next week”. He added that his client has a “strong case” to overcome the terms of bylaw 25, which, in Chambers’ case, has served to create a “one strike and you’re out” strict liability regime.

Lord Colin Moynihan, chairman of the BOA, has promised that “money will be no object” when it comes to keeping Chambers out of the team. He is joined, in his condemnation of Chambers, by an array of sporting luminaries, among them Dame Kelly Holmes, Sir Steve Redgrave and Lord Coe. “There’s certainly a stand-off between the two sides,” says Dominic Farnsworth, a sports lawyer with Lewis Silkin. “The BOA sees itself as completely in the right and there is a high degree of political and public sympathy with its view.”

What are the arguments likely to be deployed by Chambers’ legal team? One of the key issues has been highlighted by Dick Pound, a practising lawyer and the former president of the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada), to whose code on doping infractions the BOA is a signatory. As Pound has commented: “The sanction for a first offence is a two-year suspension. Chambers has served his ban and I think, depending on your view of criminal justice, if you serve the penalty that was deemed appropriate — for whatever the offence was — you are entitled to be reintegrated into society.” One of the leading candidates to become the next president of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), Pound adds: “The additional penalty of never representing Britain again can be seen as a sanction that is over and above what is in the code.”

Christina Michalos, a sports law barrister with 5RB and a UK Sport- accredited anti-doping adviser, confirms that Chambers’ legal team is likely to argue that a life ban amounts to “a collateral sanction. They’ll say that it’s disproportionate and a restraint of trade and, as such, void and unenforceable. Their claim will be in contract law, against the BOA.”

Chambers find himself having to launch legal proceedings because, in his case, none of bylaw 25’s provisos for appeal apply. Rule 5 of the bylaw states that an athlete can appeal if the doping offence was minor; if, for offences committed after the Wada code came into force, there was no finding of fault or negligence; or if there were “significant mitigating circumstances”. In the absence of these, an internal appeal would be futile, while another option, an appeal to CAS, would be too time-consuming. Hence Chambers’ imminent journey to the High Court where, Michalos says, the terms of bylaw 25 might also be challenged under human rights law: “There is a body of European case law to the effect that blanket bans are generally disproportionate, and Chambers might claim that the bylaw itself prohibits his right to a fair trial under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights.”

Ian Smith, legal director of the Professional Cricketers’ Association, sympathises with Chambers. “I’m against punishing someone after they have served their time,” he says. “It offends against the double-jeopardy principle.” Moreover, Smith senses “something about all this that is uncomfortably personal, almost as if it’s to do with Chambers — who he is and what he’s like as a man. I get the impression if it was someone else, the athletes would not be so vociferous.”

Certainly, Chambers did not help himself in an interview last year when he admitted he knew the risks but said: “I was willing to take that chance . . . I was under the assumption I wouldn’t get caught.” Asked whether a clean athlete would beat one using drugs, he said then that it was possible, but only if the latter was having “a real bad day”.

The High Court’s task will be to apply a legal, rather than a moral, judgment to an increasingly febrile debate, but Michalos sounds note of caution for those who might hope to see the athlete brought back into the Olympic fold. “Historically, the courts adopt a non-interventionist approach to sports disputes. They see sport as a private law matter. They are often reluctant to interfere with the decisions of sporting bodies.”

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