In August 1999, when athletics seemed to matter a little more, the BBC covered a Golden League meeting in Monte Carlo. There were shots of boats on a glistening sea and a perfectly turned-out Roger Black anchoring the coverage from the stadium. All was well in the world on that summer’s evening. Well, not quite.

Earlier that week there was the news that Linford Christie had tested positive for the anabolic steroid nandrolone at an indoor track meeting in Dortmund six months before. For Black, an Olympic silver medallist, and the BBC, that presented them with a dilemma. Christie was 39 years of age at the time and semi-retired. Of more relevance, he was part of the BBC’s athletics team, and if it hadn’t been for the bad news, he would have been in the studio trading opinions with Black.

With the smoothness he once displayed as a 400m runner, Black dealt with the problem. “Linford,” he said, “was supposed to be joining us but for obvious reasons, he’s staying at home.” Had his viewers not known about the positive drugs test, they wouldn’t have had a clue what Black was speaking about. Ingeniously, Black explained his friend’s absence without recourse to the dastardly ‘d’ word. Clearly the presenter’s response had been discussed in advance because as he spoke, a caption appeared across the screen saying Christie had tested positive for nandrolone.

Black wasn’t the only member of the BBC’s athletics team who was supportive of Christie. Sally Gunnell, a teammate of the sprinter at the 1992 Olympics when they both won gold, was flabbergasted at the mere suggestion that he might have cheated.

“The whole Linford thing . . . I mean . . . it’s totally ridiculous. What’s going on? It can’t be right. It is a shock. This guy is 39, retired in 1997 [two years before], and runs occasionally for his club. It’s silly really. He has got to go through the procedures, but at the end of the day, he has won his medals and this is just a crazy situation.” Though he was less robust, Steve Cram also supported Christie. “It is bizarre,” he said. “It [the drug test] raises huge question marks.”

Consider the fundamentals of Christie’s positive test. He was 38 when he showed up in Dortmund in excellent shape. Three weeks before he had been in Karlsruhe and, for a first 60m run of the season, had recorded his fastest time for seven years. That season he made a bet with a friend that he would run 6.50sec or under for 60m, a feat achieved only by himself and two other Europeans.

Wilhelm Schanzer, director of the IOC-accredited laboratory in Cologne, personally conducted the tests on the 10 urine samples taken from the Dortmund meeting. As is the protocol in drug testing, Schanzer knew the samples only by their code number. One of the 10 tested positive.

“I did not have to think too much about this case when I made the analysis,” said Schanzer. “If the concentration of the banned substance is low, we have to do additional work to make sure that what we estimate is correct. In this case there was no need. It is nearly correct to say the result was 100 times greater than the permitted level for nandrolone. It was a clear, clear result.” Christie denied then and still denies to this day that he used performance-enhancing drugs, arguing that the banned substance nandrolone in his urine may have been accidentally introduced to his system by taking nutritional supplements.

He had, however, been involved in a previous doping controversy when testing positive for the banned substance ephedrine after the 100m final at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. He claimed the ephedrine came from ginseng tea and the disciplinary committee in Seoul accepted his explanation on a 11-10 vote. “Why didn’t I think of ginseng tea?” said Ben Johnson at the time as he went through his own scandal.

Neither was support for Christie confined to the BBC’s athletics studio. Though it knew about the positive test within a few weeks of it happening, UK Athletics sat on the information and did precious little. At the time its principal concern was to protect what they saw as the athlete’s right to anonymity until a sanction was imposed. But what happened if the processes lasted for many months, even a year or more?

At the time the IAAF, the world governing body, believed UK Athletics was not committed to antidoping and it is thought that a source from there leaked information about Christie’s test to the French sports daily L’Equipe. One month after the story was broken, UK Athletics decided it could not prove “beyond reasonable doubt” that Christie had taken nandrolone and exonerated him.

It was a bizarre judgment because the rule clearly states the athlete is responsible for any banned substances found in his or her system and there is no obligation on the part of the antidoping bodies to prove how they got there. Two months after UK Athletics’ decision to clear Christie, the IAAF overruled that decision and banned him for two years. Six months ago, UK Athletics appointed Linford Christie as a mentor to work with some of Great Britain’s best young sprinters in the lead-up to the Olympic Games of 2008 and 2012.

As Christie's career faded, a new kid appeared on the block. Dwain Chambers was a teenager when he went to the European junior championships of 1997. There, he set a new junior world record for the 100m. Four years later he became only the second Briton, after Christie, to run 100m in under 10 seconds. But Chambers should have learnt the lessons or distanced himself from the drug controversies. He did not.

In 2003 he tested positive for the designer steroid, tetrahydro-gestrinone, that would become known as THG. Once caught, Chambers owned up to the offence. He was banned for two years, returned to the sport in 2006, and then left it to try his hand at a career in American football before returning again to his first love.

Last May, Chambers was interviewed by the BBC’s Inside Sport programme and he answered questions about his doping with an honesty that is rare. “Some people take chances,” he said. “Some don’t, and I was willing to take that chance. I was under the assumption that I wouldn’t get caught. I came to a crossroads in my life where I took a wrong turn, you know, got hit by a bus. But fortunately I was able to get back up on my feet and, you know, go in another direction.”

Chambers was asked if a clean athlete could beat a doped athlete in an Olympic final. “It’s possible, but the person that’s taken drugs has to be having a real bad day. That’s what I believe.” It was his honest opinion and one many sports fans share. But it was also a suicide note for Chambers, a point of view seen as an allegation by many who have competed successfully in the Olympics.

The interview was broadcast last May, when Chambers’s athletics career seemed over, so there was not much fuss. His recent return to the sport has brought forth condemnation from virtually every official and establishment source in British athletics. The criticism has been as vitriolic as it has been unfair. Chambers admitted his offence, served his time and, as the rules allow, has come back to his sport.

Those who were so supportive of Christie have been among his greatest accusers. UK Athletics, the same body that made Christie one of its mentors six months ago, treats Chambers like a pariah, insisting that it picks him for the GB team only because it is legally forced to do so. Could they explain what is the difference between Chambers and the mentor Christie and Carl Myerscough, who has served a drug ban and is now routinely selected for GB teams?

And Roger Black, who wouldn’t mention the “d” word in relation to Christie, had this to say about Chambers: “It upsets me when Dwain comes out with statements that you cannot win an Olympic gold medal without taking drugs. That’s factually wrong and it does an enormous amount of damage to the kids who want to come into the sport. I understand him wanting to be a shining example of what you can do clean but I don’t buy that. He knew what he was doing and he should be big enough to put his hands up and say, ‘I need to walk away’.”

Why should Chambers, and not Christie nor Myerscough, who also failed a test, walk away? For what reason does Black not accept in good faith Chambers’s stated intention of showing what he can do clean? Why would Black be so unquestioning of one British sprinter and so sceptical about another? If you are Dwain Chambers, you look at what has been happening in British athletics over the past two weeks and where the sport has come from and you wonder at the madness of it all. It is not madness, it is hypocrisy.

Roger Black, Steve Cram, Sally Gunnell and many others who have criticised Chambers were part of what Tony Ward, former public relations chief of British Athletics, called “The Golden Decade”. Indeed, that was the title Ward gave to his 1991 memoir. On page 194 he wrote: “In those days, the taking of drugs was not viewed with the same disapproval as it is now. It was the most likely shortcut to success, like altitude training or some technical innovation.

“Testing procedures were slack. Promoters were as relaxed about drug-taking as about money. If part of the deal for an athlete to appear was that he or she would not be tested, no problem. Voices that spoke out then, like Sir Arthur Gold, were in the wilderness.”

Have those eager to vilify Chambers and punish more than is stipulated by the rules so forgotten where they have come from?