It is almost time for Las Fallas in Valencia, the festival in which giant satirical effigies portraying leading political and social figures are burnt against a backdrop of exploding fireworks. Dwain Chambers should feel at home when he arrives for the World Indoor Championships this week.

The fuse has been lit and the powder-keg will go off if Chambers wins what is likely to be a rare gold medal for Great Britain on Friday. His future remains clouded by bans and bank balances, but it is intriguing to note that the event before his bow in Valencia will also be dominated by a drugs row.

Kelly Sotherton begins the pentathlon on Friday and, in the absence of the injured Carolina Klüft, she will will expect to contest a duel with Lyudmila Blonska, a Ukrainian given a two-year ban in 2003 after testing positive for steroids. It is their first meeting since Blonska pipped Sotherton to heptathlon silver at the World Championships last August, prompting the Briton to remark: “We don't support cheats. She's cheated once, who says she is not cheating again? It tarnishes our event.”

In light of such remarks, it is easy to consider how Chambers's presence in Spain could be awkward for his team-mates, but most have taken a pragmatic, even parochial, approach and the more pressing question is what will happen to Chambers and athletics after Friday?

While neither the sprinter nor UK Athletics (UKA) has emerged unscathed from the furore over his selection, the positive outcome has been the appointment of Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson to head an anti-doping review. “I would like to meet Dwain,” she told The Times last night. “I think it's important to know why people dope, what drives them to it, how it works. We need to understand all those things.” An advocate of life bans, she will ask UKA to approve the boundaries of her remit in mid-March.

Despite her affable public profile, Grey-Thompson does not suffer fools and there are those who believe UKA's hierarchy falls into that category. After quitting as a vice-president, Mike Winch accused the governing body of hypocrisy and incompetence in its handling of the Chambers affair.

Making it a moral issue would have been widely supported had others with drug convictions not been welcomed back. Carl Myerscough, the shot putter, was named in the Britain team and nobody published a statement saying the selectors were unanimously against his inclusion, as happened with Chambers. In the past, Janine Whitlock, the pole vaulter, returned, while Linford Christie remains a UKA coach. Niels de Vos, the UKA chief executive, has found that you cannot pick and choose your moral battlefields.

It is also unwise to persecute Chambers for one remark made to Sir Matthew Pinsent in a BBC interview last year. Asked if it was possible to win a gold medal clean, he replied: “It's possible, but the person taking drugs has to be having a real bad day.” Given that he competes in an event in which three of the past five Olympic champions and two of the past three world record-holders have tested positive, such cynicism is understandable.

But if UKA's attitude has been seen as vindictive, it is worth remembering that Chambers's cheating led to his team-mates being stripped of medals and helped to create an atmosphere in which the innocent are now tainted by suspicion.

Opportunities for Chambers after Friday will be scarce. Chryste Gaines, another Balco client banned for two years in 2005, has been frozen out by promoters since she became eligible to run again. “Because we were affiliated with Balco ... we're being treated differently,” she said. “We're asked to serve a lifetime ban.”

Euromeetings, the promoters group, says that its 51 members have agreed not to invite convicted drug cheats to its meetings, ruling Chambers out of the $1million (about £500,000) Golden League. There is a prevailing mood that the law that hands out two-year bans is an ass.

Still crippled by a £100,000 debt owed to the IAAF, the world governing body, Chambers must now decide whether to challenge his British Olympic Association life ban. He could take the matter to the High Court or to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, where Justin Gatlin, the Olympic champion, is trying to get his ban reduced to two years, having already won a cut from eight years to four, so that he can defend his title in Beijing.

Blonska, by contrast, knows that she is going to Beijing and is surfing a wave of popularity in Ukraine, where she has set up a competition to spot teenage talent and has been honoured in the national sports awards. She netted $40,000 for winning the World Indoor Championship in Russia in 2006 and added another $60,000 via her silver medal in Osaka and winning the IAAF World Combined Events Challenge last year. Some cheats, it seems, do prosper.