It provokes the alarm that came when the Olympic gold medallist Denise Lewis blithely declared her indifference to the drug background of her East German coach, Dr Ekkart Arbeit, from whom she parted company only after a prolonged bout of adverse publicity. That the FA stance should have provoked the possibility of a strike by England players, and the fevered protests of his union, told us a dismal story about the overall state of discipline and responsibility in one of the richest corners of our sporting life.The message of the Ferdinand case is simply compounded by the news of the Chambers situation. He said that a war against drugs would be fought to the death. But whose death? The latest news says that it is more than ever likely to be that of the ideal of clean sport.For the moment we can only be inordinately grateful to the scientist who oversaw the tests that exposed the new designer drug which showed up in Chambers' sample. He may, for a little while at least, have brought scorn to the notion that the drugs battle was being won.That Britain's most talented sprinter should have tested positive at this time, of course, carries resonance way beyond the already deeply tainted waters of track and field.It puts into the sharpest perspective the firmness of the recent response by the Football Association to the offence of Manchester United's Rio Ferdinand when he failed to attend a routine drugs test. Not because he has come up with some fail-safe system to bring down the cheats, but because he may have nailed a few.. and cut through the latest tissue of lies. But how would he get there? His first positive test simply returns us to another cycle of doubt.The remarks of Lynn Davies, the long jump hero of the Tokyo Olympics in a more innocent age who is now president of UK Athletics, come from the litany of denial.

He says: "Sadly again, the perception of our sport is suffering But I would rather have this in the open. If athletes are found to have taken performance-enhancing drugs they should be banned for two years - even if they are British."Even if they are British! Especially if they are British, he might have said, because where does any true cleansing of sport have to begin? At home, in our own values and our own belief in what is right, and damn the medals that Ben Johnson's coach, Charlie Francis, said were beyond him if he didn't take the fast, chemical track to glory.Some of us who greeted that grey dawn in Seoul when Johnson was unmasked as the ultimate drug cheat, bought, at least to a degree, the platitude that fell from the lips of the IOC president, Juan Antonio Samaranch. They take the wrong cough drops, they are caught in some testing malfunction, their dietary supplements have been taken on bad advice And so it goes... After Chambers' disappointments in Paris, we were given the picture of a thwarted hero, gazing into the middle distance and contemplating fresh attacks on the mountain top.

It's a big, ugly word - and that's right for the big, ugly lie it represents. The drug for which our erstwhile hero Dwain Chambers tested positive is a sexy, state-of-the-art designer number named tetrahydrogestrinone - otherwise known as THG, but let's stick to the longer version. The answer, of course, is an overall boxing authority - but some would think that a shocking proposal.. "It's argued that judges on three sides of the ring are more likely to arrive at a just verdict but down the years there has been plenty of evidence to prove that this isn't necessarily the case," he said when we spoke earlier this week.It can be argued that the conclusion arrived at by the referee, John Keane, when he made David Barnes a narrow winner over Jimmy Vincent for the British welterweight title last July was controversial enough to raise fresh doubts about appointing the referee as sole arbiter, but it carries none of the baggage associated with sanctioning bodies.So much gossip, so much speculation, so many low fears have been stirred by the activities of those organisations that people are bound to lap up the juices of their imaginations. The majority view, which tallied with my own, was that Chi was a close but clear winner regardless of the deduction from Brodie's score.Controversial decisions have always been with us (many felt that Oscar de la Hoya was exceedingly hard done by when recently dropping a decision to Shayne Moseley for the WBC and International Boxing Federation middleweight titles in Las Vegas, all three judges arriving at a two-point margin in Moseley's favour) and there is at present a debate over whether the British tradition of leaving decisions to the referee should be dropped in favour of the internationally applied system.Brooks, the chairman of the British Board, is vehemently opposed to the latter.