Drugs in Sport: Europe's fastest man Dwain Chambers, is caught up in a US designer anabolic steroid scandal

Dwain Chambers, the fastest man in Europe and one of Britain's main hopes for an Olympic gold medal next year, has tested positive for a new banned designer anabolic steroid and could face a life ban from the sport. Britain also faces being stripped of the 4 x 100m silver medal it won at the World athletics championships in Paris in August as Chambers was part of the team.

The 26-year-old Londoner seems certain to miss the games in Athens if he is found guilty of taking tetrahydrogestrinone (THG), which until last week was thought to be undetectable.

Sources familiar with the process have revealed that traces of the drug were found in a urine sample that the European 100 metres champion and record-holder provided during an out-of-competition test at his training base in Saarbrucken, Germany, on August 1st.

Officials of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) tested Chambers and his training partners after they had received a tip-off from the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA).

They sent the sample to the International Olympic Committee-accredited laboratory at the University of California in Los Angeles where scientists had only recently established a test for the drug.

Chambers has the right to a second test, for the B sample from the August 1st test to be examined. If that also proves positive Chambers will face at the least a two-year suspension. That could be extended to a lifetime ban if officials of the IAAF decide he was involved in a conspiracy to cheat with others.

If Chambers is found guilty he will earn the unwanted distinction of being the biggest name ever to be unmasked as a cheat in British sport. The highest-profile athlete before him was Linford Christie, the 1992 Olympic 100m champion who tested positive for nandrolone in 1999, though he was semi-retired at the time.

Chambers is trained by Remi Korchemny, a septuagenarian Ukrainian emigre who once coached the 1972 Olympic 100m and 200m champion Valery Borzov and who now runs the KMA Track Club with Victor Conte.

Terry Madden, the chief executive of USADA, last week identified Conte's San Francisco-based Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (Balco) as being the source of the new designer drug.

US officials knew nothing about it until they received an anonymous tip-off from a "high-profile" athletics coach who sent them a syringe containing traces of the steroid that is injected under the tongue.

Following weeks of scientific work at UCLA doctors discovered the molecular make-up of the steroid had been modified so it avoided the detection of sophisticated scanning machines.

A test was devised for the drug and more than 500 samples taken earlier in the year were analysed again. Up to 20 top US and international stars, including Olympic champions and world record holders, may have tested positive in what is potentially the biggest doping scandal in athletics history.

Chambers is only the second athlete after the American shot putt champion Kevin Toth to have been publicly identified but he finds himself caught up in a growing scandal which has already seen Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery, the world's fastest male and female sprinters, among 40 sportsmen and women subpoenaed to give evidence before a federal grand jury in San Francisco investigating Balco.

Last month, Internal Revenue Service agents, accompanied by representatives of the Food and Drug Administration, the San Mateo county narcotics taskforce and the USADA raided Balco's offices.

It has been alleged that during their inspection they found vials and containers containing anabolic steroids, human growth hormone and testosterone along with other doping paraphernalia. Gaurdian Service

Meanwhile the world governing body of athletics, the IAAF, last night vowed that anyone found to have tested positive for THG would face the consequences and that the organisation will re-test all samples taken at the World Championships.

The IAAF president Lamine Diack said: "The emergence of this new steroid is a matter of great concern and we are taking all steps that we can to investigate how widespread its use has been. If athletes have deliberately set out to cheat the public at our World Championships, then they must be exposed and dealt with in the strongest possible way."