Athletics: Chambers on Track for Gridiron Career

Dwain Chambers' dream of carving out a new career for himself in American football is still alive after he made it through to the second round of trials to play for a club in NFL Europe.

But the London athlete, banned for two years in 2004 after testing positive for the designer anabolic steroid THG, is not turning his back on sprinting; he is staying on UK Athletics' anti-doping register, a requirement of anyone who wants to compete internationally.

Chambers, 28, took part in a training week for NFL Europe in Cologne at the start of November and has impressed coaches enough to be invited back next month. If he catches their eye again he could be one of 80 potential players invited to a six-week camp in Florida in March.

At the end of that camp the roster will be cut to 48 players who will be eligible for Amsterdam, Berlin, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt or Hamburg. Each team has 48 players - 42 of them young Americans from NFL teams who are sent to Europe to gain experience and the remaining six "international players".

The potential money from NFL is the main attraction to Chambers, who has grown disillusioned at having to use future track earnings to pay back prize money of £180,000 to the International Association of Athletics Federations that he won while he admits he was taking anabolic steroids.

Average earnings in NFL Europe are only £5,000 to £8,000 per three-month season but first-year professionals in the US NFL are paid a minimum salary of £130,000 and can go on to earn many millions more. Chambers impressed with his speed at his last trial but the odds are stacked against him making it at the highest level.

Only one "international player" has ever gone from NFL Europe to the NFL. That was Germany's Constantin Ritzmann, a former long jumper and shot putter, who played for the Buffalo Bills and Atlanta Falcons but is not currently on the roster of an NFL team.

But in the past athletes have successfully made the transition. Willie Gault, one of the United States gold medal-winning 4x100m relay team in Los Angeles, was a wide receiver on the Chicago Bears' 1985 Super Bowl-winning team. Another Super Bowl winner was the former 110m hurdles world-record holder, Renaldo Nehemiah, a San Francisco 49er in 1984.

Nehemiah is now a successful athletics agent whose clients include Justin Gatlin, the world 100m record holder who is facing a drugs ban after testing positive for testosterone and is also trying to win a NFL contract. Gatlin recently had trials with the Houston Texans and Arizona Cardinals.

If things do not work out for Chambers in NFL Europe, however, he is clearly hoping to return to athletics. Once an athlete takes himself off the doping register he cannot compete internationally until signing up again and serving a period in which he must be available for testing.

Chambers, stripped of his 2002 European 100m title after admitting he was on steroids at the time, is banned for life from representing Britain in the Olympics but would be eligible to compete at the world championships in Osaka next summer.

Britain's leading distance runner, Jon Brown, has made himself unavailable for the world cross-country championships in Mombasa on March 24 because the Kenyan city is affected by malaria. "I don't want to start taking injections or whatever else is necessary," the Yorkshireman said.