Chambers aims to change the agenda

That tells you everything about their antipathy towards the disgraced sprinter, who is competing in the World Indoor Championships 60 metres only because lawyers warned the UKA that excluding him was unlawful.

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Chambers cannot run at any of the lucrative European meetings this summer because of a bar by promoters on athletes who have served two-year drug suspensions. Nor can he compete at the Olympic Games because of a British Olympic Association ban.

Those bans have convinced many that his career is effectively over after Friday's race at the Palau Luis Puig velodrome.

Yet Chambers, more relaxed and cheerful than any man should be after the barrage of abuse he has endured for a month, disagrees.

'I'll be back,' he insisted. 'There will always be a way back. Unfortunately, it's Olympic year and I won't be able to do that. So my career is kind of on temporary hold. But I'm optimistic that my performance here will change things.

'I've always said: "Just let my legs do the talking". That normally seems to turn things round. It has happened twice already.'

He was referring to his run at Birmingham that qualified him for the selection trials and the subsequent win that forced the selectors, under their own rules, to take him to Valencia.

'I want to go out and have fun and run like a bat out of hell. I want to get a medal. I want to do what is best for my country.'

No team-mate made any criticism and nobody refused to room with him when he travelled with the rest of the team on Wednesday. 'I didn't expect there to be any problems,' he claimed.

His first comeback after his two-year suspension in 2006 passed comparatively unchallenged. He said: 'I don't know why this time it has escalated. It has brought more attention to me and the sport.

'Good, bad or ugly, it's attention. What I would like is to bring attention in a positive way because then what I did would be put in the past.'

Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson, who is chairing a UKA inquiry into possible changes of its constitution to deal with drug takers, wants to meet him 'to get into the mind of somebody who took drugs'.

Chambers welcomes the chance. 'We don't want another me,' he said, without irony.

The British athletes know that whatever they achieve here will be overshadowed by Chambers.

Kelly Sotherton ends her pentathlon just 10 minutes before Chambers could run in the 60m final and long jumper Chris Tomlinson said: 'Of course it would cheese me off if I won and I was hardly mentioned.

'I broke a 27-year-old British record a few years ago on the day Paula Radcliffe won the London marathon in a world record. Guess who didn't get a mention?'