No doubt there are many among you who are beginning to think that the life of a sports columnist is one long round of noshing with celebs. Honestly, more often than not it is a bacon sarnie in the office canteen but I must admit that just lately the nosebag has been on at some rather fashionable eateries with a fuistful of sport's power-players.

Recently we dined with Wladimir Klitschko, Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Daley Thompson in Abu Dhabi (well if you are going to name drop you might as well place drop)... and last week I wrote about breaking bread at a Pimlico bistro with Tessa Jowell, the former Olympics (now Shadow) Minister and her current delight at remaining involved with 2012.

This week wasn't exactly healthy for the waistline, either, the Football Association inviting a few of us to sit down with Fabio Capello at the plush watering hole, once favoured by Princess Di, San Lorenzo in London's Knightsbridge.

It was a lunch clearly designed to put the England manager in a more favourable light with an increasingly disenchanted the media, and Don Fabio was dutifully relaxed, friendly and very forthcoming.

Unfortunately rather too forthcoming. He confirmed that it is in his mind to restore the England captaincy to John Terry, who you may recall, was arbitarily stripped of the armband by Capello himself before the World Cup because of the Chelsea player's unsavoury off–field behaviour.

The apparent U-turn wasn't digested at all well by some of his dining companions, judging from the subsequent reaction in the public prints.

One scribe who had been merrily clinking chianti-brimming glasses with Capello later suggested that, not for the first time, the Italian had got it it hopelessly wrong, and was stumbling from one PR disaster to another.

Capello's argument is that Terry has served his time. "One year's punishment is enough for anyone."

Now that set me thinking while we waited for the double expresso to arrive. It was only last week that Capello's opposite number in track and field, Dutchman Charles van Commenee, was broadly hinting that if shamed drugs runner Dwayne Chambers wanted to fight his Olympic ban, he might support him.

Obviously the spirit of forgiveness is in the sporting air at the moment.

So is this the right time to think about a similar act of clemency for another of our tarnished heroes?

Linford Christie has been persona non grata with UK Athletics and the British Olympic Association since failing a drugs test in his athletics dotage 12 years ago.

As things stand he has no involvement with 2012, other than personally coaching some useful athletes who will be. But officially Christie will not be welcome in the Olympic ring.

Should we now be asking whether it is fair that, whatever he may have done (or may not as he still disputes the positive finding) Britain's most-medalled athlete of all time remains on the outside looking in when the greatest spectacle this county has ever experienced explodes into glorious action next year?

It seems a terrible waste of his obvious expertise as a coach and mentor.


I know of the bitter animosity between Christie and Lord Coe, but could not the hatchet be buried for the occasion?

After all, they talk of an Olympic Truce for wars, so why not warring personalities?

Christie is 50 now and it does seem that the 1992 Olympic sprint champion has mellowed judging from his charismatic  appearance in "I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here" and a subsequent remarkable BBC radio interview in which he talked openly about his lack of involvement in 2012, and those who insist on continuing to ostracise him.

"Some of these people need to look at what they do.  People talk about you either because you are better than they are or you've done something successfully and they want to be like you. I just take things in my stride.  My conscience is clear. I sleep at night, I shut my door and I don't have to worry about it.

"To be honest, I am not a jacket and tie kind of guy anyway. My best role is to be with athletes. Last year my athletes were among the top in Europe, the Commonwealth and the UK.  If they want to cut their nose off to spite their face, that's their business. The way I am is the way I am. I produce results. I am their friend, their confidante. I play the father or the brother role, any problem they have, they can call me any time. A lot of coaches will dictate and say 'this is what you've got to do.'  With my athletes I am open to discussion and come to some compromise."

Of the two failed drugs tests – 1988 in Seoul when he was given the benefit of the doubt then banned from athletics in 1999. "It doesn't really bother me that much because I know what I have done. I know I didn't do anything wrong and other people know I didn't do anything wrong. It wasn't fair at all but with the drug procedures in our sport, sometimes the innocents get caught up in the system. If it's moved on and got better, then me getting caught up in the system, well, so be it.

"When I was banned the chain of custody was broken. The guy took my sample home, he had it on his window sill and in various places, why would he do that? Nandralone, for which I was banned, sits in your system for at least six months, but when they tested me a week later, I had nothing at all in my system.

"But I can't get frustrated about it. I coach other athletes like Darren Campbell who is very vociferous about the use of drugs (and Katherine Merry, Mark Lewis Francis) and none have ever tested positive. And if you speak to them they would tell you straight, if I was guilty of anything, they would not be around me. Remember athletes are not chemists. If they don't put it on the label and it's in whatever you take and is your system, regardless of how it got there, you're guilty.  I remember when caffeine was banned but nowadays you can take it, so why isn't it banned now? Sometimes I believe the system is not there to catch some of the guilty, it's there to catch out some of the innocent.  It needs to be looked at."

Nowadays Christie can even laugh at references to his 'lunchbox'. "I hated it at the time when to was first mentioned two or three days after the Olympics.  Another time and another place I would laugh at it. In fact, I do now. What brought it home to me then was when I visited a school and a little girl, aged about five or six said to me, 'My mummy says, how's your lunchbox?' I really wouldn't want my kids talking about things like that, and I really wouldn't want other kids to talk about it. Now I can laugh and make jokes about it.  Having a laugh and a bit of banter with the athletes is what I am all about. I suppose I am much more relaxed about things now. In fact I am a bit of a joker, one big nut."

Christie did not have many friends in the media when he was competing and there have been plenty of run-ins with him over the years. But not once has anyone doubted that his heart is rooted in athletics, even more so now that he devotes much of his time to coaching and nurturing young talent jn surroundings in west London that are somewhat less than glamorous.

Forgive me if I am beginning to sound like Signor Capello. If John Terry can be considered worthy of being England captain again then surely Linford should be asked to rejoin the Olympic party as an official guest.

I'd be happy to invite him and Lord Coe to lunch to discuss – it though I'm not sure either would accept.

Alan Hubbard is an award-winning sports columnist for The Independent on Sunday, and a former sports editor of The Observer. He has covered a total of 16 Summer and Winter Olympics, 10 Commonwealth Games, several football World Cups and world title fights from Atlanta to Zaire