The BOA filed a formal appeal last month with the CAS to challenge the decision in November by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) that declared its anti-doping bylaw non-compliant.

The official hearing in Lausanne will take place on March 12 and is expected to take a day with the judgement to be delivered several weeks later.

The BOA are now the only National Olympic Committee (NOC) to have a lifetime ban in place but if it is overturned, it would allow Chambers and Millar to compete at London 2012.

"Our submissions to CAS have been delivered," the BOA chairman Colin Moynihan told insidethegames here in where he is attending the Winter Youth Olympic Games.

"I've been working on them for the last three weeks over Christmas and New Year at virtually every hour available to me alongside a great legal team and we intend to put a very strong case before the CAS tribunal."

WADA are expected to submit their documents in the next ten days.

The BOA will then have the opportunity to respond to any issues raised by WADA not covered in their original submission.

The panel who hear the case will be led by Professor Richard McLaren (pictured), a Canadian barrister.

He also heard the LaShawn Merritt case which overturned the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decision which prevented athletes banned for more than six months from competing in the next Games and led to calls for the BOA to scrap its bylaw, resulting in this case.

McLaren, a former student at the London School of Ecomonics, will be joined on the panel by Switzerland's Michele Bernasconi and American David Rivkin, who also the arbitrators for the Merritt case.

"I have every intention of ensuring that we win our case," said Moynihan.

"If things go against us in CAS, I have made it very clear that anybody who is selected for the team will be given equal and strong support.

"But we are doing everything we can to ensure that the interests of the athletes, over 90 per cent of whom have voted consistently for our selection policy, are upheld.

"The BOA position is absolutely clear.

"Every National Olympic Committee, in some way or another, has a different selection policy and we want to maintain our right to be an autonomous organisation."

Moynihan continued that he feels athletes who have taken drugs in sport should have no right to compete at an Olympic Games.

"Those who have knowingly cheated clean athletes out of selection did so knowing of the consequences of it," he said.

"They made the decision to cheat their fellow athletes; they knew the price they were going to pay.

"Ultimately when you talk about redemption you've got to talk about the redemption of those clean athletes who were denied selection as a result of an athlete who was taking a cocktail of drugs to enhance their performance."

One of the main arguments to be put forward by the BOA is that because its law was introduced back in 1992, it pre-dates the WADA Code.

Contact the writer of this story at [email protected]


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