Fight goes on for our Sydney outcast

David Bond, Deputy Political Editor @djbond6873

13 April 2012

While Sir Steve Redgrave and the rest of Britain's Olympic heroes were celebrating their latest medal haul in the New Year's Honours List, one member of the Sydney team was doing her best to avoid the media coverage.

Debbie Allan, the 1999 European Champion and one of our brightest hopes for a medal before the Games, can't even bring herself to look at a judo mat three months after her quest for gold was brought to an abrupt end in extraordinary circumstances.

Allan was the villain of the Sydney show, buried in an avalanche of good news stories as our athletes produced their best performance for 80 years.

The featherweight fighter was disqualified by Olympic officials for failing to make the weight in her event, the under-52kg category, amid allegations of foul play.

Allan, 25, a member of the Camberley Judo Club in Surrey, claimed the competition scales had been tampered with after she found tissue paper had been stuffed inside them to distort the readings.

Her appeals fell on deaf ears, however, as she made a last desperate attempt to make the weight by cutting off all her hair and spending half an hour in a sweat suit. She was forced out of the Olympics in the end for being over the required weight by just 50 grams - the weight of a bar of chocolate. She fled the Olympic village immediately and spent the rest of the Games in an apartment with friends who had travelled to Australia in the hope of seeing her Games end on the winners' rostrum, not in tears on a set of scales.

Allan was the first British fighter to fail to reach the required weight since judo was included in the Olympic programme in 1964 and since then she has been banned from competition by the British Judo Association for six months.

After a miserable 2000 she is now waiting to see whether the New Year will bring her some good news. She appealed against her punishment on 19 December and is waiting to find out if her case has been successful.

Allan told Standard Sport: "I don't know when I'll fight again, to be honest, I am just waiting to find out whether my appeal has been successful. If all goes well I might be able to come back in March.

"I'm keeping fit but I'm not training properly as I can't fight in competition. If I get the ban lifted I will be back because I've got a lot to prove to myself and to other people.

"I just want to put this whole episode behind me because it's been an awful time." Her coach at Camberley, Mark Earle, resigned from his position as coach to the British men's team in October, partly because of what happened to Allan. He has personally supervised her career and was in charge of her final preparations in Sydney.

He says she is still devastated by what happened and can't watch anything which brings back the painful memories.

"She just wants it all to go away, he said. "It was terrible for her and she is still completely devastated by what happened. It's been a real ordeal for all of us.

"She is not training with me at the moment and as far as I'm concerned she doesn't even want to look at a judo mat.

"I wouldn't say she feels let down by the sport, I just don't think she can believe it happened. She brought the tissue paper in the scales to the officials' attention on the morning of the competition and proved they weren't weighing accurately and yet she still ended up as the victim in all of this.

"She tries to avoid anything to do with the Olympics which is why, hopefully, she won't have been too badly affected by seeing so many people from Sydney get honours this weekend.

"For Debbie it's not about not being one of the stars of Sydney, it's the feeling of not competing. She's a fighter and she wants to compete.

"But at the moment all we can do is wait and see what has happened with her appeal. Until then none of us can move on."

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