Jessica Hardy, the US swimmer, has been cleared to compete at the 2012 London Olympics if she makes the United States team next year, despite a doping ban in 2008.

The International Olympic Committee had declared her ineligible to compete in 2012 because of a rule that bars from the next Olympics any athlete who serves a doping ban of six months or more. 

Hardy tested positive for a banned drug, clenbuterol, in 2008, three days after that regulation was put in and shortly before the Beijing Olympics. She received a one-year suspension. The IOC said she could have never known about the new rule, according to  Howard Jacobs, her lawyer. 

That argument will be met with much scoffing around a swimming world: not knowing the rules never saved anyone before and if used as a defence by China in the 1990s would surely have let 40 and more athletes off the hook.

Regardless of the positive and negative way in which the news has been received around the swimming world, the ruling has wider implications on the score of fairness and on how the world regards positive doping tests.

Hardy claimed that the substance must have been in her system because she had taken a food supplement that contained something that it did not advertise on the tin. The dangers of taking any food supplements were highlighted to all US swimmers in a round-robin letter from then team director and head coach Mark Schubert. 

Hardy had her suspension reduced to six months in the US and lost her place on the US Olympic team. She was not, however, exonerated nor pardoned. Opinion is divided on her case, some believing that she was an innocent victim of circumstance and that she never intended to cheat, others believing that it matters little how the substance got there or whether she intended to cheat - the fact is that a banned substance was there and under the rules of responsibility that govern all athletes and what ends up in their bodies, it was right that Hardy should serve a suspension.

There is a serious case for arguing that many Chinese swimmers who tested positive never intended to cheat either, nor would many of them have even known that substances given to them by rogue coaches and doctors were banned substances. That argument in the 1990s would also stretch to Chinese athletes being largely unaware of the detail of anti-doping rules. 

You can read more about how the Hardy decision came about in this comment piece by Alan Abrahamson at 3 Wire Sports. Hardy told Abrahamson: "It’s really, really, really amazing. It was a long three years waiting around, hoping and training and preparing for the best. Now I can not wait for the future. It has been kind of hard. I have been emotionally fragile this whole time. To have a definite answer three years later is amazing. I am more excited than ever."

At a time of concern over the presence of clenbuterol in food in China as swimmers prepare to travel to Shanghai for the world championships in July, thoughts stray to the hall of shame and those who also protested their innocence but were shown no mercy. Recently, 24 Europeans, most cyclists, tested positive for clenbuterol after returning from China - and the source of the substance was said to be cooked food of the kind served widely in restaurants and hotels.

Here is the list of athletes who tested positive for clenbuterol and were suspended accordingly, all of them Chinese:

• Xiong Guomin tested positive for clenbuterol in an out-of-competition test on March 8, 1999. He and coach Xu Huigin were suspended, Xiong as a repeat offender.
• Wei Wang tested positive for clenbuterol in an out-of-competition testing on March 8, 1999. He was suspended for three years and coach Cheng Zhi for a year.
• Ying Shan tested positive for clenbuterol on January 31, 2002
• Jiawei Zhou tested positive for clenbuterol on January 31, 2002