On the one side stand those who regard Dan Sadler as a low cheat – “a morally questionable pot-hunter,” as one insider put it, comparing his actions with those of someone “caught stealing the blind box from a doctor’s surgery”. Dark allusions are made to the mainstream athletes who pretended to be mentally handicapped to win gold medals for Spain in the Paralympics in Sydney two years ago.On the other side are many of the disabled athletes themselves, who feel that having an able-bodied rival offers a tacit recognition that theirs is a proper sport and not, as one put it, some “consolation activity for sad people”.Dan Sadler’s interest in wheelchair racing began when he was 12. His father, who had been disabled when he fell out of a tree at a similar age, had taken up the sport. “I used to go out with him in the evenings a couple of times a week and at the weekend,” Dan said as we inspected his £3,000 racing wheelchair at his home in Chessington, Surrey, earlier this week.

“Initially it was just a way for me to spend time with my dad. There had always been wheelchairs lying round the house and as a boy I used them as toys. It seemed natural to have a go in one of the racing chairs at the club my father founded at the Kings Meadow track near New Malden.”He found he enjoyed it and began to join in the races. “My first chair was what we called a bucket brommie, which was essentially just a fibreglass bucket with a wheel at each corner,” the slight blond-haired 24-year-old recalled. “But when I was 15 someone let me have a go in their three-wheel chair imported from the States. That first time I used it was the first time I ever beat my dad.” In 1995 he left school and got a job working 30 hours a week in a supermarket to allow him maximum time to train.

Next year he did a full 12-race British road-racing championship season, and came third overall. In 1997 he entered the London Marathon and finished just five minutes behind the leader. “But then one day some guy I’d beaten went to the local press and it all started…”The controversy has split the wheelchair world. The International Paralympic Committee (IPC) has banned him from all its races. By contrast, the BWRA, which regulates the sport in the UK, is backing him.