By Steve Cram BBC Sport

The furore over Denise Lewis' involvement with Dr Ekkart Arbeit, the former head of the East German athletics team and a man linked to a state-sponsored programme of doping, is misjudged.

Lewis is aiming to make her come-back in June

There is a lot of hypocrisy kicking around. It is wrong to jump up and down about Denise when a lot of high-profile athletes, of all nationalities, are coached by people who have been banned for doping offences.

Denise has far too much intelligence to have someone like Arbeit even suggest that she should take an illegal substance.

I don't believe for one minute that she has gone to him on the basis that he has used drugs with athletes before.

Everyone loves to jump on the bandwagon and say, "Well, he once advocated drugs, now she's being coached by him..." and then make a quantum leap to saying it taints Denise.

It doesn't.

I'm not condoning what Arbeit has done in the past, and if it was me I probably wouldn't be coached by him.

But I can see why Denise wants to be.

We can only start criticising Denise, and others like her, if the coach in question has actually been banned.

We can have an opinion on whether she is well-advised to use a specific coach, but we cannot tell her not to.

That's what athletes do - they will choose to work with the coach that they think will help them the most. And unless that coach is banned, there's nothing anyone can do about it.

Lewis has not competed in a heptathlon since 2000

It's up to Denise and those around her to choose who they want to work with.

I felt the same when Tim Montgomery and Marion Jones were castigated for working with Ben Johnson's former coach, Charlie Francis.

You can think that it is ill-advised, but they are free to choose whoever they want.

Why? Because the sport has never addressed the issue of what to do with the coaches and doctors of athletes who test positive for drugs.

Arbeit never stood trial on doping charges because German law only allows for people administering drugs to be prosecuted. If he had, and been banned for life, that's different.

Why aren't the coaches and suppliers targeted more severely?

You can be sent to prison for dealing in steroids, but we never hear of it happening.

If athletics is really serious about preventing doping, it needs to get to get to the root of the problem by dealing with suppliers and coaches as well as the athletes.