Last Wednesday, the Houston Texans became just the latest club to hand Gatlin a helmet, a ball and a try-out. In a matter of months, his world had shifted that far off its axis.

Between the announcement of the Eagles' interest and his day with the Texans earlier this week, Gatlin went from being an Olympic champion who styled himself as the clean face of 21st century sprinting to one more disgraced and slightly deluded druggie. On April 22, he tested positive for synthetic testosterone at the Kansas Relays, and despite the obligatory profession of ignorance about how the substance ever got into his body, he subsequently received an eightyear ban from the sport. With few other high-paying jobs available for an exposed cheat, it was inevitable he would turn back towards the NFL. What was once a curious proposition has now become his professional lifeline.

"It's my understanding that he never played football before, but he can run really, really fast, " said Texans coach Gary Kubiak. "A lot of teams in the league have worked him out over the course of the past month. From general manager Rick Smith's perspective, he was very impressive. Nothing is going to happen right now.

But some of our kids who were over there watching him were amazed at how fast he ran. I don't even know if he was full speed at that time."

In a sport where the ability to run an explosive 40-yard dash is one of the more sought-after talents, it's not difficult to envisage Gatlin (right) becoming an attractive proposition for somebody.

During his day with the Texans, he reportedly ran the 40 in 4.1 seconds.

That would be faster than ever previously recorded but more cogently still, he also caught a 50-yard pass from the back-up quarterback. For somebody who gave up the game midway through high school following a dispute with a coach, proving he can marry a safe pair of hands to the breathtaking speed will be Gatlin's biggest challenge. Well, that and running with the threat of bodily violence hovering over his every step.

"For four plays a game, if you wanted to put him in there and just run a fly route, he might scare people, " said Gil Brandt, an NFL analyst, in an interview with the New York Times. "Even if it wasn't him catching the ball, his presence might make something else happen good for you."

At least he won't have to cope with the stigma of his embarrassing exit from athletics. As with most other professional codes in America, the NFL has a breezy approach towards steroids. This is a league where a first positive test merits a mere four-game ban and barely a footnote in the sports pages. Worse again is the attitude of fans, players and management to such transgressions. To them, somebody missing a few games for a drug offence is no bigger a deal than a guy having to sit with a sprained ankle. Every Sunday each squad's unavailable players are listed with their specific injury in brackets after their names. In this way, steroids are bizarrely in the same bracket as knee ligaments or broken fingers.

Having Nehemiah as his agent should also work in Gatlin's favour. The fastest 110m hurdler in the world between 1978 and 1981, Nehemiah was denied a chance of an Olympic medal by the US boycott of the Moscow Games and soon after that, he turned his attention to the NFL. Despite winning a Super Bowl with the San Francisco 49ers, he was never highly-regarded and eventually returned to the track. Farther back, Bob Hayes, another former Olympic 100m champion, made the transformation with much more of a flourish, turning from an elite sprinter to a wide receiver extraordinaire with the Dallas Cowboys back in the 1960s.

"People constantly refer to Bob Hayes, Willie Gault and Renaldo Nehemiah, who all played football from the time they were kids at least until high school, " wrote Michael Johnson a couple of years ago. "However, and perhaps more importantly, there haven't been any athletes successfully making the switch from athletics to football since Nehemiah. That's because the game has changed in recent years. It is no longer just about speed. American football is a complicated sport that takes an incredible amount of experience."

Johnson was commenting on the chances of British sprinter Dwain Chambers, another drug offender, successfully making the switch to NFL Europe.

Having originally given up on that dream, Chambers participated in another NFL camp in Cologne earlier this month.

Some in British athletics speculated his presence there was motivated by money.

Why wouldn't it be? Vying for the title of fastest man on the planet can be lucrative but the earnings pale next to those of the best wide receivers in the NFL.

Earlier this year, Terrell Owens inked a seven-year $49m deal with the Dallas Cowboys. No amount of high-profile showdowns with Asafa Powell were ever going to yield that sort of cash for Gatlin.