LONDON (Reuters) - London 2012 Olympic organising committee chairman Sebastian Coe defended on Thursday the right of the British Olympic Association (BOA) to impose a lifetime Olympic ban on sprinter Dwain Chambers.

The former European 100 metres champion, who has served a two-year drugs ban, filed papers in a London court earlier in the day seeking to overturn the ban. Chambers wants to compete in next month's Beijing Games after comfortably running a qualifying time.

"I actually genuinely think that a governing body of a sport, or a sports organisation, has to do whatever it thinks is necessary to maintain the integrity of the sport," the twice Olympic 1,500 metres champion told reporters.

"And I don't think that should be challenged. The sadness of it is that we are going to be inevitably in a six-week period of stuff that we shouldn't be. We can't ignore it."

A statement from Chambers said the lifetime ban imposed by the British Olympic Association ban was unforceable.

"I've heard for far too many years the initial response that the primary concern is for the athlete," Coe responded.

"Actually it's not. The primary concern is the well-being of the sport. If you don't do that, the athletes can go home. We're protecting 99 percent of athletes who chose to do this (athletics) for the right reasons.

EXPUNGE RECORDS

Earlier Coe, who is also a vice-president of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) helped launch a new athletics Web site (http://www.spikesmag.com), jointly funded by the IAAF and UK Athletics.

The Web site and an accompanying magazine reignited an old debate by raising the possibility of expunging all current world records from the books and starting again.

In 1999 the IAAF congress rejected a proposal from German council member Helmut Diegel calling for all world records to be scrubbed at the end of the century because of widespread suspicions that many were drug aided.

IAAF spokesman Nick Davies said the majority of people in the sport, starting with the world governing body's president Lamine Diack, opposed the suggestion.

"The IAAF has always erased dodgy records," he said. "Marion Jones, where is she now in the record books? She's gone, she's disappeared.

"So the IAAF position is when something happens, where there is proof there's a due process, we have no scruples again, they will be gone. They will be stripped away, no problem."

American Jones, a triple sprint champion at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, was stripped of all her medals and marks set since the beginning of the Games after confessing to using banned drugs.

(Editing by Miles Evans)