Thanks bix.

It's hard to argue with the 'everyone is using gear' cynics. Sport is such a broad church and different federations have different rules, face different threats and have different resources to combat them.

Can I honestly say 'such and such sport is clean' or 'so and so athlete is clean'. No I can't, just as idle, uninformed speculation about Mo Farah based on his eyes (for Christ sakes) is no proff that he's using gear.

All you can do is understand the rigours of the testing process for certain sports, the peer group pressure there is NOT to cheat (and one thing team sports could do would be to disqualify the entire team if one player is found to be using gear) and I would have said the commercial imperative of key sponsors wishing to be associated with clean sports / athletes, until you look at the Nike / Gatlin deal, which beggars belief.

That's before you get onto the moral issue of what do we play sport for as a society?

So what do you do?

Change the toleration levels of tests and run the risk of excluding hitherto clean athletes? Or stay as we are and effectively accommodate the 'microdosers' pushing at the margins of testing acceptability?

It's not an easy one to answer.

Drugs cheating is different to other forms of cheating in that messing with your chemical blueprint, as an athlete, it can get you killed (see Tommy Simpson, Lyle Alzado and many others) and that is no template to hold up to a kid playing Little League sport or turning out for his local under 11's. Yes drugs testing is imperfect (you could start by levying a tithe on all sports based on their federations annual income, to go to the funding of WADA) and the punishments are laughable but that's no reason to stop trying in my opinion.

Well, the authorities patently do expose cheats when they catch them - it's that fact that, I would suggest, leads to the 'well if Lance Armstrong is at it (i.e has been caught and exposed) then they all are' Catch-22 scenario.

Re Alzado, I don't suppose you would ever get cast iron proof that 'action a led to consequence y'. Roy Castle thought his lung cancer was caused by years of passive smoking in working mens clubs, but maybe he had a genetic predisposition anyway - who knows?

Can we agree that mega-doses of drugs, beyond what is prescribed even by underground pharmacists, cannot be good for one's long term health?

As I understand it, Carl Lewis tested positive, but in those days before strict liability was introduced it was allowed to plead mitigating circumstances. However, if the same case arose today, he would not have tested positive in the first place, as the threshold for those substances is higher.

Either way, he got off. The real scandal was indeed that the positive test and outcome was not made public at the time.

There is a book called "The Dirtiest Race in History" which is a good read if you're genuinely interested in this stuff. It centres around the 1988 Olympic 100m, but covers many other aspects of the Johnson/Lewis rivalry, commercialism of the sport and, of course, the whole doping culture. It's available as an e-book and quite cheap.

flo jo was as clean as anyone whoever raced. Otherwise you're just a speculating gossip monger Omerta is the word

The point made before about people not getting caught by testing is very valid. It's for this reason that some athletes who get caught now are given much lighter bans if they are prepared to spill the beans and name names. I think Tyson Gay was an example of this (apologies if I'm wrong).

I read somewhere a while back that catching people by intelligence methods is seen as more effective than testing. Sad, but that's how it is.