Three years ago I spoke to Dr Bengt Kayser, a sports scientist based in Switzerland, about anti-doping efforts. The very long and public fall of Lance Armstrong was in full swing.
Kayser has long been a prominent and jarring voice in the debate on doping. By arguing against conventional thought, he is the one who actually turns this into a debate of any kind.
Kayser came to mind this weekend, after revelations from the UK's Sunday Times newspaper and German broadcaster ARD/WDR. They gained access to a database of more than 12,000 blood tests from 5,000 athletes conducted between 2001 and 2012 by the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF).
The findings look explosive. Using two leading anti-doping experts, the investigations found that a third of all medals in endurance events at the Olympics and world championships were won by athletes who recorded suspicious tests.
More than 800 athletes – about 16 per cent of the sample – had blood tests that one of the experts said was “highly suggestive of doping or at the very least abnormal”.
The IAAF World Championships, set to begin in Beijing on August 22, is therefore a party that already stands well and truly pooped. The reports do not say athletes failed dope tests, just that findings are abnormal. Yet the conclusion that doping is the natural state of being in athletics rather than just a problematic condition is unavoidable.
It would be insane, then, to assume that the degree of doping on the circuit outside these two events does not match, or outright exceed, it.
It is precisely on such exposes that Kayser’s beliefs, that the fight against doping is flawed at scientific and moral levels, find traction. He is not a popular man in anti-doping circles, especially because of his belief that cleansing sport completely of doping is a utopian dream: a zero-tolerance policy is not only delusional but regressive.
Given the scale of these revelations, perhaps there is a logic, ugly as it may appear, in his stances. Former anti-doping chief John Fahey has also conceded it to be a fight that may never be won.
Who would have thought, after all, that even Alberto Salazar would be accused of aiding and abetting his athletes to use performance-enhancing drugs? The great Salazar, an unforgettable protagonist in one of the greatest races of all time, the 1982 Boston Marathon.
These are the rumblings of a world we refuse to accept exists, a world at which, when it peeps through, we feign shock.
In this world, doping methods have been evolving far quicker than anti-doping processes. That has been the unarguable pattern of doping since it became an issue in sports in the 1960s.
We may be better off tackling it with the pragmatism that Kayser proposes. Maybe athletics need not go as far as Nature, the science journal, proposed in 2007: "To be sure, a change in the rules (to allow doping) would lead to the claim that 'the cheats have won'. But as no one can convincingly claim that cheats are not winning now, or have not been winning in the past, that claim is not quite the showstopper it might seem to be."
But why not begin by rationalising the prohibited substances list, which critics argue contain elements for which there is no evidence that they enhance performance? Some drugs, it has been argued, should not even be on the list.
One of the experts used by the Sunday Times also revealed that some test readings were so extreme they posed a threat to the athlete. This realises one of Kayser's fears, that athletes put their lives at risk by doping surreptitiously, with products of uncertain origins, in potentially unsafe circumstances.
If there was an acknowledgement that doping is impossible to eradicate and a degree of permissiveness was allowed for performance-enhancers, it may reduce risks such as these.
This line of thinking will not be to many tastes. But what happens, as Kayser asks, when we reach the limits of human performance, when the 100 metres record, for instance, cannot be lowered further by natural effort?
Then, in 50 years, with more research behind us, we could be compelled to look at the idea of doping directly opposite from where we do now.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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