“You can’t get muscles like that naturally,” said the weightlifter, who was a steroid expert.

The Tour De France finished on Monday morning. Chris Froome won this epic, gruelling race for the third time. Some people won’t watch this event, given its history of doping and the Lance Armstrong case. 

Remember American sprinter Florence Griffith Joyner (Flo-Jo), who won three gold medals at the 1988 Olympics. When she died at age 38, some blamed “natural causes”. But did anyone believe that?

There was the famous case of 100-metre sprinter Ben Johnson, who was stripped of his gold medal at the Seoul Olympics in 1988, after testing positive for anabolic steroids. It was described as the “biggest drug story in Olympic history”.

I still remember the thrill of watching Johnson win the race and the subsequent shock that he’d scammed us all. It later turned out that six of the eight finalists of that 100-metre race were implicated in drug scandals at some point in their careers, including Carl Lewis and Linford Christie. It became known as “the world's dirtiest race”.

In a recent Four Corners documentary, doubt was cast over whether 100-metre Jamaican sprinter and world record holder Usain Bolt was clean. Jamaica’s drug-testing regime, it was claimed, wasn’t exactly thorough. Bolt denies doping.

With the Olympics to be staged next month in Rio, drugs in sport are back under the spotlight.

The Four Corners report focused on runner Yuliya Stepanova blowing the whistle on systematic, state-sanctioned doping in Russia. It was reported on Monday that Russian athletes will be allowed to compete in Rio, having escaped a blanket ban.

That is, except for the country’s track and field athletes, who have already been banned from the event.

While rugby league and AFL were caught in the peptides scandal in Australia in recent years, other sports like football (soccer) seem to evade large-scale doping scandals. 

"We have always had trouble attracting FIFA to the problem,” Dick Pound, the founding president of the World Anti-Doping Agency, said last month. 

Mind you, there was the famous case of Diego Maradona being kicked out of the 1994 World Cup for testing positive for the stimulant ephedrine.

I have noticed that English Premier League players appear stronger and more powerful these days. Has the competition’s increasing global appeal and profitability simply attracted better athletes? Or is there more to it?

Speaking about drugs in football in 2013, former Leeds and England defender Danny Mills (who did not take banned drugs) said: “The game now is of such high intensity that you have to be able to compete as a top athlete at the highest level, so you’ll do almost anything”. 

We want to believe sport to be a noble, wholesome and honourable pursuit. We want to believe sport can transcend the troubles of other human activities. But this, of course, is irrational.

At the elite level, sport is about winning at any cost. Players, coaches and doctors are paid to win. Sport is as much about profit, power and greed, as it is about notions of good sportsmanship and goodwill.

Fraud and corruption occurs in all sectors of society. Sadly, sport is no exception.