1923 Tour de France winner Henri Pélissier was rather frank about the life of a pro-cyclist when interviewed by journalist Albert Londres the following year. Opening up his bag, he pulled out a variety of supplements; this is cocaine for our eyes, he explained, chloroform for our gums, liniment for our joints. “At night, in our rooms, we can’t sleep. We twitch and dance and jig about as though we were doing St. Vitus’ dance.”

A national anti-doping law came into effect in 1965, too late to prevent Knud Enemark Jensen’s death from amphetamines and Ronicol in 1960, and too ineffective to save Tom Simpson from dying on the slopes of Mont Ventoux from amphetamines and alcohol in 1967.

Rather than disappearing from professional sport, doping simply went underground. Its ugly spectre still stalks sport today. In the 1980s the use of steroids turned the world of athletics upside down when 1988 Olympic champion and world record holder Ben Johnson tested positive in Seoul. He later admitted to systematic steroid abuse stretching back to 1981. In the 1990s the spotlight turned once again on cycling after the Festina affair, a French police seizure of cartloads of blood-boosters hoarded by the most popular cycling team in France. In the wake of the Lance Armstrong crisis, and that of the Russian athletics team, cycling and athletics seem to be in constant competition in an attempt to occupy the centre of sport’s chemically induced dark side.

The questions asked in the 1980s and 1990s don’t seem to have changed either: how to prevent doping; how to treat former dopers; how to tackle the history of a tarnished sport. So far, definitive answers are still conspicuous in their absence.

Arguments on whether to legalise doping have diminished in recent years; the focus has now shifted onto providing lengthier bans. Two year bans are now the norm for cycling, and in athletics second doping violations will now guarantee bans exceeding four years. Moral campaigns against dopers, most notably against Justin Gatlin during the latest World Championships in Beijing, can hit endorsements and sponsorships.

Lengthy bans are, however, almost never the answer. It certainly hasn’t hampered the recent proliferation of doping abuses in Russia. The answer is far more likely to be found in increased testing. Cyclists are now forced to report their movements to the World Anti-Doping Authorities (WADA) so they can be tested throughout the year, including at five in the morning during an off-season holiday in the Bahamas. Three missed tests now constitutes a major doping violation and the maximum first-time ban of two years from all competitions. Doping tests are no longer centred on major sporting events, but spread to incorporate the lengthy months of training as well.

Yet however much effort is made, no sport can ever be entirely free from the shadow of dopers. How is one to tackle repentant dopers? Just as in real life, once a criminal has served his sentence, he is eligible to return and be reintroduced into society (or his sport). Will he become a leading figure for a concerted anti-doping crusade, or will he relapse into being a dark blot on the sport? Recently, two Italian cyclists tested positive for EPO (erythropoietin). Matteo Rabottini, whose career had been gently sliding into obscurity, recently told La Gazzetta dello Sport that, following his positive test, his wife and children had left him, he was near financial ruin, and even his parents now refuse to talk to him. The offers of support and sympathy seemed only natural for an athlete who was openly repenting an inexcusable moment of recklessness which had destroyed his entire life. Yet the same support was offered to Mauro Santambrogio, who was on the brink of suicide after receiving his ban. But having been brought back from the brink into the cycling fold, he then tested positive for testosterone.

And what about those athletes who receive bans for accidental use of ordinary, over-the-counter medications, inexplicably banned in their professions? What about those athletes who knowingly doped for years but receive heavily-reduced bans for ratting out their fellow sinners? The idea that the anti-doping authorities will eventually find the holy-grail of a fair, secure method for prosecuting the guilty and saving the innocent is ludicrous. There is no magic formula.

For some desperate souls who gave up promising desk-jobs to follow their dreams, who were perhaps held back from the brink of success by an untimely injury, who have a family to feed and a contract to fulfil, the reward will always overcome the risk. Moreover, as doping controls become more sophisticated, so stimulants become cheaper, easier to buy, and harder to detect.

So what am I saying? Should we just admit doping will remain, indulge in fatalism, and give up what seems to be forever a lost cause? Of course not (however much despairing existentialism appeals to Cambridge students). But what all sport must do is what any good therapist would immediately say to the alcoholic, the drug-addict, the criminal; to tackle a problem, one must first admit that there is one.

It took cycling the best part of two decades of slander and ridicule to crack down on the doping epidemic. If the road to redemption seems, even now, rather a long and treacherous one, then at least the journey has started. Cycling has the most drugs tests per head, the most off-season testing of any sport, one of the most stringent lists of banned articles, and a well-regulated, organised, anti-doping body. The last few years have also seen a drastic reduction in international doping cases, while cycling has the only voluntary (additional) anti-doping organisation, the MPCC (Mouvement pour un Cyclisme Crédible), which provides even harsher sanctions (including minimum four year bans).

Now athletics too is starting to realise the extent of its doping problem. It is no longer a case of a few ‘bad apples’ or individual perpetrators; doping is institutional and endemic, and it needs to be tackled as such. Doping in Russia is just one hole in a sport riddled like Swiss cheese. Now is the time to wake up and smell the toast burning, and to act across the sport. The road towards a cleaner sport will prove difficult, especially initially. The skeletons will quickly come falling out of the closet. But it is a step which the sport must take.

But you, dear reader, probably remain largely ambivalent. I like football and tennis, you say; doping is the problem of other sports. Positive tests here are few and far between. Football, for all its faults, is a clean sport.

Football, and tennis, rugby, cricket or golf, bask only in complacency because of their inherent immaturity. To convincingly believe that the most lucrative and popular sport in the world would fail to abuse stimulants which would give marked advantages to any team is wishful thinking. West Germany’s 1954 World Cup winning team have recently been revealed to have doped systemically. Players on Helenio Herrera’s infamous, and widely successful, Inter Milan of the 1960s have told of taking all manner of unidentified pills with their coffee in the morning before matches. Bayern Munich’s long-standing fitness coach, Hans-Wilhelm Muller-Wohlfarth, attempted to use a concoction of stimulants with calf’s blood to cure Frank Ribery of a recurring knee injury two years ago.

More worrying is the general lack of high-profile doping cases within tennis. On the one hand, this is simply because so many drugs are allowed here which are banned in track and field events. Andy Murray regularly goes on the drip to recover from tennis matches, a transgression for which Mo Farah would pick up a two-year ban. Testing is still woefully inadequate. Out-of-season checks are absent; it means players can use stimulants to artificially build up muscle power during the off-season; by the time the matches start, the drugs will have left their system, but their benefits will remain.

How much doping exists within sports like football is, of course, unknown. A lack of positive tests says nothing when the sport lacks doping tests in general. Yet the problem is resurfacing, with a vengeance, for athletics. Records will be overturned, former stars will descend into infamy; the sport may take years to recover its support and its credibility. Only time can tell whether football and tennis, will, at some point, feel its full force. When the time does come, they must do what athletics must do now, and face the doping problem head on. Perhaps, finally, cycling will no longer be a doping scapegoat, but will become an example of anti-doping.