Well, now you're actually gathering evidence which is fine. The only thing I (and Owen I think) we 're saying is that your initial opinion was not backed up by evidence. I certainly have no dog in the fight of whether Bolt cheats or not...except I do like to see him run.

It's not going to be possible to prove Bolt is a doper without him failing a test. As such anything I say can be dismissed as speculation if you're minded to see it that way. I do think the whole 'that's just guilt by association' argument is daft though. All I'm doing is applying some pretty straightforward logic. We know that Marion Jones, Maurice Greene, FloJo and (I think) Carl Lewis all went through their whole careers without ever failing a drugs test. We also know that they were all doped up to the eyeballs the whole time. As such we can already say that the absence of a positive test is no great evidence of an athlete being clean when placed in the context of extraordinary performances. And Bolt's performances were extraordinary by any measure. He obliterated the world records in the 100 and 200, the former being a distance that he'd only begun racing in about a year or so before the Olympics. Another thing we know for a fact is that every single athlete who has ever run faster than 9.8 in the 100m is a proven doper except Bolt, who ran 9.58. To me the logical position is to assume that anybody capable of smashing times achieved only by dopers is very likely to be a doper himself.

My wider point is that I firmly believe most elite level athletes are doping. We have our heads in the sand on this issue because most of us don't want to know the truth.

I am in no way a supporter of win at any cost and I support doing our best to do away with drugs in sport. That being said, I also sympathize with the odd situation where the best thing for an injured player is a drug that is banned. American football players get more banged up than most of not all the others. I know they are under constant scrutiny and can't take steroids even though steroid treatment may be the standard therapy for many of their ailments. That forces them to use less than adequate drugs and/or be forced to cheat the system.

That said, I don't know how or if this could be fixed, make an exception and suddenly everyone is part of the exception and a minor steroid for ones knee is a way around taking steroids to simply bulk up!? It sucks all around for them, but at least they get paid a crap-load of money to have such "problems"?

There's already a system of 'therapeutic use exemptions' that you can apply for in these situations. Needless to say this is widely abused. It's amazing how many top class distance runners are supposedly asthmatic. This is because the drugs they give you for asthma are performance enhancing. Likewise it seems with all these athletes now getting caught for using Meldonium, a drug intended for people with serious heart conditions. You'd think that a serious heart condition would pretty much rule out a career in elite level sports, but that didn't stop 17% of all Russian athletes testing positive for the drug back when it was still legal, and it hasn't prevented close to 100 positive tests happening this year already across various sports.

Not so in the NFL, at least for steroids, they allow zero steroids for any reason. I sympathize but also understand if you allow it, it WILL be abused. I gotta think there has to be a way around this? But I can't think of one off the top of my head.

There isn't one.

I hope you don't think that NFL players are not using steroids btw. It's comparatively simple to get away with if you're able to pay for the right designer drugs and you're careful in how you manage your glow time. With the amount of money involved in NFL it would be incredibly naive to suppose that drug abuse isn't rampant in the sport. When you think that a 3rd string offensive tackle probably earns more money in a year than 90% of pro cyclists do then you can see the attraction, and testing is vastly more advanced in cycling.