ANYBODY bothering to listen to sport’s endless debate about performance-enhancing drugs will have heard some interesting suggestions over the past week or so. Bode Miller, a 27-year-old American ski champion, offered the opinion that the blood-boosting drug erythropoietin (EPO) should be allowed in sport.

Eddy Merckx, the five-time winner of the Tour de France, talked about redefining what constituted doping, “to see where it starts and finishes”. Have the authorities not already done this? “I support the war on drugs,” said Merckx, “but I’ll never back a zero-tolerance policy.”

Mario Pescante, an Italian member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), expressed fears that his country’s drug police would launch raids on the athletes’ village at next year’s Winter Olympics in Turin. Forget that the prospect of such raids might deter would-be cheats and that the actual raids might catch some, Pescante wasn’t in favour.

Linford Christie wonders aloud why he isn’t offered a place on London’s team for the organisation of the 2012 Olympics. He says the positive drug test for nandrolone, at a track meeting in Dortmund six years ago, was a mistake caused by the German laboratory that produced the finding. Wilhem Schanzer, the

head of the laboratory, has long insisted on the validity of that test result. Exonerated by British athletics, Christie was given a two-year ban by the world governing body, the IAAF.

If there is a common thread in all of this, it is the sense of entitlement. Listen to Miller’s rationalisation of the case for freely available EPO: “I’m surprised it’s illegal, because in our sport it would be pretty minimal health risks and it would actually make it safer for the athletes, because you’d have less chance of making a mistake at the bottom and killing yourself. You have to make four or five decisions every second in skiing, every turn. These are conscious decisions, plus there’s another hundred that are instinct. And when your brain starts to slow down, as if you’re holding your breath for two minutes, it makes it damn hard to make those decisions.”

What we have here is a plea to get off their case: skiers should have EPO; cyclists should be given some slack on what they can and can’t take; winter Olympians should not be subject to drug raids; and Christie should be an ambassador for London 2012. And can we, the public, not see that all this talk about doping is bad for business? Unless we’re vigilant, they will win. Perhaps they are already winning. The question, of course, is how we care. Do we remember Christie as an Olympic champion or as a disgraced former athlete? Everything is in the detail. Christie says he never used performance- enhancing drugs, even though he was deemed fortunate to escape an earlier sanction after testing positive for a stimulant at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. That, he claimed, was down to ginseng tea taken in Korea.

Christie’s 1999 positive was for one of the most commonly abused steroids in sport, nandrolone. To believe Christie, we must accept that IOC laboratories make very serious mistakes. If we accept his take on this test, we must also accept that the anti-doping movement is unreliable and therefore worthless. To do that would be wrong and dangerous. The weakness of drug testing is that it catches too few of those who break the rules rather than too many, and gives us false negatives rather than false positives. Only those athletes who test positive accuse the laboratories of unpro- fessional contact. Like their urine, their testimony is often tainted.

The fight must go on. Miller’s advocacy of EPO use should be ignored; so too Merckx’s plea for latitude and Pescante’s special exemption for winter Olympians. And Christie must still convince us that he deserves a place at the table for London 2012.