If the Beijing Olympics cannot deliver a 100 metres race with a clean champion, the head of the global agency fighting drugs in sport has said, the message to young athletes around the world will be: “Fill yourselves up with a mouthful of pills if you want to succeed.” On the eve of the Games, these comments from John Fahey, president of the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada), were an unusually frank assessment of the state of play in the war on doping.

“The suspicion is out there. The public does not have the confidence it once had,” he said. “Does that mean we cannot restore the very essence of the fair play concept? We must. The public will desert any sport in time if it’s not satisfied with its integrity.”

While Fahey said that Wada was smarter in the way it targeted athletes for drugs tests, if the suspicion is to be removed it would help if the agency had greater powers of intervention. But it was revealed yesterday that, with the drugs-testing laboratory here run largely by Chinese technicians, Wada can only submit an observer’s report at the end of the Games, and if it suspects foul play, it cannot act.

Professor David Cowan, who runs the Wada-accredited laboratory in King’s College, London, is one of the ten laboratory heads who have gathered to work here and he is confident that results cannot be tampered with. “I am very comfortable that they have got a very fair system,” he said.

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That does not mean that Cowan predicts a clean Games. “Jacques Rogge gave an interview saying we expect up to 40 positive tests at these Games,” he said. “I agree. We will have a busy few weeks. We will get a number who have been foolish. But we will catch one or two of the more sophisticated dopes as well.”