Doping Revealed- 43.6% of athletes are using drugs

If you were to take a stab at what percentage of elite athletes were doping, where would you put that figure?

Would you trust anti-doping tests that consistently return 1% to 2% of all samples as positive? Your answer is that one or two athletes per 100 are doping and you believe that anti-doping is catching all of them.

Or would you be on the cynical side, thinking that the 1% to 2% of positive drug tests are the tip of the iceberg? Maybe you think it's 20 out of 100? Higher?

What if you could ask the athletes themselves? Sure, they might lie, and so the figure you get this way would probably be an underestimate, but it would be a start towards establishing the true prevalence of doping.

Knowing this true prevalence is a really important but missing component of anti-doping, because how can you evaluate the success of anti-doping without knowing how often the "condition" (doping) occurs?

It would be like trying to treat a disease and measuring how well it works without knowing who has the disease.

A catch-22 situation or anti-doping, if ever there was one.

However, just last week scientists came as close as one can probably get to knowing the prevalence, at least back in 2011.

They used clever methods to guarantee anonymity and to try to tease apart who might be answering dishonestly and came up with a figure that is a shock to followers of the sport.

It's 43.6%. That's your number. The proportion of elite athletes at the 2011 World Athletics Championships who confessed to doping when asked.

The real figure is likely to be higher, as some athletes will deny doping or refuse to take the survey, even with assurances of anonymity or smart methods to detect dishonest replies.

For the record, 1,203 athletes completed the survey, while 87 refused. At the 2011 Pan-Arab Games the proportion was even higher - 57.1%.

What this means is that 44 out of 100 athletes had taken illegal drugs within 12 months of those championships. Now for context - 440 doping tests were done at those championships. Only two, or 0.5%, were positive. More charitably, in the whole of 2011 2% of all tests returned adverse (positive) findings.

So, that's the mismatch - 44 out of 100 athletes anonymously confess to doping, but only 0.5 to two out of 100 tests come back positive. Anti-doping thus scores two out of 44 or 4.5%. That's a best-case scenario, assuming all the athletes are tested, which they are not.

In reality many dopers are never even tested, so the effectiveness is even lower.

What this reveals is that anti-doping is not fit for purpose and that "show me proof of a positive test" is a meaningless fallback position.

You hear it often enough, though. Athletes say: "I never failed a test" and sports leaders often say: "We tested more athletes than ever at this year's championships and these are the cleanest ever."

What this study does is puncture, if not obliterate, that reliance on blood/urine testing as a means to establishing innocence. That foundation has now been revealed to be very shaky, indeed.

In response authorities have already argued that things have improved since 2011 - more sensitive testing, harsher punishments and so on. That may well be true, but only to a point.

In 2015, for instance, 30,308 samples were taken from athletes and only 0.9% were positive. Even if the actual prevalence is now 20 out of 100 instead of 44 (and that's being gloriously hopeful), they're still missing 19 out of 20 dopers.

So no, the reality is that anti-doping is not fit for purpose.