Hardly a day in the sporting calendar seems to go by without a fresh drugs scandal hitting the headlines, and it is no longer just confined to the usual suspects in cycling and athletics. Whether it’s steroids, recreational drug use, or mistakenly taking your wife’s slimming pills (as claimed by footballer Kolo Toure), there are plenty of pitfalls for professional sports stars as tests become more and more stringent. The International Cycling Union even admitted to compiling a secret ‘doping risk’ profile of last year’s Tour de France competitors.

Yet while there are only a few voices arguing for a relaxation of attitudes towards straightforward doping, the debate is more strained when it comes to other means of enhancing performance. For some, the expectation that professional athletes must dedicate themselves to the pursuit of excellence is undermined when increasingly arbitrary classifications are made as to what constitutes cheating. It seems counterintuitive, for instance, to ban one competitor for taking an over-the-counter supplement with negligible benefits and allow another to use the latest top-of-the-range, expensively-developed swimsuit or high-tech racing bike. With the development of physical conditioning and even the possibility of bionic enhancement – as heralded by the disqualification of prosthetic-limbed runner Oscar Pistorious from the 2008 Olympics – the lines look set to become increasingly blurred.

Where do we draw the line between ‘fair’ enhancement and cheating? If sport is about achieving excellence by pushing the limits of the human body as far as it can go, is it really undermined by the use of drugs and other enhancements? Should we be seeking to uphold at least some of the amateur ethos of sportsmanship and fair play in a professional era? Or is artificial enhancement a natural progression from intensive training, carefully-designed diets and the other gains of sports science?