Most of us have a clear image of the doper. Calculating. Cynical. Willing to cheat for personal gain. It is a comfortable image because it keeps the moral lines clean. But the more you dig into the actual stories behind the headlines, the less comfortable that picture becomes.

James Witts has been writing about endurance sport for over two decades. His new book, Dope, examines the current state of performance-enhancing drugs in sport, how athletes sidestep testing, how the authorities respond, and who is really winning that battle. What struck me most from our conversation was not the scandal or the science. It was how consistently the same human vulnerabilities keep showing up at the centre of every story.

You can listen to the full podcast with James HERE: What if nobody's actually clean?​

It is rarely just about winning

Colin Chartier is an Ironman triathlete who tested positive for EPO and subsequently spoke openly about his experience. James interviewed him at length. What emerged was not the portrait of a calculating cheat. It was someone who had tied his entire identity to performance, who never felt good enough despite genuine success, who was running towards the next finish line rather than celebrating what he had already achieved.

James describes the same pattern appearing in multiple athletes across multiple sports. The pressure is not always external. Often it comes from inside, a relentless drive that endurance sport both attracts and amplifies. When that drive collides with opportunity, the line between legal and illegal can start to feel less fixed than it should.

There is also real economic pressure at the professional level that most spectators never see. A journeyman pro athlete might scrape together the money for a flight, share a hotel room, and know that a top-five finish is the difference between paying the mortgage or not. When someone offers a shortcut in that environment, the moral calculation is not as simple as it looks from the outside.

The grey areas nobody talks about

One of the more uncomfortable threads running through the book is the role of therapeutic use exemptions, or TUEs. These are certificates that allow athletes to use otherwise prohibited substances for legitimate medical reasons. The system exists for good reason. It also gets abused.

James points to the way certain teams have historically operated right up to the edge of what is permissible, treating the rules less as a boundary and more as a starting point for negotiation. As he puts it, competitive edge in elite sport has always meant pushing boundaries. You just hope it stays on the legal side.

For recreational athletes, the picture is different but no less concerning. A study at Ironman Frankfurt found that roughly one in seven age groupers surveyed admitted to using some form of prohibited substance in the previous year. The motivation in those cases is rarely financial. It is ego, identity, the desire to qualify for Kona or simply to be faster than the person next to them on the start line. The same human drivers, scaled down to amateur sport.

The cat and mouse problem

Testing is more sophisticated than it has ever been. The biological passport, which tracks indirect markers in an athlete's blood over time, has made it harder to use blood-boosting drugs like EPO without detection. But the anti-doping authorities are always, to some degree, reacting rather than leading.

Micro-dosing makes substances harder to detect. Training camps in remote locations reduce the likelihood of out-of-competition testing. Blood transfusions using an athlete's own blood remain difficult to prove. And emerging threats, including novel drugs developed through AI-assisted pharmaceutical research and selective androgen receptor modulators abandoned mid-development because of health risks, are already on the radar of anti-doping scientists who acknowledge they are not yet equipped to catch them.

The honest answer to who is winning the battle between dopers and testers is that it depends on the day.

What this looks like in the real world

James's central argument is not that doping should be excused. It is that the conversation around it is too simple. When an athlete tests positive and the media moves on within a news cycle, the underlying pressures that led to that moment remain entirely unexamined. The athlete carries the consequences. The system that produced them carries none.

That matters for anyone who coaches, mentors or works alongside serious endurance athletes. The drive that makes someone capable of training twenty hours a week is the same drive that makes them vulnerable to this kind of pressure. Understanding that is not about making excuses. It is about seeing the full picture.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Doping in sport is driven as much by identity, imposter syndrome and economic pressure as by the desire to win. The headlines rarely tell the full story.
• Therapeutic use exemptions and the grey areas around legal supplementation create a slippery slope that affects amateur athletes as much as professionals. Around one in seven age groupers surveyed at a major Ironman event admitted to using a prohibited substance.
• Anti-doping science is advancing, but novel drugs, micro-dosing and AI-assisted pharmaceutical development mean the testers are always playing catch-up. The battle is ongoing and far from resolved.

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