There is nothing quite like the hush that descends over a stadium when eight men are limbering up to do battle for the mythic title “fastest man on Earth”. I was in the athletes' stand at the Montjuic stadium in Barcelona in 1992 as Linford Christie stood behind his blocks, unblinking, unmoving, reducing the world, as one sports writer wrote, into “a tunnel 100 metres long, one Linford wide”.

It was over in an instant. Christie soared through the line amid an explosion of flashbulbs, arms aloft, revelling in the frenzied embrace of more than 60,000 spectators. But something odd was happening all around me. No applause, no acclaim, just huddled conversations among the athletes. And then the words that I will always associate with the Olympic Games emerged from an athlete in the seat behind: “I wonder what he was on?”

Those of us who have competed in the Olympics - stayed in the Village, witnessed the clandestine conversations, metabolised the cynicism - have little inclination to argue the toss about the prevalence of drug taking. Is it a majority of athletes or merely a quarter? It is sufficient for a clean sportsman to know, as he lines up for the most important day of his life, that at least one other person alongside him is doped.

Seven years after his triumph in Barcelona Christie tested positive for nandrolone, an anabolic steroid. Yesterday Dwain Chambers, Christie's successor as British sprint king, was unsuccessful in his attempt to overturn a lifetime Olympic ban in the High Court. Chambers has admitted taking THG, a designer steroid, plus six further banned substances.

Many have talked as if the long-awaited decision on Chambers represents the end of the doping debate, but it is nothing of the kind. Even with the ban upheld, the cheats will continue to shoot steroids, the testers will continue to chase shadows and the clean will continue to get victimised. All of which raises an important question - is it not time for sport to consider a radical new course? Is it not time to give the honest a fighting chance?

One way to eliminate drug cheating, of course, would be to legalise drug taking, but this would be to trade the devil for the deep blue sea. Success would be determined not by talent but by a willingness to trade future life expectancy for present glory. The dangers of doping were revealed at the trials of sports doctors in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall - athletes suffered from complications ranging from cancer to ovarian cysts. Do we really want a world strewn with the corpses of recently retired sportspeople?

But there is a middle road. As the ethicist Julian Savulescu has argued, instead of legalising all enhancers, why not legalise safe ones? Take endurance sports, where success pivots on how efficiently oxygen can be transported via the red blood cells. The percentage of red cells is known as the haematocrit level (HCT) and it can be increased by injecting EPO (a banned hormone) or by training at altitude. Increasing HCT to about 50 per cent carries no serious risk, whether it is achieved by altitude training or by using EPO. It is only when HCT is raised above 55 per cent that the risks increase. The higher concentration of red cells turns the blood into the consistency of jam, raising the chances of a heart attack.

The authorities have spent millions in a doomed attempt to find a robust test for EPO: the latest is a joint blood-urine test that can be avoided easily by using plasma expanders and diuretics. But banning EPO is not merely futile, it is also perverse. At present it is legal to boost HCT from 55 to 56 by training at altitude, even though it is perilous, but it is illegal to increase HCT safely from 40 to 41 using EPO. Surely it makes more sense to legalise all blood-altering techniques and to simply test for HCT? By setting a safe limit (say, 50) the authorities would have a full-proof procedure that protects the athlete. It would also be fairer. The problem with unenforceable rules is that they penalise honesty.

The same logic applies to steroids. It is said that steroids are unsafe, but the truth is that moderate use can improve strength without any significant damaging side effects. Permitting safe steroid use would still require the authorities to test for overuse, but this would be more effective if testers focused on symptoms (such as liver damage) rather than searching for the elusive substances themselves.

“Regulated permissiveness” would also enable athletes to choose drugs under conditions of informed consent and provide incentives for pharmaceutical companies to create safe drugs: at present the pressure is to create undetectable drugs.

Some will argue that all enhancers - safe or otherwise - should be banned because they are artificial, but this is simplistic. EPO is no more artificial than specialist shoes or Red Bull, but the latter are not illegal. Sporting authorities should not get hung up on drugs per se. Their function is more basic: to give the honest a realistic chance of beating the crooks.

Matthew Syed is a two-time Olympian in table tennis

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