NOVEMBER 14 — “We are completely innocent. We run a very clean and professional team that has been singled out due to our success.”

So said Lance Armstrong, back in December 2000 before the extent of his long-term and systematic cheating had been revealed.

Doping — the use of drugs to enhance performance — has always been a major issue in sport and I’m afraid it always will be.

The issue has come back into the foreground again this week with allegations that several Russian athletes at the London Olympics in 2012 were doping, with the result that the country’s athletics federation has been provisionally banned from competing in all international competitions.

This news has led to the same response as always: prominent athletes trotting out the tired old lines about how saddened they are to see their sport being dragged through the gutter, while administrators promise tough action and the media expresses its high-minded outrage.

I’m afraid that I have become extremely sceptical about doping and have resigned myself to the probability that the use of performance enhancing drugs is absolutely commonplace in every sport all over the world.

Let’s face reality: the news about the cheating Russians, just as were the revelations about Lance Armstrong and everyone else who went before and followed after, is almost certainly only the tip of an ugly iceberg.

Many people like to tell themselves that the occasional cases of “outed” cheaters are terrible exceptions, and that the vast majority of competitors are clean. I just don’t believe that anymore.

Maintaining a stubborn refusal to accept the notion that all sports have been, still are and will continue to be immersed in the deliberate use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs is naïve to the point of ignorance.

It would be nice, of course, to believe the Russians were the only cheaters in London three years ago, and that the vast majority of sports are clean from doping. But I almost regard Armstrong and the Russians for being the unlucky or careless ones for getting found out.

All the evidence — historical and contemporary — suggests that doping in sport is real, it is happening right now and it will continue to happen in greater numbers unless serious action is taken to improve drug-testing procedures.

It is not easy, of course, because sport is a highly competitive business by its very nature. Athletes are lavishly rewarded for success and many of them will therefore take extreme measures to achieve positive results.

In utopia, everyone would play by the rules and accept the maxim that the best man or woman or team should win.

In the real world, though, cheating is a perfectly understandable and unavoidable human element of any competitive sport, especially when the financial rewards on offer are so high.

On the field of play, various forms of cheating are now largely indulged across a wide range of sports — diving in football; claiming catches in cricket; faking or exaggerating injuries in American football and so on — with the general consensus being that it’s fine to do whatever you can get away with.

It would be naive in the extreme to assume that similar cheating doesn’t also happen away from the field of play with the use of performance enhancing drugs, especially if the chances of being caught are minimal due to insufficient testing procedures.

Simply stated: doping has always existed in sport, and always will, because some competitors, coaches and their back-up teams are prepared to do whatever it takes to win, by fair means or foul.

And with the ongoing advancement of medical science, it’s becoming easier for unscrupulous doctors to devise methods of supplying athletes with drugs that are much more difficult to detect. The testing methods must keep pace with the administering methods, and at the moment they are not.

Evidence of doping — both anecdotal and scientifically proven — has been stacking up for years. For example, a couple of years ago Arian Foster, one of the biggest stars of American football’s NFL, claimed that steroid use is widespread in his sport, saying: “I’ve seen and been around guys who juice. I’ve seen all kinds of things.”

He’s seen all kinds of things? And this is a seasoned professional, operating at the top level of one of the world’s most highly paid and highly scrutinised sports. If it’s happening there, can anyone really believe it’s not happening everywhere else?

Stopping doping is extremely difficult for the reasons outlined above: some athletes are prepared to cheat to win and will pay a lot of money to do so, and investment plus technology allows the doctors who prepare the chemical supplements to stay ahead of the drug testers who attempt to detect them.

But the task of administrators — in all sports — is to do everything possible to ensure that success is achieved only by participants who adhere to the rules. And when it comes to doping, it’s plainly the case that not enough is being done to prevent those rules from being broken.

For starters, an increase in the prevalence of blood testing — rather than the current tendency only to test urine samples — is one decisive step that should and could be taken.

But essentially it requires a huge increase in the financial resources made available to drugs testers, giving them every chance of staying ahead of the cheaters rather than the other way around.

If that doesn’t happen, it’s only a matter of time until the next batch of “shocking” doping revelations.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.