Over the past few decades, rarely has there been a time when doping scandals have not been in the headlines.
From cycling to tennis and athletics to a range of other sports, the fight against the drug cheats appears never-ending.
Testing and how the World Anti-Doping Agency deals with it is something that has broken into mainstream sports coverage and as it happens, WADA's Director General David Howman was in Dublin, so Off The Ball's Ger Gilroy caught up with him for an in-depth chat.
"We will never beat the problem. We will confront it and have regular victories, if you like, but we will never defeat it," said Howman on the perennial battle against dopers, also explaining that increased money in sports increases the temptation for athletes to cheat.
He also gave his take on anti-doping programmes across national and sporting code divisions.
"What we do is monitor the programmes to try to ensure that the quality is testing the right people at the right time. That's a big job and we've changed that perspective just in the last couple of years by making sure that risk sports where we know that certain substances are going to be more prevalent are actually tested for those substances," Howman said.
