Sex toys and drugs tests. What’s the link?  Well, ask Australian jockey Jason Warrington who was busted last week, not for testing positive (he admitted marihuana use, though) but for using a sex toy while providing a urine sample. Go figure!

I just can’t figure it out; was he planning to enjoy himself at the same time or something? Not the place nor the time, I would have thought. In all seriousness, though, this was probably no sex toy but a contraption that has been around for years and is aptly known as the ‘whizzinator’. This device is a prosthetic penis filled with ‘clean’ urine and looks every bit like a sex toy; therefore the ‘confusion’!

The wizzinator is worn like a belt under the pants and is so real in appearance that it is only exposed if testers demand that you ‘drop 'em’, revealing the attaching part of the device around the waist. And it has reached a level of sophistication that would do any sex shop proud, with a range of skin-colour types to match including white, black, latino etc. Going price is about $150.

But improvised cheating knows know boundaries. Before the wizzinator came along, athletes were already using artificial bladders either inserted surgically or placed suppository-like in the rectum or the front passage of females. With males, a false urethra attached to the penis would provide the flow of clean urine but it would be a dead giveaway with your dacks around your ankles and the tester's inquisitive eyes peering at your privates. Females, on the other hand, could probably better conceal these false bladders. When asked to pee, they could simply pierce the inserted bladder with a fingernail. Always wondered why some female athletes have very long fingernails - maybe they were not just fashion statements!

But false bladders are par for the course for the determined but unsophisticated cheaters. Those with the wherewithal have used more elaborate methods to outdo the testers. Although it is difficult to prove unless you were there, it is said that electrical ‘tickling’ of the pituitary gland to increase growth hormone production ‘naturally’ was rumoured to have happened. It’s a wonder thought hadn’t been given to tickling the testes to ‘naturally’ increase testosterone production, but then again this method has been used as an instrument of torture, so no takers there.

And for the really upmarket athlete, how about surgical widening of arteries in the calf muscles, increasing blood flow and therefore oxygen levels?

But the method which takes the cake for sheer simplicity and ingenuity was one practised by the East Germans. Swimmers would have air blown into their bowels (don’t ask me how) to increase buoyancy in the water. For the life of me I can’t work out how someone could swim faster when they were constantly on the edge of a fart! Maybe the propulsion afforded by their flatulence was itself the enhancement.

Perhaps one of the most bizarre cases of cheating, though, had nothing to do with doping. This was attributed to Polish-born American sprinter Stella Walsh. She had been beaten at the 1936 Berlin Games but claimed that she had been duped by a male athlete in drag. Her conqueror, Helen Stephens, gladly volunteered for a sex test which revealed that everything was in order. Walsh herself was not so forthcoming. It was not until Walsh became the unfortunate victim of stray bullet during a Cleveland shopping mall shooting in 1980 which killed her that the truth came out. The post mortem revealed she was in fact, a man!

Despite the weird, the wonderful and the illegal ways of getting around doping tests there are also ‘legal’ ways, if you believe. Breathing pure oxygen is supposed to increase stamina and Roger Bannister, the first-ever sub-four minute miler, proclaimed its use during the 1950s. How could you ban it? It's in the air and we all partake of it. And don’t estimate the power of the mind, especially the placebo affect. If someone takes something they believe will help them perform better, studies have shown that it does work in many cases. And you can’t ban ‘sugar pills’ either.

But all cheating and doping methods will one day be so passé when genetic doping assaults the sporting world. No need for false bladders (long fingernails would be true fashion statements), no need to be wired up for tickling, no need to go under the knife - and certainly no need to have air blown up your back passage.

Doping in the future will be in the genes and no amount of urine, whether real or contrived, will reveal that it has happened. I suspect the testers themselves, whose job it is to kneel in front of male athletes to check that they are providing urine from a real appendage, can’t wait for that day, either. We are so used to the athletes complaining about privacy when it comes to urine sampling but I can tell you it's not much fun from the other end. I know I’ve taken my share of swabs for STDs over the years and it's not everyone’s cup of tea. I also know I’d rather be sticking my arm out (for a blood test) rather than my ‘John Henry’ out because I feel for the poor sod who has to get an ‘eyeful’ as part of their job.

So you athletes stop complaining about your privacy and please leave your sex toys at home. The testers have enough embarrassment to contend with as it is.

(Robin Parisotto is a the author of Blood Sports – the inside dope on drugs in sport)