We are all born with them. Our genes and the potential for sporting performance is written in them. How big are our lungs, our legs, arms; how good is our vision, our reflexes and how strong we are and so on are all dependent on our genes. It’s all laid down before we are even born. They are our passport to sporting success but how they translate to sporting performance also rests with our lifestyle, especially our nutritional and training habits.

The leaps and bounds in technology, though, may mean that in the future the whole issue of doping may become redundant, because there is the potential for doping to be forever hidden away and undetectable. Today, most of the known performance-enhancing drugs are detectable, although there are probably many others the testers just aren’t aware of. The power of gene therapy will make the whole testing system obsolete and impotent, especially when doping goes ‘inside the genes’.

Unless society can overcome the ethical and moral dilemmas regarding the privacy of every individual’s DNA, there will be no way of knowing who has been genetically enhanced or not through the use of proposed individual ‘gene maps’. These maps would document each person’s DNA fingerprint at birth and could be used as the baseline for gene doping testing in the future. In effect, it would be possible to see whether genes have been ‘cut and pasted’ or simply replaced with others to improve performance. And the can of worms would really open up if a young child or an embryo had been fiddled with. Under current doping laws they could not be sanctioned because they had not doped - someone had done it for (to) them.

Gene therapy is still in some ways an inexact science and while there have been some remarkable advances in research and even medical applications, the technology is fraught with as yet unknown risks, particularly therapies which may inadvertently turn on cancer-causing genes known as oncogenes or produce other manifestations or mutations such as two-headed animals. Ridiculous, alarming, even funny you may perhaps think. Well, think again. Researchers in Taiwan recently genetically ‘designed’ fish embryo to produce offspring containing the gene responsible for the muscle-wasting disease known as Muscular Dystrophy, which leads to an early death. Instead, their well-intentioned research ended up producing ‘two-headed’ fish. I mean one head on an athlete is enough but it would give new meaning perhaps to events such as synchronized swimming! It beggars belief that anyone other than those on their death beds would take such a risk?

With our genes being potentially the strongest performance enhancers, more than any known drug could be, it is obvious where sport’s biggest threat is coming from. How ironic that it is something we are ‘naturally’ endowed with that may ultimately wreck sport as we know it, rather than drugs. It could be debated, though, that drugs have already ruined sport. One thing is for sure - it seems that sport has now reached a point where it can’t exist without drugs, whether legal or not according to today’s mores and anti-doping rules.

While we could literally see the problems of cloning in human sport, what about in the horse-racing industry and even the dog-racing business, for that matter? The cloning of Dolly the sheep heralded a frightening reality, that the dead (as well as the living) can be either brought back to life or recreated.