It's 18 years since Ben Johnson covered 100 metres in 9.79 seconds to win gold at the Seoul Olympics... then lost it almost as swiftly.
A urine sample taken after "setting" a world record at the 1988 Games showed the Canadian had used anabolic steroids to improve his performance.
Disgraced, stripped of the medal, he slunk out of Seoul into obscurity.
He had been unveiled because his suppliers hadn't realised traces of the substance would still be detectable in his urine even though he had stopped using the stuff some time beforehand.
In the 18 years since it would have been reasonable to expect athletes, coaches and sports bodies to take the straight and narrow and give drugs a miss.
It's been any but, though.
Tour de France winner Floyd Landis and world 100m record holder Justin Gatlin are just a couple of elite athletes to return positive samples recently.
Since 1988 there's been a steady flow of "dope heads" who have all shouted their innocence after testing positive.
Marion Jones, Kelly White, Dwain Chambers, Michelle de Bruin and CJ Hunter have all been tainted in some way.
Pre-race favourites Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso were pulled out of this year's Tour de France the day before it started after being implicated in a doping scandal.
A few years ago South African runner Lisa de Villiers, at 14 years of age, became the youngest athlete to test positive for steroids.
Eleven elite Chinese athletes, including two world record holders, tested positive at the Asian Games in Hiroshima in 1994.
Italian Antonella Bevilacqua, in the top six women high jumpers in the world tested positive twice in the late 1990s for the banned stimulant, ephedrine.
Anabolic steroids, drugs, performance-enhancing substances ... quite simply dope ... the stuff cheats use to run, cycle or swim faster, jump higher, lift more, row further ...
And the cheating doesn't stop there.
Austrian sprinter Andreas Berger, in a cunning effort to fool the testers, had a nurse inject a catheter - filled with dope-free urine from his coach - up his penis so that he would be able to produce a 'clean' sample for the testers. All went well until a suspicious doctor demanded a second sample. His extremely painful and uncomfortable sham ended with a four-year ban.
Germany's Katrin Krabbe's world came tumbling down after being accused of manipulating urine samples taken at a Stellenbosch training camp in January 1992. Krabbe, a former East German, had been training in South Africa in preparation for the Barcelona Games, when samples taken from her and another two former East Germans Silke Moller and Grit Breuer were found to have come from the same woman.
World 100m and 200m champion at the time, Krabbe was unable to reach her previous times, and faded from the scene.
A lot of the time cheats are caught and banned. Sometimes they don't have a chance to be exposed.
In 1990 a top Dutch cyclist Johannes Draaijer died in his sleep without any apparent reason. In the late 1980s a number of top cyclists died mysteriously.
Medical experts linked the deaths with a drug - erythropoietin (EPO) - popular with endurance athletes.
EPO boosts red blood cell mass and improves endurance.
Deaths related to EPO have ceased - not because the drug has frightened off potential users - because users have worked out how much to give themselves.
Another substance popular with endurance athletes is human growth hormone (hGH).
A couple of years ago Jacques Rogge, a leading member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) medical commission described hGH "as the most misused drug in sport ... it is now the substitute for anabolic steroids."
Human growth hormone, now developed chemically, used to be obtained from dead humans. It is found in a small gland at the base of the brain that influences growth and body functions.
A further reason for the popularity of EPO and hGH is they are found naturally in the body and it is extremely difficult to detect whether athletes have deliberately increased the levels of the compounds in their bodies.
Clean urine, therefore, does not necessarily mean drug-free.
What about the athletes who have tested positive but protest their innocence, blaming an over-the-counter headache remedy?
Top South African sports scientist Professor Tim Noakes pointed out that about 50 percent of these athletes have innocently taken something for a cold, the flu or similar.
"There are hundreds of chemicals in all the different cold and flu remedies available over the counter and it is incidental that some of these contain stimulants that appear on the list drawn up by the IOC of banned substances," says Noakes.
"Australian swimmer Samantha Riley tested positive after taking a headache tablet. Found in her urine was the stimulant dextropropoxphene, a narcotic analgesic used in many everyday pain killers."
Karen Botha, South African long jumper, tested positive with the same substance at the All Africa games in Harare, also in the late 1990s.
Noakes pointed out the real cheats are the sports bodies, coaches and athletes who go out and buy supplies of anabolic steroids for the specific purpose of improving performances.
How do the testers catch the users?
"Testing has improved over the last few years. We are now able to pick up substances in an athlete who might have stopped using drugs six or seven months earlier ... in the past we could only go back about two months ... the gap is closing," said Noakes.
One of the problems though is the lack of random testing. Most tests are taken only at major championship meetings or the Olympics. Athletes work out when to stop, so by the time they are tested the dope is flushed out of their systems.
It's been said some athletes are better pharmacologists than the doctors themselves.
Years before the Seoul Games the East Germans, multiple medal winners at many Olympics, had cheating down to a fine art. Squads of athletes were on planned steroid-administered programmes. But this practice was thrown out with the rubble of the Berlin Wall soon after German unification.
The rest of the sporting world thought that would be the end of national doping programmes.
Until the early 1990s when China's athletes burst onto the scene, and like taking candy from a baby, destroyed world records at will.
Fellow athletes and the media were immediately suspicious, convinced the Chinese were using something more potent than pasta and pizza.
Late in 1992 at the national games in Beijing, wonder-woman Junxia Wang, not only set the world 10 000m record (one of the longest-standing records in athletics history, held set by Norway's Ingrid Kristiansen since 1986) she bettered the time by a staggering 42 seconds.
When asked for comment Kristiansen merely laughed scornfully saying "you can't do that on oatmeal only."
More remarkable, and unbelievable, was Wang's performance in the 3 000m at the same games where she set two world records on consecutive days.
Her teammate Qu Yunxia set a world mark for the 1 500 metres.
In moved the testers, confident of making a killing. But to their dismay all tests turned up negative. It appeared China had produced a super-human athletic squad ... and they weren't on drugs!
The Chinese bubble burst just before the Asian Games in 1994. A team of independent testers took urine samples three days before the games started. Eleven Chinese athletes including seven swimmers, two of them 1994 world champions, tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. When tested after their events a few days later, all tests were negative. Gotcha!
Now the suspicions are mounting against the likes of Landis and Ullrich.
Landis' B sample results are to be released today and they expected to be as positive as his A sample. While it was reported yesterday that a dossier on Ullrich indicates the German spent R310 000 a year on performance-enhancing drugs.
Who said all cheats were cheap?