IN A past life — from the age of 16 through to my early twenties — my passion in life was bodybuilding and lifting weights. I competed in a number of competitions and like the majority of my peers at the time took steroids.

In fact, in the gym culture of which I was part throughout the 1980s steroids and steroid use was rife. Indeed it was almost the norm, as normal as brushing your teeth to those involved.

The reason I volunteer this information is because the issue of drugs and doping in sports has become ever more controversial and explosive. The recent International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) report revealing concerns expressed by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) over the sheer number of suspicious tests it has conducted in the past decade, including those involving Olympics champions and top athletes, has blown the issue wide open.

Prior to that Mo Farah had come under a cloud over allegations that his coach, Alberto Salazar, had advised various athletes under his tutelage at the Nike Oregon Project athletics group to take performance-enhancing drugs. And, of course, by now the entire world is familiar with the story of Lance Armstrong, the seven-time Tour de France champion who was stripped of his titles when it came to light that he’d been doping throughout his career.

Now boxing has come under the doping spotlight with Muhammad Ali biographer Thomas Hauser’s explosive article at the SB Nation sports news website titled “Can Boxing Trust USADA?”

In his piece Hauser reveals that after Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao weighed-in the day before their long anticipated fight in May, agents from the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) turned up unannounced at Floyd Mayweather’s Las Vegas home to conduct a random drug test on the undefeated world champion.

They found evidence of an IV having been administered to the fighter, which his team explained had been in the form of saline and multivitamins to combat the effects of dehydration. The use of these substances is not prohibited. However the use of an IV to administer them is. Why? Because introducing them directly into the bloodstream can and does mask the presence of other substances that might be in an athlete’s system, such as performance enhancing drugs, which are illegal.

There exists a massive and unbridgeable gulf between the reality of doping in sports and public perception. It is my contention, based on nothing more than personal experience and knowledge of the huge stress placed on the body by intense competitive level training and the body’s natural ability to recover from such training, that the use of doping in sport is ubiquitous and widespread — to the point where I would find it difficult to believe that any top athlete has never used them at least at some point in their career.

Floyd Mayweather is 38 years old. He approaches his 49th and, if he is to be believed, last fight against Andre Berto in Las Vegas this weekend as an athlete in peak physical condition, showing no evidence of physical decline.

His skill level is unquestioned. As an exemplar of the sweet science, boxing as the art of hitting and not getting hit, he is unsurpassed. But in order to get himself into the kind of condition he will be in when he enters the ring on September 12, he will have pushed and punished himself to an extraordinary degree over the past two months and more of yet another long training camp. His ability to recover from two or even three training sessions each day, including sparring, will undoubtedly have diminished with age, given that a male’s natural levels of testosterone and growth hormone goes into sharp decline with age.

It doesn’t take a genius to realise that questions have to be asked. Similarly, Manny Pacquiao went up nine weight divisions in just seven years, during which he carried his speed and power with him. Then we have Mexico’s Juan Manuel Marquez. The difference between the small and smooth 2009 Marquez, schooled by Floyd Mayweather, and the 2013 ripped and muscular Marquez who brutally knocked out Pacquiao, cannot be explained by protein shakes alone. It just can’t.

Various boxers have tested positive for banned substances over the years, the likes of James Toney, Antonio Tarver, Roy Jones, Fernando Vargas and many others. The problem, as Hauser points out, is that “the prevailing ethic seems to be, ‘If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.’ In a clean world, fighters don’t get older, heavier, and faster at the same time. But that’s what’s happening in boxing. Fighters are reconfiguring their bodies and, in some instances, look like totally different physical beings. Improved performances at an advanced age are becoming common. Fighters at age 35 are outperforming what they could do when they were 30. In some instances, fighters are starting to perform at an elite level at an age when they would normally be expected to be on a downward slide.”

Professional boxing in the US suffers from the lack of a national governing body with clear and transparent rules and regulations. Instead it is run on a state by state basis under the rubric of state athletic commissions. This opens it up to the kind of mismanagement bordering on corruption that has come to characterise it over decades. Add to this the multiplicity of sanctioning bodies, each with its own version of the world title in every weight division, and you have a situation that is positively anarchic.

On one level it is sad that Mayweather’s legacy could be tarnished by these revelations, though at this stage there remains no evidence that he has ever used banned substances. However for me it is even sadder that we, the fans, demand from our top athletes and champions ever-more speed, power, and endurance without realising what is involved in them being able to deliver it.

The drive for success that compels a man like Floyd Mayweather to put his body through the hell he has for two decades is rooted in capitalism, with its inordinate emphasis on individual success, competition, status, fame, and fortune.

Teenagers from working-class backgrounds, such as I was, often seek a route out of a future of dim prospects via individual achievement, by focusing on transforming themselves rather than the society and environment they live in.

For that they cannot and should not be blamed. What is unforgiveable, though, is the hypocrisy involved in building up athletes as role models and paragons of virtue when in truth the only virtue that matters in the world of competitive sport is winning at all costs.