The Irish athlete Cathal Lombard has tested positive for EPO, the now commonly-abused drug that radically boosts red blood cell production. Lombard’s path seems to have been a standard one. Nothing special for most of his career, his 5,000 and 10,000 meter times started improving radically when he changed coaches a couple of years ago. In interviews he put it all down to training smarter and overhauling his approach to running.

Assuming the tests are confirmed, Lombard’s story shows just how phenomenally effective performance-enhancing drugs are these days. Lombard is basically a decent club runner: certainly faster than most of us, but he never won anything in competition and he certainly couldn’t touch the likes of, say, Mark Carroll, the leading Irish men’s middle distance runner of his generation. Just compare and contrast their respective accomplishments over the years. And yet at the age of 26, Lombard started knocking down his 5 and 10k PBs in 20 or 30 second chunks over a period of months, to the point where earlier this year he smashed Mark’s National 10k record by 13 seconds. Now imagine what happens if you give EPO to someone who is really, really talented to begin with.

This sort of thing makes it hard to get really enthusiastic about the upcoming Olympics, because it’s clear that for everyone who’s caught there are a bunch more who evade detection. But which ones? It’s hard to catch even textbook cases using known substances, let alone truly elite competitors who use stuff that testing agencies don’t even know exists. Some sports, like professional cycling, are so obviously soaked in chemicals that everyone has simply agreed to look the other way. On the track and field circuit, there are a lot of fairly clear-cut opinions about who’s clean and who isn’t, and a lot of justified resentment from honest athletes who see their own natural talent and hard work count for nothing courtesy of someone else’s course of injections. They face a harsh choice when they see the likes of Lombard accelerating away from them on the back straight towards Olympic glory, corporate sponsorship and popular adulation.