ON THE back of the Conor Benn failed drugs tests, given that we now know he failed not one but two Vada tests for the same banned substance — the woman’s fertility drug clomifene — boxing has come under the kind of scrutiny that the sport’s movers and shakers most definitely will not have welcomed.

Regardless, it has been a long time coming and who knows at this juncture where it will end? This particular question carries even more significance because of the claims made by Benn’s sports doctor, one Dr Usman Sajjad, in podcast interview last year.

He claimed that you would have to be an idiot to fail a test for performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) in England, before going on to state that he believes between 80 and 90 per cent of professional boxers are regularly taking them.

This of course is based on assumption rather than fact, but with his expert knowledge of the subject, I see no reason to doubt the verisimilitude of this claim.

Logic dictates that with the stakes involved in elite-level sport, measured in the life-changing sums of money earned by those who succeed and not earned by those who do not, athletes and competitors in elite level sport will be willing to do whatever it takes, up to and including taking performance-enhancing drugs to either gain an extra edge or, as the case may be, to level the playing field.

Here I must confess to having taken performance-enhancing drugs myself, which in my case amounted to anabolic steroids.

This I did over a period of eight years in which I competed in bodybuilding between the mid-80s and early ’90s.

Years of a misspent youth, perhaps, but from them I gained an intimate understanding of the mindset and culture involved in doing whatever it takes to win.

The fact that I was competing for plastic trophies at the time, along with those whom I was competing against, only illustrates that in a very real sense the real sin that someone such as Conor Benn is guilty of lies in getting caught.

Benn continues to maintain his innocence. He argues that the trace levels of clomifene found in his system was the result of accidental contamination from food — specifically eggs — rather than cheating.

Unfortunately for this, at this point not many in and around boxing are minded to believe him. 

Doubts where he’s concerned are only compounded by his decision not to renew his licence to box with the British Boxing Board of Control, citing an unfair process, which absolves him from facing a hearing with the high probability of being banned and being forever known as a drugs cheat.

It will also allow him to fight under different licensing bodies overseas should be decide to take that particular route.

More broadly, the only way that boxing — and every other sport for that matter — will deter fighters from using PEDs is to introduce an automatic lifetime ban for those caught doing so.

Such a step, however, would be almost impossible to carry out when it comes to world champions and pay-per-view stars, given the money they generate not only for themselves but for the sport in general.

We should not be naive when it comes to this issue. The chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the general public and those operating at the highest level in boxing and other sports is huge.

This is why when someone like Benn falls foul of a drugs test he finds himself immediately transformed from being one of the most exciting prospects boxing has seen in years, touted as a role model and inspiration, into a reprobate for whom no words of condemnation are strong enough.

When it comes to boxing, this on a certain level is understandable. A boxing ring for fans of the sport represents a place of honesty in a dishonest world.

They, we, want to believe the hype that fighters really are the best of us.

In turn those in the ring are imbued with a sense of infallibility and greatness that becomes addictive to the point where they will do anything to maintain it.

What ensues in the process is a vicious cycle based on the fundamental truth that this seemingly purest of sports is anything but, colonised instead by assorted con artists, rogues, liars and charlatans both in and out of the ring.

What is true is that what fighters put themselves through mentally and physically in the process of preparing for a fight, never mind during the fight itself, is epic in its intensity and hardship.

The human body is simply not equipped to endure rounds and rounds of the hard sparring, conditioning work and prolonged diets required to get ready for a fight.

It needs help to recover and adapt and continue over the hard weeks of a training camp.

With this considered, in many respects the real story would be if a given champion, contender or rising star in boxing is not using PEDs rather than is.

Returning to my own experience, I broke my neck in a car accident in northern Mexico back in 1992, sustaining a C1-C2 neck fracture. I was 25 at the time and fortunately had a large neck due to my bodybuilding training, which helped cushion the impact to the point of ensuring that I didn’t suffer any spinal damage, else I would be a quadriplegic right now.

Imbued with the malign Nietzschean values of rugged individualism back then, I will never forget the morning that Dr Siegel, the neurosurgeon whom only two days before had performed the hours-long surgery to fuse my two shattered vertebrae together, breezed into my room in the intensive care unit at the hospital just outside of San Diego I was being treated at. 

He proceeded to ask me if I’d ever used steroids. When I replied in the affirmative he went on to reveal that they’d softened my bones, going on to explain that a side effect of steroid use is the removal of calcium from the bone shafts.

This particular piece of information punctured any lingering illusions of strength and indomitability I’d been fortified with to that point.

It also confirmed that what anabolic steroids and other performing-enhancing drugs help to build they also destroy.

Thus the Faustian bargain required to make peace with the potential consequences involved in taking them should never be entered into lightly, if at all.