Applying similar criteria across a range of sports, the IOC's figures for 1999 showed 343 nandrolone positives. Even excluding the celebrated cases of the athletes who were not allowed to make it to the start-line in the Sydney Olympics, nandrolone was again the most common drug reported in Sydney, where a record-breaking 35 competitors were reported for positive drug tests.

So it would be fair to say that the volume of nandrolone positives has not altered. What has changed is the "quality" of the athletes testing positive.

NANDROLONE MYTH No.2:

"I must produce large amounts of the stuff naturally".

Not unless your middle initials are 'ICI' you won't.

Minute amounts of nandrolone are produced in the body, but we are dealing here with particles so small that they are virtually atomic - one-tenth part of one-millionth of a gram.

Olympic laboratories, tasked with ensuring that their tests are fair as well as effective, have researched natural nandrolone production regularly over the past quarter-century, the most recent study being conducted at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.

There, of 621 competitors tested after competition, only five produced results where their nandrolone levels exceeded 0.1 nanograms per millilitre of urine (ng/ml).All five were women. The levels in women are marginally higher, as a result of a different hormonal make-up and use of the contraceptive pill. But the levels are still minimal. Nobody in the Nagano tests exceeded 0.4ng/ml.

This just served to confirm the IOC's cut-off levels - a doping-control speed limit, where anything above 2ng/ml in men or 5ng/ml in women is regarded as an offence. Basic arithmetic suggests that the IOC scientists have set themselves a generous margin for error - 2ng/ml being 20 times what might be regarded as a "normal" level of nandrolone in men. So can there really be any doubt at all when someone registers over 2ng/ml of nandrolone that it is not the result of endogenous production? When Linford Christie tested positive for nandrolone in Dortmund in February 1999, it is reported that the levels found in his sample were more than 200 ng/ml - or roughly 2,000 times above the estimated natural levels.

"From what I understand, the medical data shows the only way you can go above the 2ng/ml level is by ingesting the drug," says Dick Pound, the Canadian lawyer who as the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, is the world's leading anti-doping official. "You can eat boar's testicles all week and not reach that level."

But even such incontrovertible statements have not prevented other agencies embarking on their own quests for the present Holy Grail of sports science - discovering why so many leading athletes and Italian footballers have suddenly started testing positive for nandrolone.

When British athletics produced 10 nandrolone positives in the space of a few months in 1999, it left officials dumb-struck.