The clamour for explanations for this "epidemic" of positives saw the government-sponsored UK Sport pull together a group of 20 experts to pool their knowledge and experience, under the chairmanship of Professor Vivian James. Four months later, they reported back that, in rare cases, eating the testicles of wild boar, or some other game, might raise your levels of nandrolone metabolites marginally. But, they said, this was only a remote possibility.

Despite trawling research papers from all over the world, these great scientific figures could find no other evidence to suggest that simply eating normal food stuffs might give a nandrolone positive test - even if the livestock had been injected with veterinary steroids. "To get an athlete to give a positive test for nandrolone from eating meat, they'd need to eat an entire cow," Dr Colin Crosby, a sports medicine expert, said after Lenny Paul, a British bobsleigher, was exonerated from a nandrolone ban in 1998 by saying that his positive test was entirely due to a dinner of steroid-laced spaghetti bolognese.

According to the UK Sport Nandrolone Review Group, a possible explanation for this spate of nandrolone positives might be that the athletes were using supplements that contained nandrolone or related substances. None of the experts were prepared to speculate whether this use of supplements was deliberate or inadvertent.

It was soon after the Review Group submitted its expert report that David Moorcroft, head of the UK Athletics was heard to say to one athletics journalist, "What I still can't understand is how we are getting all these positive results."

"Maybe it's something they're taking, Dave."

NANDROLONE MYTH No.3:

"It's not the athletes' fault - the labs are to blame"

The new, Andro-style products are very easily available. One simple search on the internet for nandrolone can immediately produce thousands of links - most of them mail order sales outlets - for related products. A single retailer in Britain reckons that £6 million of his annual turnover of health supplements comes from Andro-style products, and there are at least 20 such traders in Britain alone.

Ease of access may account for a lot. On the very day three years ago that the European 200 metres champion, Scotsman Doug Walker, was named as being the first British athlete to have failed a drug test for nandrolone, the latest edition of Athletics Weekly - "The Bible of the Sport" - dropped on to thousands of subscribers' doormats together with a glossy colour catalogue from a company called Maximuscle.

Maximuscle's products include some perfectly harmless protein powders, fruit drinks and energy bars including a product called Acetyl-Glutamine, which the lurid sales pitch in the catalogue says: "is legal and won't fail any drug test, even though it can raise your bodies[sic] natural testosterone levels". Under IOC rules, even such manipulation of the hormone testosterone can carry a two-year ban.