TIPPING POINT:If nothing else, modern sport shows how the ability to run fast doesn't have a corresponding impact on brain velocity, writes BRIAN O'CONNOR

EERO MÄNTYRANTA was always unusual. Even in a country such as Finland, his ability to ski extreme distances marked him out as different. At the 1964 winter Olympics he won two golds in the cross-country ski events over 30km and 15km. In all, Mäntyranta won seven Olympic medals, becoming a legend of a sport where stamina is all-important.

However, a hint of sulphur lingered around Mäntyranta. Accusations of blood-doping, that insidious method of periodically removing oxygen-rich blood, storing it and then injecting it back into the body to boost the total of oxygen-carrying red blood cells, were thinly couched in the sort of language that prevents a trip to the courthouse – but gets the message across just the same.

It certainly seemed to fit. A stamina-sapping event such as cross-country skiing is a natural fit for blood-doping, as the muscles are starved of oxygen. And Mäntyranta was dominant for a long time. Plus, there has always been a whiff of “iffiness” about the Finns, like they have enough time huddled in the dark during the cold winter to get up to no good.

Except none of it was true. Mäntyranta mightn’t have been an angel, but no matter how snugly the blood-doping slurs might have fitted, they were wrong. Tests on almost 200 members of his family proved it. Like other members of the Mäntyranta clan, the star skier carried a rare but natural mutation in the erythropoietin (EPO) gene, which tells the body to make more red blood cells.

He was making the stuff automatically. Two and two had made five. It moved, looked, and sounded like a duck. But it wasn’t a duck. Instead, the episode is a reminder of the dangers of presuming guilt until proven innocent, of all that “how it is better that a hundred guilty men go free before one innocent is imprisoned” stuff. None of which, however, produces any kind of reassurance when it comes to the overall picture of doping in sport.

Woody Allen is credited with the old gag about being thrown out of college for cheating in the metaphysics exam – “I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.” When sport looks into its soul these days, the view can look pretty rancid – if of course you look carefully enough.

Those in whose interests it is to see only what they want to see have things pretty good. Any amount of officialdom can point to the comparative rarity of positive drug cases and paint a picture of a few bad apples corrupting the barrel. And it is important that the principle of innocent until proven guilty is maintained.

But the insidiousness of doping is how it cuts the foundations out of everything, even the genuine stuff, because only those living in Cloud Cuckoo Land can believe in the “official” any more.

In Ireland we know all about that, and in the stuff that really matters, too. Sport might be a triviality in comparison, but that isn’t the same as irrelevant. It means too much to too many people for that. And what’s common to all kinds of fraud is that the most effective con is the one that lets you get away with it without anyone being the wiser.

EPO is pretty old-hat now, like reaching into a fridge for a pint of milk. Officials testing wee are weeing into the wind. Steroids are passé. Amphetamines are fossilised into the past, as inured to the modern reality of the drug cheat as any number of masking agents.

Guess what the real worry going into London 2012 is: gene-doping – messing around with humanity’s molecular structure.

This phenomenon is parasiting on years of research into coping with muscle-wasting illnesses, except these aren’t poor unfortunates in dire need of help, but healthy athletes so obsessed with the need to get quicker and stronger that they will happily inject modified forms of anything into themselves. And it’s damn near undetectable.

Proteins made by engineered genes look identical to ones the body makes naturally. Biopsies can figure out who’s mucking about with nature, but only within a tight timeframe, and who’s going to ask athletes to provide biopsies hours before they are supposed to compete?

Talk of genetics can be a bit too space-agey to seem real. It’s all a bit futuristic. And it’s not like the spectre of gene-doping is somehow new. Before the last two Olympics, dire predictions about its potential impact were made. It’s been the next big thing for quite some time, with “before” and “after” pictures of mice spectacularly going all Schwarzenegger.

But nothing has ever showed up. No wild-eyed sprinter with one arm like Popeye and another like Olive Oyl. Officially, it’s not an issue. Which of course doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. It’s just not being detected, at least not yet. That’s pretty much a textbook definition of a good con.

A recent book called Run Swim Throw Cheat – The Science Behind Drugs backs up the belief we have been through all this before. Its author, Chris Cooper, a biochemist, argues that each time officials come up with a test to detect one way of cheating, the cheaters come up with another. They are always a step ahead, so much so, he concludes, that the war to rid sports of doping is one that cannot be won.

If that’s a rather bleak world view, it’s one sadly backed up by a raft of instances in which an obsessive need to win continues to get in the way of any need to behave like a properly functioning human being. There will always be those willing to cheat, and when caught they will invariably plead innocence, protesting the dope got into them via a dodgy steak, contaminated toothpaste or the cocaine-addled hooker they were boffing just before stepping out onto the track.

If nothing else, modern sport shows how the ability to run fast doesn’t have a corresponding impact on brain velocity. The inability to make the connection between injecting any amount of crap into your body and the possibility that it might harm you suggests obsession certainly, but also the suspicion that if it isn’t one form of stupidity feeding an inadequacy, it will be another.

Sure enough, Cooper quotes a survey of elite athletes in which more than half admitted they would gladly take a pill that delivered untraceable victory for five years – only to then drop dead. Much of the literature on doping includes the assumption that athletes have to be protected from themselves. To those of us with a less scientific, and indeed benevolent, bent, it requires a lot of charity to row along with such a view.

Sport isn’t supposed to breed such cynicism. That’s the whole point. It’s meant to be an oasis of fairness in a world gone beyond cynicism, an artificial haven where merit wins out. But sport is very much of this world too, and it’s becoming harder and harder to look into its soul and properly believe.