Horse racing's Ted Walsh last week found a memorable way of discounting the chances of his son, Ruby, riding four winners on the opening day of the Cheltenham Festival.

"It just doesn't happen," the Kildare man reflected.

"It's Cheltenham, not Disneyland."

His good judgement was confirmed a few hours later, when, with three wins under his belt and the fourth race at his mercy on a chestnut mare called Annie Power, Walsh the younger was sent crashing to the turf at the very last hurdle separating him from the Magic Kingdom.

The fall was said to have saved bookmakers £40 million ($59 million/€56 million).

In an eventful week, other sports found ways of showing they were not Disneyland either.

The niggly, cynical, if ultimately dramatic football served up at Stamford Bridge by Chelsea and Paris Saint-Germain - two squads bristling with the most exciting attacking talent money can buy - seemed a mightily long way from Disneyland, or even Euro Disney.

And then there was the report of the Cycling Independent Reform Commission (CIRC).

Racing's Ted Walsh discounted the chances of son Ruby riding four winners on the opening day of the Cheltenham Festival, saying "its Cheltenham, not Disneyland"  ©Getty Images



Now getting the edge, that vital advantage that sets champions apart from their chief rivals, is the essence of top-class international sport.

Some - Roger Federer in tennis, cricket's Michael Holding, Michael Jordan in basketball - are blessed with supreme natural ability which, honed by years of practice, set them apart from their peers.

Others, whose talent puts them on a par with their most gifted contemporaries but not above them, can add that decisive extra scintilla to their performance through extreme mental toughness; or having access to more money - and hence, potentially, better equipment, coaches, training regimes, food - than their opponents; or with the help of technological innovation, although, in this case, others tend to catch up fast.

If your competitors happen to be honest, you can also get the edge by breaking the rules.

Doping is perhaps the most obvious way to do this, but there are plenty of others.

Cycling's CIRC was told of "varying efforts to cheat the technical rules", ranging from "using motors in frames" to "the wearing of illegal clothing and apparel".

Indeed it warned that "technical cheating may be emerging as a more significant avenue for illicit gains than ever before".

To me, one of the most depressing things about this CIRC report, though, is that it in part details a period when use of drugs, in particular erythropoietin or EPO, seems to have been necessary, or as good as, not to gain an edge, but merely to stay in the race.

Why? Because such an overwhelmingly high proportion of top road riders appear to have been using it.

Tennis' Roger Federer has been blessed with supreme talent, while other top class sports stars have had to find alternative ways to gain an edge on their rivals ©Getty Images



While acknowledging the difficulty of quantifying prevalence, CIRC cites a 1994 report on EPO use in Italian professional cycling that put usage rates at "between 60 to 80 per cent of all riders".

It immediately goes on to add: "From riders' testimony to the CIRC, it is possible that this estimate may be modest for the peloton in that era, given that some put the percentage at 90-plus per cent across the peloton."

Since EPO was illegal - albeit undetectable until a test was developed in 2000 - and since performance gains attributable to the drug were estimated at 10-15 per cent, this meant that ultra-honest riders who saw it as unethical to break the rules governing their sport must have found it all but impossible to be competitive or even to stay in the sport at elite level.

Says CIRC: "It seems that today riders have a choice as to whether to dope or not, whereas before there was no real choice if a rider wanted to be competitive in the big races."

Until you have an effective test, it is hard to know what to do in such a situation.

So I have quite a lot of sympathy with the governing body's introduction in 1997 of the so-called "No Start Rule".

This held that any rider with a haematocrit (red blood cell) reading higher than 50 per cent in the case of men or 47 per cent for women was deemed unfit for competition and prevented from competing for 15 days from the date of a test.

Explains CIRC: "It was not an anti-doping rule, but a health and safety measure."

It came after riders informed the governing body in 1996 that, as the report puts it, "misuse of EPO had spiralled out of control and that there was a serious and acute danger that riders would die on the Grand Tours.

"It was the various team doctors and managers who went to the [International Cycling Union] and begged them to start blood controls."

The Cycling Independent Reform Commission said the so-called "No Start Rule", introduced in 1997, "was not an anti-doping rule, but a health and safety measure" ©Getty Images



With the development of the Athlete Biological Passport (ABP), anti-doping authorities do now have in their armoury a more effective weapon to combat EPO use.

According to CIRC, "Prior to the ABP, only three riders were convicted of blood doping.

"In the first three years of the ABP, 26 riders were found positive for the presence of EPO stimulating agents in their specimens."

The report went on: "The ABP was a paradigm shift in anti-doping and began to reduce the percentage performance gain that EPO had previously offered because riders had to take smaller quantities to avoid detection."

In this context, you would have to say that top road racers who competed clean before a worthwhile EPO test was developed could almost be considered candidates for sainthood.

That is why when a few months ago I met Christophe Bassons, a former pro cyclist who competed from 1996 to 2001 and who rejected EPO, I was so struck that he seemed to feel no sense of moral superiority over former rivals whose cheating perhaps prevented him from enjoying a significantly more glittering career.

Among the notes I scribbled down while listening to him are the following, rather extraordinary, sentences.

"I'm not at all proud of not doping.

"Rather, I'm ashamed for being lucky in a way others weren't."

I called Bassons to check what he meant by "being lucky", and it was that his background and education equipped him to make choices that weren't available to many others in the peloton.

Former French professional cyclist Christophe Bassons, who competed from 1996 to 2001, rejected EPO - unlike most of his peers, including Lance Armstrong ©Getty Images



CIRC touches on this as well, noting: "In this era, many young amateur riders, often from a lower socio-economic background, had a chance to gain recognition and earn good money as professional cyclists, where their alternatives for other types of employment were perhaps less appealing.

"A typical narrative from that period was of a gifted non-doping amateur, who had previously competed closely with riders from the rest of the world, turning professional.

"He would find that his former amateur competitors were now significantly faster than him, and he soon realised that doping was the difference...

"The rider was confronted with a stark choice, either to fall away from professional riding or dope.

"Those few who rejected doping and left the sport appear to share a common factor in that they had an alternative, perhaps a university degree or an option to pursue a career in another walk of life."

This is strange territory indeed, where one of the clean guys can empathise so much with the cheats that he is left feeling ashamed.

Perhaps this is the sort of thing that the person who told CIRC there was "no room for ethics in sport" was getting at.

There are no easy answers here: it seems self-evident that a similar situation could arise with a different - untestable - drug in another sport.

But if we live in a society where winning is everything - where the reward structure for athletes, once sponsorship income is taken into account, makes explicit that winning is everything - then an environment in which competitors are striving so desperately for that edge that legality becomes, for some, essentially irrelevant if they think they can get away with it is what we can expect.

Education must be part of the answer - but as much for sports leaders as the athletes themselves whom they love to lecture about the evils of doping.

I still have relatively little sympathy with an athlete who, in a generally "clean" sport, resorts to drugs to secure the edge he or she needs to reach number one.

However, when a sport becomes so "dirty" that competitors feel they have no choice but to dope to retain their livelihood, then we all share part of the responsibility.

David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen's Twitter feed can be accessed here