Since the German has been labouring so hard to collect his thoughts on various topics this conference-season, it would be churlish not to offer some reaction to what I shall call, with a certain amount of poetic licence, his anti-doping catechism in Katowice.

This reaction takes three parts:

1. Punishing athletes' entourage members.

Yes, it is hard to disagree that, as Bach puts it, "for each doping case, we have to identify everybody who is implicated. We cannot just sanction the athlete and let the others go. This is a question of credibility and justice".

Indeed, I would add that not infrequently it is the comportment of the athlete that appears least blameworthy.

But what comes across most clearly in this passage of Bach's speech is a sense of frustrated impotence.

This is unsurprising: the punishment of non-athletes is a subject that gets to the heart of why doping is such a tough nut to crack.

You cannot remove a manager's medal or (usually) a physio's prize-money.

So sanctioning such individuals risks taking sports bodies into realms very far from their core business.

To take the most extreme example: exacting full retribution for the notorious East German doping machine would presumably have required bringing Erich Honecker to justice.

Even attempting to engineer non-sports-related sanctions is probably a step too far for sports bodies, unless and until the industry develops a much better reputation for transparency of governance and general probity than it possesses at the moment.

At the same time, few Governments that I can think of are likely wholeheartedly to embrace proceedings that might undermine some of the foundations on which their national sporting success - and hence prestige - has been constructed.

(The Rodchenkov Act suggests, admittedly, that one Government might be minded to undermine some of the foundations on which the national sporting success of others has been constructed.)

So: those with the will to tackle the scourge are unable to act effectively; and those with the wherewithal very often lack the motivation.

Hence the frustrated impotence, and hence we are stuck. 

2. Retrospective testing.

Yes, this has proved an effective way of unmasking cheats, arguably the most effective yet devised, albeit, by its very nature, usually years after the event.

So, Bach's offer to finance storage facilities for International Federations and National Anti-Doping Organisations is welcome.

But if this form of detection is to become its own branch of the anti-doping industry, as seems to be the case, there simply has to be some means of independent oversight.

We have to be sure, not that every sample is treated the same way, but that when a potential breakthrough emerges, rendering re-testing desirable, that the most appropriate tests are conducted, wherever possible, on all samples deemed by specialists most likely to yield a positive test.

The most obvious way to do this would be to set up a small independent team authorised periodically to go back over the ways in which anti-doping authorities have reacted to new information deemed likely to yield a new crop of positives, and conduct an audit.

Catching dopers via this route is an art as much as a science.

But right now it is too important a tool to run the risk of corruption somehow entering the system.

3. The International Testing Agency (ITA).

Ex-IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch (who cut his administrative teeth in an age when the IOC had little of either) was the master of how to manipulate money to channel power.

If you don’t believe me, go away and study how and why the Association of International Olympic Winter Sports Federations (AIOWSF), and later the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations (ASOIF), were set up.

But Bach, who was an active participant at the famous Baden-Baden Olympic Congress of 1981 (read more here), seems an able disciple; I think the ITA illustrates this.

As the German told delegates in Poland, creation of this new kid on the anti-doping block was "made possible by start-up funding of $30 million from the IOC".

He went on: "The overarching goal of the ITA is to make anti-doping testing independent from sports organisations."

But not sports organisations called the IOC, it would appear; how else to interpret the make-up of the new body's five-member board, which includes two IOC members - Uğur Erdener and Kirsty Coventry - and one former IOC member - Francesco Ricci Bitti?

The blurb on the ITA website, moreover, explains that this board's composition "is submitted to [the World Anti-Doping Agency's] Executive Committee for approval".

This may be about to change, but when I checked on WADA's website on Tuesday, both Erdener and Ricci Bitti are members of the WADA Executive Committee. 

Having drawn a sharp intake of breath after digesting that last sentence of the speech, I must admit, the next one really threw me.

"In today's world where perception is unfortunately so often becoming reality," Bach asserted, "it is more important than ever to avoid even the perception of a conflict of interest."

This may seem a stretch, but what this put me in mind of is those nuclear powers who profess to back non-proliferation but would never relinquish their own nuclear deterrent.

The last sentence I am going to quote, I do agree with: "Making testing independent from sport organisations and national interests is therefore a vital step and greatly supports the credibility of the anti-doping system."

I look forward to the day when it might happen.