Lack of will is also a problem. Sport brings national glory, which can make questioning success risky. After her admission, Ms Shirley was branded a "traitor". State-sponsored doping programmes in East Germany, China and Russia were all aimed at winning political prestige. Sport brings in a great deal of cash, too. Warc, an advertising firm, reckons the worldwide sports-sponsorship market was worth $48bn in 2020. All that money makes it possible to buy off officials. Last year Lamine Diack, Lord Coe's predecessor as the head of World Athletics (then known as the International Association of Athletics Federations) was given a four-year prison sentence for taking bribes to hush up positive doping tests, as were five other officials. (Mr Diack is appealing.)

Ultimately, countries and companies pay both for top-level sport and for the anti-doping system which polices it. This means that, even when they are not actively working to subvert the system, as Russia or Mr Diack did, they do not always have strong incentives to ask hard questions. Mr Salazar had been a divisive figure in athletics long before Nike eventually closed the Oregon Project. WADA itself gets half of its money from governments and half from sporting bodies, raising questions about how truly independent it can ever be.

That is a view shared by America's government. Fed up with what it sees as a limp response to the Russian scandal, in December it passed a law known as the Rodchenkov Act. This tries to assert American criminal jurisdiction over any sports event involving American athletes or companies, anywhere in the world. It gives American prosecutors the ability to impose ten-year prison sentences and $1m fines on those found to have aided doping (though it does not apply to individual athletes).

Travis Tygart, head of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, described the Rodchenkov Act as a "game-changer". That is hard to argue with. It will drive a coach and horses through existing arrangements. WADA worries the act's extraterritorial ambitions mean two sets of rules could apply to doping cases, and that confusion and resistance from other countries might "shatter" the international anti-doping system. (It also notes, pointedly, that the act's penalties do not apply to parochial American sports such as baseball, which have had their own share of doping scandals.) The Tokyo games are one of the first big international competitions to be held with the act in force. Lord Coe may or may not be right to say, in the wake of the Russian scandal, that getting away with doping will be harder than ever. But the fight against it has rarely been so bad-tempered.

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