RYAN LOCHTE’S doping ban, which was announced this week, highlighted a couple of things.

Firstly, that the American is perhaps the stupidest athlete in the history of sport. Lochte’s ban has not been inflicted upon him as a result of a positive drugs test, nor was it due to another athlete revealing any incriminating evidence about him. Instead, Lochte did all the damage single-handedly, posting a photo on his personal Instagram account of himself receiving an IV injection of vitamins.

The Unites States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) began investigating and while they learned that Lochte hadn’t taken any illegal substances, he had violated USADA’s policy on intravenous infusions, which only allows athletes to receive under 100mls of permitted substances through an IV drip. Any more than that and a therapeutic use exemption (TUE) is required, which Lochte did not have.

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The 33-year-old multiple Olympic champion has now been banned for 14 months which if it doesn’t end his career, will certainly cause severe damage to his chances in Tokyo 2020. So if anyone was in any doubt as to Lochte’s stupidity – and he went a fair way to convincing us all with his staged “robbery” at the Rio Olympics, which turned out to be entirely fabricated – this latest stunt has made sure it’s set in stone.

But there is another thread to this story. Lochte’s defence was that he didn’t know the rules, which few disbelieve. While ignorance is rarely an acceptable defence when trying to avoid a ban, it is almost impossible to imagine anything else behind Lochte’s actions.

However, that a seasoned athlete such as the American does not know the rules suggests the anti-doping authorities are not doing an adequate job of ensuring elite athletes are left in no doubt as to what is permitted and what is not. The burden of responsibility lies with the athlete, but it is surely in the anti-doping authorities interests to ensure slip-ups like this do not happen.

However, that Lochte felt that using an IV drip was so insignificant that he would post about it on social media gives the distinct impression that this is a relatively normalised practice. Is this the way we want sport to go; athletes thinking IV drips are so run-of-the mill that they can stick photos of themselves hooked up to one on social media?

Even if Lochte had not committed an anti-doping violation, it is hardly a great signal to be sending out to young kids by one of the greatest swimmers in history that IV drips are a normal part of elite-level sport. But this is now the stage we have reached – that it is generally accepted that elite athletes will push so close to the line that they are right up against it.

That Chris Froome is unlikely to win this year’s Tour de France, which would have been his fifth overall title, is almost certainly a good thing for cycling. The Team Sky rider’s pre-race build-up was marred by his adverse analytic finding and while it did not result in him being convicted of doping, his irregular test result certainly put question marks over the Brit’s legitimacy.

So here we are, once again, talking about elite athletes blackening the reputation of sport. Sport at the top level is always going to be about who can glean an extra half a percent over their rivals but something has gone wrong when taking salbutamol and hooking yourself up to an IV drip is normal.

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Ideally, we’d never have got to this point. Rowing back from here is going to be infinitely harder than stopping it getting here in the first place would have been. But we are where we are and there is little point in lamenting the shambles that is the past decade-or-so of anti-doping failures.

There is no cure but the first step towards some kind of recovery is tightening the rules to the point that Olympic champions are not casually hooking themselves up to IV drips or Tour de France winners are becoming embroiled in months-long doping scandals, a saga that has not only sullied Froome’s personal reputation but has also caused another dent in the reputation of sport as a whole. And with any luck, Lochte’s stupidity has highlighted to the anti-doping authorities that even those at the top of their sport are not being made aware of what is permitted.