It was with great amusement that a British newspaper colleague once told me that the loudest sound to be heard in an Olympic swimming arena was that of all the competitors sucking on their inhalers.

The same individual was capable of coming close to spontaneous combustion on encountering the names of those eastern European athletes he had personally deemed to be cheats on the basis of performance and/or physique.

They, you see, would have been taking drugs deemed illegal and therefore doping. The swimmers who were taking medication that many would not have otherwise required, drugs designed to address respiratory issues such as asthma, were doing so legally because they had acquired therapeutic use exemptions (TUEs).

However much my colleague was inclined to exaggerate either way when offering those apparently contradictory views, the leaks being produced by Russian hackers ‘the Fancy Bears’ now suggest either that the number of sportspeople who depend on drugs to cope with every day life is outrageously disproportionate to that in the wider population, or that the industrialisation of elite sport has reached such a level that it is exceptionally bad for the health.

That, in turn, raises serious questions about the morality of those running programmes which push these athletes to their limits and, it would seem, those they can reach without resorting to drugs through the use of TUEs.

Under the headline ‘It looks bad Brad’ - referencing the sainted Bradley Wiggins - David Walsh, the journalist whose 13 year crusade brought down Lance Armstrong, last weekend recounted one of his experiences after being invited to spend time living with Team Sky, those great standard bearers of the British sporting revolution, in their bid to demonstrate that they were clean.

He had attended a presentation at which one of Team Sky’s doctors projected an image of their trademark cycling jersey, black with blue line running down the back. That line was, he suggested, symbolic, because it differentiated legal from illegal, the line to which they would push but not cross.

That is pretty much the language of the tax lawyer. Not the difference between right and wrong. Merely the difference between legal and illegal.

Sport is, of course, entirely dependent on rules that are in many instances rather arbitrary, without which much of the activity would border on strange, to the point of silly, that old favourite of the offside line instantly springing to mind. However this needs to be seen in the context of the demonisation and blanket banning of the representatives of an entire nation on the basis of what was branded a ‘state-sponsored doping cover up’, something that was quite rightly portrayed as morally corrupt.

However in determining the difference between legal and moral it must also be seen in the context of what constitutes doping.

Earlier this year I attended a lecture given by Dick Pound, considered by many the Godfather of anti-doping policy, at which he explained that for all the drug use that was prevalent in sport previously, there was no such thing as doping until rules were put in place governing that area. In short he deemed drug taking to be doping only on grounds of legality, not morality.

Pound also outlined the three criteria that the World Anti-Doping Agency considers when placing substances on the banned list: that they are performance enhancing, likely to be damaging to the health of the athlete and violate what he claimed was a defined term, but is in reality a rather nebulous concept used by many people to mean many things, namely ‘the spirit of sport.’

As I have also pointed out before the use of any drug ahead of playing sport, even the anti-inflammatories my septuagenarian team-mate takes before Forty Club cricket matches, or for that matter throwing paracetamol onto alcohol in a bid to reduce the impact of a hangover, is considered by the person taking them to be performance enhancing, otherwise they would not take them.

As to potential impact on health, it was the effect of repeated use of anti-inflammatories that my old pal’s fellow opening bowler Ian Botham cited as one of the reasons he quit playing the sport in the early nineties.

As the list grows of western athletes - many of whose physiques and performances have given rise to speculation in the past - whose liberal use of TUEs is uncovered by the Russian hackers it is, then, worth considering the following.

We have WADA, run by a British chairman, decreeing which drugs are legal and when.

We have the IAAF, run by a British chairman, denouncing Russian athletes.

We have the Paralympics, run by a British chairman, banning Russian athletes from participation.

We meanwhile have record medal hauls for British competitors at both the Olympics and Paralympics.

The British are lauded because everything they have done has been within the rules.

The Russians are meanwhile ostracised.

Is it morally wrong, though, to wonder how the rule book might read if it was initially published in Cyrillic rather than English?