There was something almost touching about the traces of shock and despair in the little post on social media by our old colleague John Beattie following his radio show the other day.

“I’m going home, after former athlete Drew McMaster told me four rugby players I would know from the 1980s took steroids,” he wrote.

The tone of the message from this worldly man who has moved from sports journalism to a broader news agenda seems almost bewildering in the context of all that we know, yet it reflects a naivete, in some cases of an almost wilful nature when it comes to this subject that undermines attempts to deal with it.

It was consequently a matter of considerable concern, then, when Craig Reedie, the Scot who is the current president of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) went on television the same night to claim he does not think there is a mass doping problem in British sport.

It was hard to disagree with the social media response to Reedie’s comment of Jim Delahunt, another broadcaster I’ve worked with a bit in the past: “Always found him nice but wrong person to go for that kind of opinion. Bit like getting Cram to i/v Coe!!”

All this was the response to weekend claims in The Sunday Times that British doctor Mark Bonar had been caught on tape admitting to having supplied drugs to some 150 elite sportspeople.

Dr Bonar has subsequently denied what was attributed to him, but after all that has happened before we have to consider why we are in any way surprised by such revelations.

Some in the rugby community have sought to suggest that McMaster’s claims lack credibility because there was an amateurishness about their sport at the time in terms of attitudes to conditioning that would preclude such practices.

Yet if we are talking about the eighties then that is long after David Jenkins, a product of the rugby hotbeds of Edinburgh Academy and the University of Edinburgh and who was performing in the similarly ‘shamateur’ sport of athletics in that era, has admitted to having taken performance enhancing drugs.

Is it really beyond the bounds of credibility that some of his school or University colleagues would have been exposed and succumbed to the temptation to take a short-cut to fame and glory, if not necessarily wealth?

The defence offered by UK Anti-Doping (UKAD) for its failure to act upon initial reports about the doctor who was reported upon in The Sunday Times at the weekend is that he was not officially linked to a sporting body so was not under their jurisdiction and that they did not feel they had sufficient evidence to pass the information on to the General Medical Council.

All of this starts to raise the question of just how keen the British sporting establishment, ready as it is to accept such accusations about those from further afield, really is to address these matters?

As also became clear when the Scottish Football Association was recently placed under scrutiny about the lack of testing that takes place in our national game, it is an area that is badly under-funded which instantly offers the upper hand to those seeking to make commercial gain as suppliers and to those prepared to pay for their services.

That may seem extraordinary given all that has happened since David Jenkins was in his prime 40 years ago and we are left to wonder whether some in the wider sporting community would prefer not to know that their friends and rivals were dopers and, rather more disturbingly, whether administrators who have the wherewithal to fund anti-doping programmes, are choosing not to because they believe the damage to their sport will be too great if they do expose participants as cheats.

The easy option, as some choose to take, is to seek to dismiss the claims of the likes of Drew McMaster, by suggesting they are merely embittered and agenda driven.

Doing so is to engage in pretty similar tactics to those employed by Lance Armstrong before more than a decade of investigative journalism finally exposed him which, in turn, takes us to the way some establishment apologists would prefer us to focus upon the methodology used by under-cover journalists.

The reality is that the level of deception and intimidation used by the likes of Armstrong makes it almost impossible to expose much of what is happening without employing an array of methods, including subterfuge.

That may seem cynical while, like John Beattie, few of us wish to discover to find out that people we have known for most of our adult lives built themselves up both physically and reputationally through unfair means. However if the alternative is wilful naivete then it is a much better state of mind when involved in such a murky business.