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Gold Coast, Australia. Two Mondays ago. Police search a car they stopped as it approached Mermaid Waters. A Southport court is later told that 760 ecstasy tablets, some cannabis and some cash were found in the vehicle.
Two men in the car, aged 31 and 19, both sportsmen, face a range of charges.
The older man has been named as Nathan Baggaley, winner of three world kayaking titles and two Olympic silver medals and a former Australian Institute of Sport athlete of the year.
Baggaley has been one of the main rivals of New Zealand's best kayaker, Ben Fouhy, winner of a world championship and an Olympic silver medal.
We must wait for the evidence to be tested in court but the news will prompt reflection of an earlier time Baggaley made headlines. In September 2005, after Baggaley tested positive for the anabolic steroid Stanozolol and methandienone in an out-of-competition test, he said he had unknowingly ingested the banned drugs from a bottle of orange juice in his family's fridge.
He claimed the juice belonged to his brother who was said to be a rugby player recovering from injury.
Relevant questions that appear to have gone unanswered include whether his brother had a therapeutic use exemption allowing him to take such powerful banned drugs, something which would require documentary support from a doctor.
Stanozolol is the steroid that consigned Ben Johnson to infamy after he tested positive at the Seoul Olympics.
Methandienone, sometimes marketed as Dianabol, emerged in sport in Eastern Europe and is described by an internet drug sales company as "a reliable mass steroid ... which manifests itself in an enormous buildup of strength and muscle mass".
Baggaley claimed some vindication when his two-year ban was reduced on appeal to 15 months, suggesting it was an indication that his explanation of inadvertent use was accepted.
However, under pressure from the World Anti-Doping Authority (Wada), the International Canoe Federation reopened the case in December.
"If you believe your brother may have a fridge full of orange juice laced with steroids, you shouldn't be drinking these things," authority chairman Dick Pound said at the time.
If convicted of trafficking in relation to the drugs allegedly found in his car, Baggaley will be banned for life under Wada rules and his hopes dashed of competing at a third Olympics, in Beijing.
Baggaley's rise from the disappointment of 10th at the Sydney Olympics to multiple world champion brought him public affection, but if the criminal charges are successful it will harden doubts about how he achieved it.
CASES such as Baggaley's beg questions. Are they the actions of errant individuals, or are they indicative of a culture?
What do they say about Australia's sports factory, the AIS? Does Australia have the will to get tough on cheats, even if it means a lower medal tally?
Climbing the Olympic medal table is the goal of organisations such as the AIS and the more modestly funded high-performance division of Sport and Recreation New Zealand (Sparc).
The AIS, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary, was born of Australia's unhappiness with its result at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. Australia didn't win a gold and was only 32nd on the medal table, just above Mongolia and well behind New Zealand (18th).
Piling chagrin upon disappointment, the favoured Australians lost the men's hockey final (0-1) to New Zealand.
It couldn't be allowed to happen again, and it hasn't.
Australia was fourth on the medal table at each of the past two Olympics. The same countries made up the top three at each: the United States, China and Russia.
The populations of those countries are 301 million, 1.3 billion and 142 million.
Australia's population is 20 million, far fewer than the countries below it on the Athens Olympics medal table: Japan (128 million), Germany (82 million), France (64 million), Italy (58 million), South Korea and Great Britain (both 49 million).
The only nation with a similar population to Australia to do better has been East Germany under its secret government-sanctioned policy of doping its young athletes.
At those 1976 games, East Germany (population 11 million) headed off the United States for second.
Peter Davis, who headed the AIS Olympic athletes programme for nine years, tells the Weekend Herald he is convinced there is no systematic doping in Australia or the United States and Canada, where he has similar experience.
Apart from one country that he won't name, that is involved in winter sports, he is unaware of any evidence that might indicate it is occurring in the Western world.
Nor has he encountered tacit approval of the kind that another former Australian athlete of the year described in 2000.
Discus thrower Werner Reiterer was a gold medal hope for the Sydney Olympics but instead retired and, embarrassingly for the Government, revealed his own doping on the eve of the Games in an autobiography titled Positive.
Reiterer alleged that at least one "Olympic administrator" condoned drug use by warning athletes about the timing of doping tests and advising how to beat such tests.
Davis' posts have included senior positions in high performance with the United States Olympic Committee and Australian Rugby Union and he is at present director of sport science and medicine for Canada's Olympic programmes.
His experience, he says, is the opposite of complicity on the part of officialdom.
Coaches have come to him concerned that an athlete might be doping and requested they be tested.
Davis says an example was Charlie Walsh, who was Australia's cycling coach and is renowned for his tough training regimes.
IT APPEARS Walsh was right. The so-called "shooting gallery" scandal where cyclists were injecting banned drugs - allegedly including equine growth hormone - brought sports institutes unfavourable publicity because the injecting occurred in an institute hostel.
But examples around the world demonstrate that coaches are often complicit in cheating.
Most agree that the case of Russian-born Gennadi Touretski, personal coach of Olympic gold medallists Alexander Popov and Michael Klim, and a member of the AIS coaching team guiding Australia's world-beating swimmers, ended unsatisfactorily.
Touretski's world was turned upside down by a fluke when, in April 2001, his home was burgled and a safe removed.
The safe was recovered minus its valuables but containing, police alleged, a quantity of steroids. The Australian team's swim coach was charged with offences under Australia's Poisons and Drugs Act, which provides for a maximum penalty of six months in prison.
The case was ultimately abandoned when a judge ruled that Touretski's wife, Inna, could not be compelled to testify against her husband.
Under Australian law, a spouse can be excused if harm to the relationship is found to outweigh the value of the testimony.
Inna Touretski had argued that evidence might wreck their marriage.
Touretski, who was suspended on full pay, returned to his coaching job at the AIS but has since left Australia.
In 2000, the Australian Government won kudos for the best anti-doping performance of any Olympics.
Counting the 27 Chinese who were kept at home, and other athletes who failed tests, the number of positives from the Sydney Olympics exceeded the 52 from the previous seven Olympics, although part of the explanation is that previous anti-doping measures were lamentable.
Australia's scientists had led the way in producing - in time for those games - a method of detecting doping with the powerful blood-boosting drug EPO.
But since those Olympics funding has dried up for the same scientists, who had moved to finding methods to detect use of a broadening range of other synthetic blood-doping products.
One of them, Robin Parisotto, told the Weekend Herald he has had to take a job in general research.
German researchers now lead the hunt for such tests.
There are occasions, he says, when he wonders whether the push for an EPO test in time for the Sydney Olympics was motivated by public relations.
More encouragingly, Australia is at the forefront of broadening methods of detecting cheats.
It has passed a law that expressly authorises information sharing between customs, police and the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority (Asada).
Authority boss Richard Ings, formerly a professional tennis umpire and who presided over McEnroe and Connors encounters, says the law provided the same tools to those seeking to detect sports cheats as are available to combat crime.
While testing remained important, it revealed a fraction of the picture. All the major busts of the past 10 years came through government agencies: Balco, through the United States' Inland Revenue; Operacion Puerto through Spain's Justice Department, Festina (1998 Tour de France) through the police; and the Chinese swimmers, caught with human growth hormone the same year by Australian customs.
Ings said it was foolhardly to "put 100 per cent of our eggs in the testing basket when the future is that athletes will use things that cannot be detected".
Testing can detect only one of the eight doping breaches identified by WADA. The other seven require investigation.
Investigation has already achieved remarkable results. "Two investigators and a half a million dollar budget [of Asada's total budget of more than A$12 million] cranked out 25 per cent of our doping violations in the first six months and we believe that will continue to grow.
"I've got this multimillion-dollar investment in testing and a quarter of my findings are coming from two people knocking on doors. It's pretty impressive."
One violation that came from investigation involved a second-division rugby league player who was using human growth hormone, a drug considered to have been widely abused since the 1980s and for which there has never been a positive test.
Asada has set up a "stamp-out-doping hotline" and Ings wants to imbed an investigator with Australian customs' analysts.
"How many individuals in recent years have had packages intercepted where the volume was so low that they just got a warning letter?
"We want to follow up on that. We want to trawl through old court cases that have involved prohibited substances to see whether [there were] links to athletes."
Graeme Steel, head of Drug Free Sport New Zealand, said the Sports Anti-Doping Act, which comes into effect in July, while not as explicit as Australia's legislation, would allow similar detection methods here.
He planned to employ an investigator but said he doubts that New Zealand has a problem on the same scale as that of Australia.
