Why does it continue to be so hard to deliver what clean athletes demand and desire?

Begins with L. Ends with W. And an A for Ass in the middle.

Thus four-year doping sentences have to be shrunk to two-year sentences. Well, that’s a restraint of trade, isn’t it?

Thus serious cheats can’t be banned from future Games, as the British Olympic Association ruled in its byelaws for almost 20 years. Well, that’s an extra sanction isn’t it?

And thus serious cheats can’t even be banned from the next Olympics up, as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) asserted ahead of the Beijing 2008 Games, only for stance to be ruled “invalid and unenforceable” by the Court of Arbitration for Sport in 2011. Well, that’s punishing people twice, isn’t it?

Earlier this week, at the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Foundation Board meeting in Glasgow, the IOC proposed that its Olympic ban - known as the “Osaka Rule” because it was introduced in 2007 during the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) World Championships in Osaka - should be resurrected.

If you were being cynical, you might infer some mischief here on behalf of the IOC, which has been so spectacularly and bitterly at odds with WADA this year over the timing of some of the latter organisation’s key announcements - notably the revelation of Russian doping shortly before the Rio Games, and the suspension of the Doha anti-doping laboratory on the eve of the ANOC General Assembly in the Qatari capital.

Most starkly, of course, the IOC resisted WADA’s call for a blanket ban on Russian competitors at the this summer’s Olympics following those revelations of orchestrated doping abuses within their country’s sporting structure.

Soon after the successful appeal to CAS against the IOC’s Rule 45 by US 400 metres runner LaShawn Merritt, who returned from a two-year doping ban in 2011, the current WADA President Sir Craig Reedie, then a WADA Executive Board member, told insidethegames:

"I share the IOC's disappointment in the CAS decision but if you are going to arbitrate, you need two sides that agree to arbitrate. The USOC (United States Olympic Committee) and the IOC agreed to arbitrate and we will therefore be bound by that arbitration rule."

Unsurprisingly, the latest proposal has put Sir Craig - who has been duffed up good and proper by the IOC establishment this year but is still soldiering on - onto the back foot.

"We will take legal advice before inserting it into the Code," the newly-re-elected WADA President told insidethegames.

"We are reluctant to put anything in the Code that runs the risk of being overturned."

It is virtually impossible to be cynical however when one considers who put the IOC suggestion forward - France’s Tony Estanguet, the triple Olympic canoeing champion and vice-chair of the IOC Athletes Commission.

Nobody can doubt the good faith in which Estanguet has acted. And in truth, the initiative does much to colour the IOC in a progressive - although strictly speaking, regressive - role following the public relations disaster of their perceived intransigence in failing to clamp down against Russia at this summer’s Olympics.

In calling for athletes who have served suspensions longer than six months to be excluded from the next edition of a Games, Estanguet is taking up the baton which was carried with such vigour by a previous generation of estimable Olympians.

In the wake of the IOC’s failure to resist the USOC appeal against the Osaka Rule, chair of the BOA Athletes’ Commission Sarah Winckless, the retired Olympic rowing bronze medallist and double world champion insisted that the BOA bylaw had the support of 90 per cent of British athletes.

British athletes had been surveyed on the matter after the 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008 Olympics, and there had been no wavering in their approval of a byelaw that was initiated by competitors, not administrators. Bryn Vaile, who was one of those competitors, remembered it well.

As a member of the formative BOA Athletes Commission, Vaile - a gold medallist in the 1988 Olympic Star sailing class - was among those responsible for getting the bylaw on the statute books on March 25 1992. Along with Olympic swimming gold medallist Adrian Moorhouse, he argued its case successfully to the BOA Executive Committee - and he believed passionately that the bylaw should remain.

Moorhouse, Vaile and fellow members of the Athletes Commission had felt that action needed to be taken to prevent doping offenders returning to represent their country in the Olympics, and had to overcome some opposition from within the BOA before they had their way.

"We looked into the legal position of restraint of trade," Vaile recalled. "But the way we saw it, this was not preventing people carrying on their careers – they could still compete in grand prix meetings or World Championships."

Vaile, however, wanted to see conditions become even more difficult for doping cheats. "I still believe that if you take performance-enhancing drugs, you should be banned for life," he said. "There should be no compromise to it, because that is compromising our futures. Every time a drugs cheat comes back to competition, it doesn't just tarnish the sport, and the people watching. It tarnishes the next generation, and it belittles every other clean athlete."

That is the pure view of the athlete. Whatever the political scintillations of his latest proposal, it is that pure view that Estanguet is now espousing. Surely, now, the Ass that is the Law needs to be led back into a more sensible direction.