The edge is that extra ingredient that enables you, the athlete, to get the better of your closest rivals.

Elusive and ephemeral as it tends to be, competitors and their entourages look for it in all manner of different places.

These include: training methods, physical and mental; clever exploitation of the rules, as epitomised by the cricketer who arrived at the crease one day in 1771 brandishing a bat the width of the wicket; a lucky few might even attain the edge through sheer, unadulterated talent – though with a world population pushing up towards eight billion, the odds against you being the Shakespeare of the pole-vault or the Mozart of the single scull must be dauntingly long.  

And then there is the doctrine of marginal gains, as practiced notably by the Great Britain cycling team, which holds that if you systematically identify and analyse every nook and cranny where a - legal - performance advantage might lie, the sum of tiny improvements hence made may well confer an edge over one’s opponents.

Two further commodities may be particularly helpful in delivering the edge that competitors strive for.

One is money – you may have noticed how the Olympic and Paralympic medals tables are still typically dominated by relatively rich, powerful nations.

The other is the one we all tend to focus on: performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs).

This is partly because many are banned and partly because of the scale of the improvement in performance levels that PEDs are perceived to make possible.

What interests me here though is not improved performance per se, but improved performance relative to one’s chief rivals.

While at the FT, I heard it said many times that fear and greed are the chief drivers of financial markets.

Performance enhancement in top-level sport is, I fancy, not so very different.

One of my main primers on the exceptionally murky world of PEDs in sport is a remarkable book written in 1991 by Robert Voy, one-time chief medical officer of the United States Olympic Committee (USOC).

While the scientific and legal aspects of the war against doping have moved on leaps and bounds in the quarter-century since the book – Drugs, Sport and Politics – was published, Voy’s observations on the psychology of performance enhancement still seem as persuasive today, with meldonium enjoying its 15 minutes of fame as the medicine of the moment, as when he composed them.

For example, is there a single syllable of this pithy, typically unflash summation from page 166 that is any less pertinent in 2016 than in 1991?

“The problems with performance enhancing drugs: a) they work; b) athletes can use some drugs in a way that allows them to slip through the current dope testing system; c) athletes believe if they don’t use drugs they will be at a disadvantage competing; and d) many types of drugs are not illegal to use.”

There’s the fear I was talking about: “athletes believe if they don’t use drugs they will be at a disadvantage competing”.

The greed, or lust for the spoils of victory, is encapsulated – quite chillingly – in this passage from page 115:

“Consider this. A number of elite-level athletes were asked if, hypothetically, they would be willing to take a special pill that would guarantee them an Olympic gold medal even if they knew this pill would kill them within a year. Over 50 per cent of the athletes surveyed said yes.

“This is a terrifying indication of just how desperate athletes are to win. Some athletes are clearly willing to do anything in their attempts to earn the fame, glory and wealth that come with winning. There are also many unethical physicians, trainers and businessmen out there who are willing to cash in on this desperation. Is it any wonder, therefore, that the drug problem has reached such an enormous magnitude?”

Think about that “within a year” and now tell me you are surprised there should have been as many as 99 positive drug tests for meldonium, a drug prescribed mostly to treat heart and cardiovascular diseases, in the two-and-a-bit months since it was added to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) banned list, due to evidence of its use by athletes with the intention of enhancing performance.

Given that its usage appears to have been widespread - “athletes believe if they don’t use drugs they will be at a disadvantage competing” - think now about the specific points at which athletes using meldonium as a performance aid might have hoped to acquire an edge over their rivals.

It seems to me there are two windows of potential maximum advantage.

The first would be at the outset for early adopters, before the majority of athletes and their entourages had cottoned onto the new intelligence.

The second would be after it was added to the banned list, on the dual assumption a) that most of your rivals would then stop taking it and b) that you could keep taking it without getting caught.

I would suggest that a similar pattern might apply with any new substance, from EPO to fried rice, rumoured on the grapevine to produce a performance benefit.

I also have to say that I doubt many professional athletes are quite as much in control of their own destinies as some of Voy’s comments imply: it seems to me there are many opportunities for a variety of interested parties to apply pressure on athletes to fall into line, even if they have misgivings about what they are being asked to do.

If this theory of the psychology of performance enhancement holds water, it leads to the bleak conclusion that most consumption of PEDs and other substances is motivated less by one’s hankering to gain an edge oneself than a paranoid desire to deny any possible edge to one’s rivals.

Fall prey to this mindset too religiously and you could end up after a few years at the top with a list of daily pills to pop as long as your arm.

Here, once again, is Voy: “To give you an idea of the number of substances athletes sometimes take, I recorded one athlete’s daily diet as follows: vitamin E, 1600 mg; B-complex capsules, four times per day; vitamin C, 2000 mg; vitamin B6, 150 mg; calcium tablets, four times daily; magnesium tablets, twice a day; zinc tablets, three times a day; royal jelly capsules; garlic tablets; cayenne tablets; eight aminos; Gamma-Oryzanol; Mega Vit Pack; supercharge herbs; Dibencozide; glandular tissue complex; natural steroid complex; Inosine; Orchic testicle extract; Pyridium; Ampicillin; and hair rejuvenation formula with Biotin.”

That list may have been drawn up a long time ago. I presume, moreover, that Voy selected one of the more extreme examples he had a record of. But would you want your grown-up child on that sort of regimen, even if they did step onto the odd podium from time to time?

Plus, as Voy adds, that was what the athlete – “a national track star” – admitted to taking. 

Maybe, a generation on, the gravity of recent allegations and disclosures is finally waking us up to the nature and scope of sport’s dark side in an age when the financial rewards of winning are unprecedented.

But the continued relevance of much of Voy’s quarter-century-old masterpiece underlines how far we remain from putting things right.

Perhaps we never will.