With annual income of something like £7.7 million ($10.8 million/€9.5 million)  – or less than £150,000 ($212,000/€186,000) a week – according to the last public figures, chief executive Nicole Sapstead and her team must face continual difficult choices in deciding how to get maximum bang for their buck.

Yet the affair – triggered by the Sunday Times allegation that Bonar had been secretly filmed describing how he prescribed banned performance-enhancing drugs to 150 elite sportsmen – also seems to highlight a glaring weakness in the UK’s anti-doping regime.

When I contacted UKAD last month to talk finances, I was told that, while the national anti-doping organisation (NADO) had to cut its coat according to its cloth, “the programme we are able to run remains a highly effective programme”.

This in spite of moves by the British Government to trim its direct spending on anti-doping, with overall grant-in-aid to UKAD expected to drift down from £6.031 million ($8.5 million/€7.4 million) in 2013-2014 to £5.296 million ($7.5 million/€6.5 million) in 2016-2017.

In her response to the Sunday Times report, however, Sapstead stated that, while UKAD had commenced an investigation into Bonar following interviews with a sportsperson two years ago, it had found nothing to indicate he was governed by a sport.

“Under current legislation,” she said, “UKAD has the power only to investigate athletes and entourage (including medics) who are themselves governed by a sport”.

Bonar, it should be said, has described the allegations as “false and very misleading” in a Twitter account - @ZenGrifter – that appears to be his.

Now tell me: if you only have the power to investigate medics who are governed by a sport, how on earth can you be sure that your anti-doping programme is highly effective?

Wouldn’t such a state of affairs actually provide an incentive for any doping doctors who might be out there not to become affiliated to a sport?

Returning to Bonar, Sapstead went on to explain that UKAD had considered informing the General Medical Council (GMC), which overseas medical practitioners in Britain, but decided the evidence they had did not give grounds for such a referral.

Very well, I thought, while the legislation may be flawed, if this is the regime UKAD has to work with, one would imagine that links with the GMC would be pretty close, say, with a senior GMC member on the UKAD board.

I have to admit, the GMC is not a body I am at all familiar with; nonetheless, scanning the bios of the nine UKAD board members on the NADO’s website, I see no reference to the GMC there.

What I do see is a wealth of experience in the fields of a) sport and b) law enforcement.

As for individuals with a more scientific/medical bent, I see Professor John Brewer, head of the school of sport, health and applied science at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, and Justin Turner, a QC with a PhD in immunology.

Brewer also has a specifically sporting hat, as chair of British Ski and Snowboard.

Having read the full list of bios through twice, slowly, I think I can say that the word “medical” does not appear once.

This seems to me a remarkable oversight; surely, a senior medical practitioner ought to be added to this UKAD board as a matter of urgency.

This week’s events may also have longer-term consequences.

While its overall grant-in-aid has been falling, UKAD’s standing as one of the world’s most respected NADOs has helped it to keep income from non-government sources rising: in 2014-2015 it totalled £1.928 million ($2.7 million/€2.46 million), up from £1.421 million ($2 million/€1.8 million) the previous year.

The Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) has welcomed UKAD’s moves to “bring in further investment from the commercial sector to support its efforts”.

Should UKAD’s handling of the Bonar case, which is now subject to an independent review, in any way diminish its reputation, then you would think there must be a risk that its ability to keep non-government income increasing might be affected.

This might, in turn, ratchet up pressure on hard-pressed Government ministers to stump up more cash.

For much of this week, I have had the childhood nursery rhyme, “There’s a hole in my bucket dear Liza, dear Liza” running through my head on a loop.

Just at the moment, with a seemingly endless succession of unwelcome doping disclosures and allegations hitting the public domain, this strikes me as the appropriate musical accompaniment to our hapless attempts to control this phenomenon of modern, “win-at-all-costs” sport.

● I have become a bit tired of writing about the so-called war on drugs in recent weeks; and if I have become tired of writing about it, there’s a good chance you are getting tired of reading about it too.

So, to borrow Monty Python’s catchphrase, now for something completely different: the story of how a dog came to be sitting among the accredited media at an Olympic Games.

Not a guide-dog or a police-dog, you understand, but a plain old family pooch, albeit a pooch with pretty illustrious owners.

I stumbled upon this strangely beguiling story while researching something completely different (obviously); it is included in the United States Olympic Book for the 1976 Games in Montreal.

The dog, Bertha, a golden labrador, belonged to decathlon champion Bruce Jenner - “Superman in a sweatsuit” as the article describes him - and Chrystie Crownover, his then wife.

Chrystie, it seems, had wanted to watch a pal compete in the discus; her dog-sitter had disappeared, so, as she explained, “I brought Bertha along”.

In what today, in our necessarily security-hyperconscious times, reads as a fable from an age of innocence, the author, Maury White, relates what then happened.

“[Chrystie] and Bertha had managed to saunter past three sets of guards en route to the final press entrance into the vast stadium.

“The last set said “No!” in at least six languages.

“Bertha, bless her heart, solved the problem.

“As the guards were lecturing Chrystie, Bertha simply trotted the few remaining yards into the Stadium and temporarily got lost among 70,000 pairs of legs.

“The guards shrugged and let Chrystie pass too.”

The pair did, eventually, get ejected after a picture-taking session blew their cover.

“Madam”, a security man is reported as saying, “we all love our pets.

“You love your dog.

“I love my cat.

“He loves his parakeet.

“But can we bring them to the Olympic Stadium?

“Of course not.”

The charm of the story is augmented if you consider that Bruce Jenner – of whom White writes, “If this face and body had appeared 4 ½ centuries earlier in Italy, Michelangelo would have chiselled another marble masterpiece” – is now Caitlyn Jenner, perhaps the most famous openly transgender woman in the world and, so Wikipedia tells me, a star (or perhaps former star) of Keeping up with the Kardashians.

I resurrect this story purely in an attempt to cheer us all up – and to underline how things have changed since those days of Comaneci and the Sex Pistols.