KEY POINTS:
On Tuesday, Trevor Graham goes on trial charged with lying to federal agents about distributing banned drugs to elite athletes.
Graham is the Jamaican-born world-class track coach whose whistle-blowing on the BALCO affair set off an international scandal when he provided drug authorities with a sample of the undetectable steroid known as THG or "the clear". That set in motion events leading to the imprisonment and disgrace of former Olympic champion sprinter Marion Jones.
Three months before the Beijing Olympics, the irony is that Graham is going on trial in San Francisco and some of the seven athletes he has coached (four of them Olympic gold medallists, including Jones) will testify he helped them get human growth hormone, the blood-doping substance EPO and other performance-enhancing drugs.
Graham coached Jones, Justin Gatlin, Tim Montgomery and Antonio Pettigrew, all gold medallists, among others. Pettigrew - a 4x400m gold medal relay winner at Sydney in 2000 - will testify he was encouraged to take performance-enhancing drugs.
So too will Dennis Mitchell, the sprinter whose explanation for damning amounts of testosterone in his system was the result of too much sex with his wife has gone down in history as one of the most implausible of excuses. Graham denies encouraging drug use and lying to investigators.
The trial is significant - as was the Jones episode - because it shows how drugs agencies like WADA (the World Anti-Doping Authority) are strategically adding cooperation with law enforcement agencies like Interpol and the US Drug Enforcement Agency to the traditional drugs-testing role.
Jones - jailed for six months - was tripped up not by drugs tests (she came up clean 160 times) but by the fact she lied to investigators after admitting the five gold medals she won at Sydney were steroid-fuelled.
Visiting Wellington recently, WADA director-general David Howman said links with law enforcement agencies were growing but were still a work in progress. Law enforcement inquiries gathered evidence of doping and links now existed that could see the agencies share their evidence with sport and make sure "those who are cheating are sanctioned."
While the Graham and Jones trials demonstrate the success of the inter-agency approach, anti-drugs authorities are also beefing up their testing programmes to ensure they do better than Jones' 160 'clean sheets'.
In Sydney, Howman and WADA president John Fahey said advances had been made in technology and techniques to uncover human growth hormone usage. HGH can be difficult to detect and which Howman has said has long been taken "with impunity" in many countries.
Whether the new HGH tests catch more offenders is yet to be seen but the Beijing Olympics are already pushing the line this will be the 'cleanest' Olympics for many years with their lab set to do 4500 drugs tests, up from the 3600 done in Athens four years ago.
This is itself more than faintly ironic, given China's previously poor record in doping - although the country has apparently taken large steps to clean up its act. Operation 'Raw Deal', masterminded by the DEA, shut down 26 underground US steroid labs and made more than 120 arrests in what is thought to be the largest performance-enhancing drugs crackdown in US history last year.
Raw Deal also identified no fewer than 37 Chinese factories providing the raw materials for the US labs, a fact that has led to China becoming notorious as the biggest supplier of anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, insulin growth factor and other performance-enhancing substances to the world.
That creates a paradox - China's elite athletes no longer test positive, but the country is awash in factories that pump out the cheats' pills.
However, Fahey said: "The testing in Beijing on HGH will be more advanced than ever before."
The main problem - an extremely narrow window of detection - had been addressed. "If you micro-dosed, you could get it through the system, providing you stopped at an approriate time before you competed. There was a view that it was hours. I can assure you now it's many days.
"We are better now at detecting over longer periods and those that believed in certain things there, if they wish to continue to believe in that, they will do so at their peril.
New measures swing into place from January 2009 where some athletes nominated for drugs testing will have to tell testers where they are for one hour every day - to allow random testing.
The new measures have provoked some controversy as they are being applied across many sports - British footballers threatened court action over the restrictions before they realised the measures were not as 'invasive' as they thought.
But they still require athletes nominated by a national and/or international body to tell testers where they will be, for one hour every day, available for drug testing.
New Zealand athletes will have to do the same. Graham Steel, executive director of Drug Free Sport New Zealand (the agency charged with drug testing in this country) said athletes in the nominated pool would then risk a "three-strikes-and-out" policy if they did not comply.
Britain's 400m champion Christine Ohuruogu was given a one-year ban for missing three such tests last year.
