Drugs in sport: Whatever eventually happens to Rio Ferdinand and Dwain Chambers, it is the system that has failed the test argues Mark Lawson

For all the talk of a new superdrug for runners called tetrahydrogestrinone (THG) and footballers snorting coke in nightclubs, the biggest problem with sport and drugs is speed.

Tomorrow Rio Ferdinand finally faces a disciplinary hearing almost three months after failing to report to a drugs test. Hearings and appeals in the case of the British sprinter Dwain Chambers, who tested positive for THG, are expected to be a marathon running up to the start of the Olympics in Athens next year.

These, though, are short distances compared with the 15 years which have elapsed since Carl Lewis, the iconic American sprinter, known for sanctimonious speeches against opponents who took drugs, failed three tests himself in the United States Olympic training camp in 1988 - a fact which emerged only recently.

So 2003 can be seen as the year in which sporting authorities got quicker at testing for drugs but slower at doing anything about it. This paradox is explained by the fact that, while we still talk of organisations running sport, it is the performers and their clubs and representatives who have the real authority.

Whatever laws a sporting body tries to enact, a modern sporting superstar will always be able to afford the best and the most expensive lawyers. What happens is a stand-off in which the authorities may be conducting the urine tests but the athletes are taking the piss.

The sudden slowness of the world's fittest men when they are faced with trouble over drugs was most spectacularly demonstrated in the case of Ferdinand. In the history of suspicious urinations from sportsmen this was always an unusual example because, while most incidents involve arguments over what was really in the pee, the Manchester United defender failed to deliver a sample at all.

Ferdinand's explanation for his unavailability to fill the flask was revealing of the way in which Premiership stars are redefining masculinity. While generations of men have used pressure of work as an excuse for not going shopping, Ferdinand was pictured shopping when he should still have been at work. He had reportedly driven to Harvey Nichols on a day when he was also moving to a new home.

This omission would not have been possible in athletics, where competitors are shepherded by a tester from the moment of selection until they splash the plastic. In football the testing system was rather more like a doctor's appointment, with a similar possibility for no-shows. Resulting from managers' paranoia about admitting strangers to the Premiership dressing rooms, this compromise is an example of football's tendency to lose its bottle on the question of narcotics.

So was the rate at which the Football Association and Manchester United then moved on the Ferdinand matter, a progress so slow that there is a case for all the officials involved being tested for abuse of sleeping pills? Both sides had motivations for the delays.

The FA feared being challenged or out-lawyered by England's biggest club and the game's most combative manager, Alex Ferguson, while Manchester United, long an organisation which seems to consider itself intuitively above the rules, blocked and blustered because the club needed Ferdinand to play for the wages he was paid. Ferguson, who could teach a spy about suspicion, may also have feared an attempt by rivals to use the Ferdinand case to slip something into his team's end-of-season champagne.

The result was that the credibility of football's drug testing was threatened even before the outcome of the Ferdinand hearing this week. A relatively short ban - during a period when United's Wes Brown is fit again and England are playing only warm-up friendlies before Euro 2004 - might seem an appropriate compromise but the game will need to go shopping as urgently as Ferdinand for a new policy on testing.

Football can also be accused of confusing two issues: the enforcement of fair competition and social moralism about drugs. The samples collected in athletics are intended entirely to prevent some competitors benefiting from artificial muscle bulk or strength. The drug drive in football - a game in which it is legal for injured players to be given cortisone injections which may disable them in later life - is more complicated.

While most of the substances banned from Olympic sprinters are also denied to Premiership strikers, the majority of those caught by FA and FIFA testing have been recreational users of dope and coke. For example, the top-flight career of the Chelsea goalkeeper Mark Bosnich was ended by the revelation that he took Class A drugs. This either means that football does not have a steroid problem or that the apprehension of it is more lax.

But, in sniffing out joints and wraps, there is a blurring of aims here which football needs to work out. Athletics has set itself to outlaw performance-enhancing drugs but is a footballer who has used charlie or pot in a nightclub likely to play better or worse the following day? Observation of certain players rumoured to have been crackheads is that their habit was not good for their talent. It can be argued that a player who is high or mellow may be more likely to injure himself or an opponent but an anti-drugs crusade cannot be regarded as an attempt to create a level playing field, as it is in athletics events.

A similar ambiguity occurs in another of this year's curious stories about sporting performance under the influence: the case of the "drunk" jockeys. By breathalysing riders - and suspending those who tested positive - the Jockey Club could also be accused of making an issue of performance-reducing substances, which might simply be regarded as the performer's own stupid choice.

The justification of such a substance policy might be that it is as dangerous to be in charge of a horse after drinking as it is to drive a car in such a state. But the disqualifying limit is so low (half of the one which puts you off the road) and jockeys are half the weight of average men (exaggerating the presence of alcohol) that it is possible to have some sympathy for the argument that, like footballers, the saddle stars are being held to rules of monastic abstinence which do not apply to those in other fields of employment.

No such tolerance can be extended to athletics, where the use of drugs is purely intended as cheating. Unable to go shopping instead of splashing out for the dope doctor, runners have over the years provided an entertaining litany of explanations for why banned substances have passed through their kidneys.

They had taken an over-the-counter powder for a cold. Or a survey of Eskimos has shown that the bodies of a small number of people produce these by-products naturally. Perhaps someone tampered with their water bottle during training.

Dick Pound, the Canadian lawyer who runs the World Anti-Doping Agency, has made the point that one advantage of designer drugs for the authorities is that they rule out the defence of coincidence or ignorance. If an athlete is found with THG in his system, then it is futile to complain of a failure to read the Lemsip packet properly. The substance can have originated only in a sports-cheat laboratory.

The long-term problem for athletics is not the testing, which now seems to be only a few paces behind the cheats rather than being lapped, but the subsequent imposition of penalties. The sport's authorities favour lifetime bans from competition but a world increasingly run by lawyers is likely to interpret this as restraint of trade. Eventually proven junkie runners may expect to sit out one Olympic cycle and then be followed constantly to the lavatory on their return.

Because every International Olympic Committee doctor inventing new drugs tests has a dark shadow in a laboratory somewhere else creating new drugs - or blood transfusion or other unfair advantage - an opinion once restricted to extreme free-marketeers has now become a mainstream view.

It is increasingly argued that athletics should become a narcotics free-for-all in which, in a human version of formula one racing, everyone can adapt their chassis and their engine and success will go to the performer whose artificial enhancements are the best. A variation of this is that there should be two separate Olympics: with and without steroids.

The argument against this proposal is that performers would effectively kill themselves in pursuit of gold. In professional cycling - where drugs are not legalised but prevention of their use has been poor - three top young competitors have recently suffered medically suspicious sudden death.

To succeed an athlete needs speed and power and, if competition is ever to be clean, then those who run the games need to be provided with both qualities. Even if Rio Ferdinand suddenly has more time to go shopping, he would be able to buy American merchandise which presents Carl Lewis and other suspected athletes (especially in baseball) as heroes: a situation indicative of a business in which questions are raised and answered too slowly.