Perhaps I'm overly jaded, but as far as I'm concerned, as long as there are athletes, there will always be attempts by some of them to use performance enhancing drugs in order to win.

We already know this first hand. We've seen how Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Marion Jones - who were all at the top of their games even without using performance enhancing drugs - ventured into the world of PEDs to prolong their careers and dominate in the process.

I don't remember where I heard it, but someone once said the real problem in sports is not when some low-level athletes are using PEDs, it's when even the best athletes in the world are doing them. The trickle down effect is then that everyone has to cheat to survive.

But while PEDs are one problem, there's a whole new disaster looming on the horizon, and just in time for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It's gene doping, or "the non-therapeutic use of cells, genes, genetic elements, or of the modulation of gene expression, having the capacity to improve athletic performance" as defined by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).

Back in early 2002, WADA sponsored a meeting at the Cold Spring Harbor genetics lab on Long Island in New York. Doping authorities met with genetic scientists to ask if athletes and their handlers would soon be altering their very genomes in an effort to soup up their performance. Was the age of the genetically-enhanced athlete upon us?

The answer, at the time, was that this was a long way off. Yet by 2006, Theodore Friedmann, one of the world’s leading experts on gene therapy to treat disease and the chairman of WADA’s gene-doping panel, had this to say:

“I’m not so sanguine as I was that this is far off in the future.”

And now, it appears that what was once thought to be a problem years off is already here. And not just here, but readily available.

A German television report that aired on Monday night discovered that stem-cell therapy (which if used by athletes would be considered gene doping) is readily available in China, and is basically waiting to be abused.

In the documentary, a Chinese doctor offers stem-cell therapy to a reporter posing as an American swimming coach who is looking for treatment for one of his athletes.

The report, filmed with a concealed camera, shows the doctor with his face blurred speaking in Chinese and offering the treatment in return for $24,000.

The program did not offer evidence that the hospital had provided gene doping to other athletes, but anti-doping officials were appalled that the treatment was so readily available.

Here's the actual translation from the TV program:

The fictitious coach says he is seeking stem-cell treatment for one of his swimmers.

Doctor: "Yes. We have no experience with athletes here, but the treatment is safe and we can help you," the doctor replies. "It strengthens lung function and stem cells go into the bloodstream and reach the organs. It takes two weeks. I recommend four intravenous injections ... 40 million stem cells or double that, the more the better. We also use human growth hormones, but you have to be careful because they are on the doping list."

If this isn't a major red flag, I don't know what is. Here were some experts' responses.

"I could not have imagined it in such a provable form," Mario Thevis, chief of the German centre of preventive doping research in Cologne.

Another Cologne expert on gene doping, Patrick Diel, said he was "stunned to see it."

"It goes beyond my worst expectations," Diel said.

The problem is that gene doping, right now, is extremely difficult to detect. Meaning in a short period of time, we could have tons of people cheating and never know it's happening.

Although there's no evidence that says any athletes are currently gene doping - but again, it'd be almost impossible right now to know if they are - many experts see it as the future of cheating.

Given the ease with which gene doping is starting to become available, how it's likely to only get more advanced from this point, and how athletes will go to any means necessary to gain an edge, the sports world may soon be in for a shock that'll make the cheating of Bonds, Clemens, and Jones look incredibly minor in comparison.

Experts stunned by gene doping possibilities in China [Globe and Mail]