It’s been clear for some time that sport is broken.

Well, maybe not sport as a whole but, certainly, elite sport is broken.

From the endless doping bans dished out to athletes in almost every discipline imaginable to sports discarding their morals to sell-out to Saudi Arabia’s riches to financial fair play rules being broken to the men in blazers being endlessly embroiled in corruption scandals, it’s been quite some time since anyone was under the illusion that professional sport is in a good place.

But this week, the definitive proof of the hole into which elite sport has fallen came with the confirmation that we are now doping children.

Such is the value placed upon sporting success, it’s accepted, in some quarters at least, that doping children is a sacrifice worth making if the return is a potential gold medal.

And what makes it worse, in this case in point at least, is that the solution that was landed upon was to blame the child and not the system which led to a minor being doped and in turn, testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs.

Earlier this week, Russian figure skater, Kamila Valieva, was handed a four-year ban for failing an anti-doping test back in December 2021.

Her case became particularly high-profile when the result of her positive test emerged during the 2022 Winter Olympics where, having begun the Games as one of the hot favourites for figure skating gold, the........

© Herald Scotland