Twenty summers ago, aboard a similar plane, I reached across the seat for a folded newspaper and I got my fingers grubby with ink and my nose rubbed into sport's grimiest reality.

Cheats were everywhere, I read between the lines. The heroes were glomming the headlines but the cheats were mocking us from the agate small type.

In the summer of 1988, someone had left behind a copy of the English-language Korea Times on the Seoul-bound plane. I thumbed through it innocently, thinking the Globe and Mail's readers might be amused by what Seoul's garage sales were offering.

Instead, I was welcomed to a wide world of cheating on different scales. Offered for sale on the newspaper page facing me were porn tapes, equipment suitable for either exercise or bondage fantasies, and no fewer than four offers of gas chromatographs. Having just left Novar, Ont., I figured one of those had to involve big-city sin.

The chromatograph was state-of-the-art equipment for drug testing in 1988, the kind of sophisticated equipment I'd heard that Russian and East German lab technicians used to make certain athletes pee into, so the doctors could be sure all tell-tale traces of steroids were rinsed from their systems

Aha, I thought, the black market knows there are cheats out there and they're even set to exploit it for profit by peddling anti-doping machines. Let's see what unfolds. Would the sports world have been different if Ben Johnson's handlers had answered one of those ads in the Korean Times? What if he'd been smart enough to skip the race, claiming injury? Would sport have been pushed to make as many advances as it has made in anti-doping if not for the kick start provided by the high-profile capture of the Canadian? Who was the next “trophy catch”…anyone even remember?

In some ways, the Johnson case made drug cheating a sexy issue. Without simple “just Ben” as he called himself, I suspect there'd have been only superficial U.S. federal government involvement, no BALCO investigation for tax fraud or drug distribution, none of Marion Jones's admissions or jail sentences, and Barry Bonds would be, unquestionably, the best baseball player of his generation.

But they're exactly that -- yesterfolk. We look ahead to find the next generation of champs and cheats.

The World Anti-Doping Agency pumps more than $20-million a year into drug tests, education and into prospecting the next stage of doping. That will be biological, rather than chemical. Genetic doping – the conversion of the human body rather than the medicinal adaptation of it – has been recognized as the next generation of advantages available to cheats.

I know that shooters have visited eye surgeons to sharpen their sight by taking mico-thin slices off the cornea; and orthopods have sucked away the pain and debris floating in knee joints to let middle distance runners go faster than before. That's all been okayed by the medicos who are expected to advise.

But the next generation includes splicing of DNA, the creation of what we might have called monsters, once.

Watch, marvel, maybe reel in horror...