When Sport Crosses the Line (ft. James Witts, Author of DOPE)
The High Performance Podcast
High Performance
4.6 • 4.8K Ratings
🗓️ 6 May 2026
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What separates the athlete who cheats from the one who doesn't? And is the answer as simple as character — or is something else going on entirely?
This week, Damian sits down with sports journalist James Witts, author of Dope, a book that goes deep into the culture surrounding elite sport and the forces that push athletes across the line.
They get into the Enhanced Games arriving in Las Vegas, the staggering gap between how many athletes self-report doping versus how many ever test positive, and why doping in a contact sport like boxing is a fundamentally different moral question to doping on a bike.
Jake and Damian also bring in archive clips from legends Usain Bolt and Michael Johnson — two athletes who faced the question head-on, and answered it differently. Plus: your questions from the comments, what Jake and Damian have been watching and reading this week.
Dope by James Witts is out now.
Listen to full episodes:
Usain Bolt https://pod.fo/e/279623
Michael Johnson https://pod.fo/e/254ca8
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Damien, Jake. |
| 0:03.0 | Well, here we go with another episode of High Performance. |
| 0:06.0 | This month is the Enhanced Games. |
| 0:08.0 | And so we thought we would have a bit of a conversation about, I guess, doping in sport, |
| 0:12.0 | but with the umbrella view of what happens in life, |
| 0:16.0 | where you start out in your career, regardless of whether it's sport or something else, |
| 0:20.0 | with a really kind of fixed set of rules that you want to operate by and then what happens to your moral compass |
| 0:27.4 | as your career progresses that means those things get impacted and we've got a really cool |
| 0:32.8 | guest we're about to hear from right yeah so you used to phrase there, Jay, the moral compass. I think that's |
| 0:38.6 | really what this episode is about, about how do you keep your moral compass pointing to a true |
| 0:44.7 | north in a world that will constantly try and take you off course. And I was looking at to speak to |
| 0:50.7 | James Witts, is a billion journalist that's written a book that comes |
| 0:54.5 | out called dope, and it's about the culture that surrounds elite sport where young athletes |
| 1:01.3 | often get tempted to look for short courts, look for hacks, look for a quick route to the top |
| 1:05.6 | that gets them onto that podium, but it also involves injecting or imbibing different substances that are illegal. |
| 1:14.4 | And I wanted to talk around, how can you keep your moral compass true? |
| 1:18.4 | Great. Well, we'll hear from James in just a couple of moments. |
| 1:20.6 | But I think how about we start the episode by delving into some of the previous guests who've joined us, |
| 1:25.3 | who have had a clear moral compass, but actually |
| 1:28.4 | it's impacted their careers. Yeah. So again, this is the thing that, like, how do you be a |
| 1:34.1 | patient man in an impatient world? How do you be a clean athlete in a world where you know other |
| 1:38.9 | athletes are doping? That's not a free decision to make. I mean, it was a conversation we had with Yusain Bolt, if you remember when we sat down |
... |
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