Supremely placed to make such a statement is John Fahey.

To illustrate the point, the former NSW premier who has just completed a full term as the World Anti-Doping Agency's president, recounts the first of many anecdotes shared in this extended boardroom meeting when one liquid caffeine hit rolls into another.

Having finished at WADA, Fahey enjoyed a restful summer break by the beach, but today at JP Morgan's plush Sydney headquarters, where he is one of the investment bank's senior advisers, he is suited up and animated, discussing the six years in charge of the global anti-doping effort.

During the dark year that was in Australian sport, Fahey repeatedly declined to be interviewed at length like this, conscious of his position at WADA and the prospect - still very real - that the world's most powerful anti-doping authority might yet become directly involved in the scandals that engulfed Essendon and Cronulla football clubs. But now here he is, lucid and liberated before an open mic (though it turns out still somewhat restrained when it comes to the still unfolding AFL and NRL cases ).

Tapping into a rich memory bank, Fahey puts his politics sport politics simile into disturbing context with this reminiscence: it's some years ago and he's at one of the world's grandest sport events among the VIP guests. Fahey happens upon a sports minister who has just learnt that one of his country's top sporting figures has been pinged for doping. This politician, in full-blown hand-wringing mode, describes to Fahey what feels like a national catastrophe.

Fahey tells the minister he should wear the doping discovery ''as a badge of honour'', yet he is convinced, after walking away, that the message has fallen on deaf ears.

Alarmingly, this exchange encapsulates a lasting feeling Fahey has taken from his intimate experience in sports anti-doping. He has concluded, and is not afraid to say, that very few powerbrokers in sport and politics would genuinely view high-profile doping cases exposed in their backyard the way he does - through the prism of the greater good.

''If you're a sports minister, the last thing you want is one of your athletes to be picked up for doping,'' Fahey says. ''Firstly, it brings shame on your country. Secondly, it is seen as a failure. Thirdly, any sports minister is going to say, 'Why has this happened on my watch?'

''Then come to the sport itself: no sport wants to have cheats in their ranks. It impacts on their capacity to get sponsorship, it impacts on their membership, it impacts on their crowd levels … and it's a black mark in many cases against those officials.

''I'm not saying they deliberately avoid finding out the truth, I'm simply saying that they pay lip service to the problem. Most sports don't invest anywhere near enough into making sure that there is the most effective of programs to avoid the usage of performance-enhancing drugs. And I can say that applies at international level, at national level and at club level.

''Is there doping across the board? Of course there is. Are we catching all the cheats? Not by a long shot.''

Fahey, 69, is shaking his head; frustrated, perhaps, that after six years at WADA he doesn't have a rosier picture to paint. Established in 1999, WADA has a budget of about $30 million a year, 50 per cent from governments and 50 per cent from the International Olympic Committee. Its code dictates how 193 signatory countries and more than 600 sports - the AFL and NRL included - deal with doping. Broader than that, WADA's raison d'etre is to help educate everyone - from kids and the recreational gym-goer to professional athletes - about the dangers of drug use.

Fahey came to one of the top (though not always popular) honorary posts in international sport as a self-described lifelong ''sporting tragic'' with a fair pedigree in politics. His candidacy would have been helped by the hand he played in Sydney winning the 2000 Olympic Games.

He was also a complete outsider who, from the moment he decided to run for the position, got the distinct impression from the European voting sect that anyone from an ''outpost'' like Australia was far too removed from the centre of their universe to be taken seriously. ''This of course made me very determined,'' recalls Fahey, who was encouraged at the time by George Brandis, then Australia's minister for the arts and sport.

This meant campaigning against a clear favourite: French sport minister and two-time Olympic gold medallist fencer Jean-Francois Lamour. Upon learning that some New Zealand-born, naturalised Aussie had gathered the numbers, Lamour withdrew and publicly lambasted WADA. ''Puerile'' is how Fahey scoffingly describes the Frenchman's churlishness now.

Being WADA president was a full-time gig for about 14 weeks every year, during overseas assignments that were always crammed. But Fahey's family circumstances demanded he be in Australia as much as possible, despite the fact WADA's headquarters are in Montreal. At home, on an average week, he estimated it was a 25-30-hour job. He would start each day early, and often retire late to stay in sync with Canada.

As permanent carers of two teenagers, Amber and Campbell, Fahey and his wife Colleen are both parents and grandparents. The kids, aged 15 and 13, and keen surfers by the look of photos Fahey shares while talking about them, are the offspring of the couple's third child, Tiffany, 27, who died in a road accident on Boxing Day 2006.

When he spoke at her funeral, her father lamented a life that had been ''corroded'' by drugs.

Winning the WADA presidency a year after Tiffany's death, Fahey found something in the new job ''tremendously exhilarating … rewarding … worth doing''. But when he handed the baton to British IOC vice-president Craig Reedie last November, he confesses to feeling a ''level of relief''.

The pressure on a state premier was significantly higher than on WADA's president, but Fahey says ''the sense of responsibility was perhaps as high''. There was zero predictability about what might arise in one of WADA's nearly 200 signatory countries, let alone at the multitude of global sporting events where WADA code applies.

''In NSW, I usually knew what the papers were going to write before they were written because you were part of the process, or you knew the issues that were breaking and the background,'' Fahey says. ''You'd have no idea what was going to be in the news the next morning [relating to anti-doping].''

A WADA head's life is stimulating and sometimes combative. Along the way, Fahey incensed the chief of the English Premier League by criticising the competition's anti-doping program (he remains critical, believing the EPL does not invest or test nearly enough).

And, in his very early days at WADA, he was forced to mark territory with the controversial ex-boss of international cycling, Hein Verbruggen.

At the time the Union Cycliste Internationale and WADA were openly at loggerheads, and Fahey had observed that ''for years cycling was in denial on the drugs issue''.

Verbruggen's response was to inform Fahey in a letter that the assertion maligned his time as UCI president and that he was considering defamation proceedings. ''In the end I wrote a letter to say, 'Stop threatening me and go ahead and do it if you want to','' Fahey reflects all these years later, giving a hint of what he's like in professional combat. ''It never happened.''

More recently, he dined with the US Anti-Doping Agency's chief, Travis Tygart, in the tense time before he brought the momentous case against Lance Armstrong. ''Just have patience,'' Tygart told Fahey that night. ''I know what's there and I'm not going to give up.''

Unsurprisingly, Fahey sees USADA's top dog as a model anti-doping crusader through his pure ''doggedness … and enormous integrity'' to overcome all kinds of forces - political and otherwise - who preferred Armstrong remained king and that the inconvenient truth remained buried.

''They're the pressures that are there,'' Fahey says matter of factly. The inference is that Australia is not exempt from what he sees as a universal phenomenon.

Roger Federer is the model athlete Fahey cites on anti-doping. ''I love the words that came from his mouth when he said, 'Yes, it's a nuisance to have a knock on the door at 7.30 [for testing]. But I'll do that every day of the week if I can prove to the world that my sport is clean and that I'm clean.'

''To me, that's the attitude that every club should have. But that type of thing has to come from the top - so the AFL Commission and the ARL Commission have got to say 'this is the program that we want to guarantee to the Australian public who give to us in their millions every year that this sport is above board'.

''Don't come to me, as more than one football code has done in the past, and say 'this is costing us more money than we can afford to spend'. That's rubbish.

''How important is your reputation? How much do you spend to maintain your integrity and your reputation? It ought to be priceless.

''And if they're not going to do it now while the cloud is still hovering over them, what chance have we got when we move on?''

Clearly Fahey is talking about Australia now where, for the past 13 months, the ''cloud'' he refers to has felt more like a noxious smog that has threatened to choke the country's two richest and most popular football codes. Fahey has picked his moments to weigh in publicly to this sensitive terrain - late last year he said he expected footballers would be issued with infraction notices for anti-doping rule violations. The AFL's Essendon and NRL club Cronulla are nervously awaiting outcomes from investigations that were launched by the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority in February 2013. The AFL, which did a joint investigation with ASADA last year, has suspended club coach James Hird for a year and penalised Essendon heavily. The NRL has imposed a 12-month ban on Cronulla coach Shane Flanagan and fined the club.

ASADA has finished the first investigation stage into both clubs and codes but is now determining whether the findings warrant further action.

While he has already put noses out of joint, Fahey indicates that, if anything, his commentary to date has been mild. ''Oh, I'm sure they wanted me to go away!'' he says. ''All I'm doing is stirring something up that they want people to forget about.''

It seems the only body he really sympathises with in this story is ASADA, which was praised well before all this as one of the leading anti-doping organisations in the world alongside USADA, UK Anti-Doping and various Scandinavian equivalents.

Fahey's take on the Australian doping scandal is that it is ''the most unusual occurrence, in my six years as president, anywhere in the world. ''With lights, music and all of the other trimmings, a huge announcement was made in February 2013 … telling us we had a massive problem.''

ASADA, by Fahey's reading, was thrown a scorching potato when the Australian Crime Commission tabled a troubling report on organised crime and drugs in sport. In full public glare - atypical working conditions for anti-doping bodies - Fahey says ASADA was effectively instructed: ''Now, go and collect some evidence and deal with it under your code.''

Since then, it seems every interested party has wanted a neat resolution yesterday. Preferably with football players unscathed. By comparison, it took USADA 2½ years to compile the case that brought down just one cyclist.

Fahey says the ASADA team has had just a year so far and the allegations involve a multiplicity of athletes.

''I have absolute faith in the professionalism and in the leadership of the ASADA team to deal with the matter in a proper and principled way. They should be given the room to deal with it in an orderly fashion, whatever that means in terms of time,'' he says.

As pointier questions are fired on the minutiae of the Essendon-AFL-ASADA case, Fahey becomes more guarded. James Hird's responsibility, Jobe Watson's AOD-9604 revelation, Andrew Demetriou's role, the success or otherwise of the AFL's joint investigation with ASADA, all draw generic responses. On the fact that Australian Sports Commission chairman John Wylie was involved as an intermediary for Essendon and the AFL, he offers a leading ''for the moment I don't want to comment on that''.

Fahey is more forthcoming about another aspect of the messy web that inspired reports of behind-the-scenes deal-making. ''I can say that I have not seen any anti-doping organisation who has done a deal. I would be gob-smacked if anyone in ASADA has even used the word 'deal' in discussion.''

On outgoing ASADA chief Aurora Andruska, Fahey remarks: ''I know her quite well.'' When it emerged last month that Andruska would leave ASADA in May (though unconfirmed officially, it's understood that she was not offered another contract), Fahey made a pointed reference in an interview with Fairfax Media to the ''bully boys'' he believed Australia's anti-doping chief had encountered. Unprepared to elaborate in this sitting, Fahey restates that Andruska has been ''gutsy'' in tumultuous times.

Has Andruska been leaned on by the kinds of forces he has openly stated exist in sport, government and anti-doping? He won't go there, but Fahey makes it very clear that WADA is watching events here closely. That point was made to Australia's Sports Minister Peter Dutton late last October in a meeting with Fahey and WADA's director-general David Howman.

''We didn't discuss specifics,'' Fahey says, ''but we made it very clear what this particularly inquiry meant in the world of anti-doping. The whole world's got their eyes on Australia.''

Fahey does not believe lifetime bans for drug cheats is the solution: ''I think you end up with a worse outcome … you effectively bring down the cone of silence over the whole system.'' But unless those who transgress prove they are profoundly reformed, he doesn't see room for them returning.

''Lance Armstrong … is to me nothing but a liar and a cheat. And he was a bully - particularly of women,'' Fahey says. ''He deserves nothing in the minds of anybody. He deserves no support, and no recognition. Convenient admissions just don't cut it.''

Fahey's passion for sport - clean, honest sport played by clean, honest athletes - is no more apparent than when he speaks these words. Which poses the question: since he's no longer WADA president, where will that passion be channelled next? ''God's been good to me in many ways. I've had some very interesting roles in my life,'' Fahey says, divulging no immediate ambitions. ''If I can see it's challenging, and I can see it's worth doing, and if I can see I might enjoy it, I'll do it.''