Of all the great athletic performances in 2015, this year will be remembered primarily as a year of doping scandals. Most striking were the revelations that athletics’ governing body, the IAAF, failed to disclose suspicious blood data from its athletes but also the stories that emerged of widespread doping within both Russia and Kenya have been hugely detrimental to the reputation of sport.

The greatest damage inflicted as a result of these stories is not the revelation that some athletes dope- everyone who has ever had any contact with elite sport acknowledges that this happens, will always happen and will never be stopped entirely. Rather, the greatest blow to sport has been that the public’s trust has been so severely eroded that there is an almost universal scepticism applied to every performance that is above average nowadays. It is an unfair assumption of guilt towards elite athletes but the public just do not trust sport is being policed correctly and there is a feeling that cheats are getting away with doping time and time again.

The global sporting bodies, and particularly the International Olympic Committee, recognise that there is a significant problem regarding the integrity and credibility of sport. The groundswell of public mistrust must be halted because if there is no trust, then sport will become a less and less valuable entity. Fans will not pay to watch athletes who they think are doping. They will not turn up in their thousands to watch people who they believe are fuelled not by talent and hard work, but by performance-enhancing drugs. And this is why at the 2015 Olympic Summit, which took place in Lausanne last week, the idea was floated that instead of individual sports being responsible for testing their own athletes, an independent authority should be tasked with doing this. Step forward the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).

At present, WADA promotes, coordinates and monitors the fight against doping in sport but it is left to each individual sporting body to actually carry out the testing. This is a problem; there is no way on earth that this does not put each sport in a hopelessly conflicted position. The governing body for each sport is responsible for both policing and promoting their sport which is, obviously, a quite glaring conflict of interest; it is perfectly understandable that no sport wants its most marketable asset to be caught doping. This is not to suggest that governing bodies are dishonest in the way they carry out their anti-doping procedures but is certainly puts them in a difficult position. Most significantly, many observers do not trust that everything possible is being done to clean up sport.

The challenge that is now faced is restoring the trust that has been so badly damaged over the past year and a shake-up of the drug-testing regime seems like a good place to start. At last week’s Olympic Summit, the IOC President, Thomas Bach said: “We cannot overstate the importance of good governance, which leads to credibility. We need credibility for our sports organisations as well as for our sports competitions. With regard to the credibility of sport and the protection of clean athletes, the Summit has taken a major step forward to making anti-doping testing independent from sports organisations.”

These few sentences illustrate just how desperate Bach is to restore trust in sport because the problem that sport faces right now is not so much that it is not clean, but instead that the public perception is that it is not clean. If WADA were to take over drug-testing on a global level, the IOC feels that there would be a wider belief that everything possible was being done to clean up sport entirely and without exception.

It is an intriguing opportunity but there are a few hurdles which must be cleared for this to happen. Firstly, WADA must agree to undertake such a monumental task. Craig Reedie, WADA President, said earlier this week that he will take the suggestion to the executive committee in November but he would not be drawn on the pros and cons of his organisation taking on such a responsibility.

The second issue which would prove somewhat challenging is the funding of the operation. Currently, WADA operates on a budget of around $26 million per year, an amount which is a drop in the ocean in comparison to what would be needed to carry out a full testing programme. So significant restructuring would be required in terms of funding and each sport would have to transfer money to WADA to fund the new system.

It remains to be seen whether this idea will get off the ground but it is encouraging to see that there is a will to restore the public’s trust, which i currently at an all-time low. The journey will be a long one though- one change to the anti-doping system will not miraculously restore all credibility, but it would certainly be a start.