SIMON LEWIS: Golf can’t be naive to sport’s greatest blight

It was a week ago that R&A chief executive Peter Dawson held court in Scotland to discuss a myriad of hot topics in golf, from Tiger Woods’ controversial drop at the Masters, to Rory McIlroy’s Olympic status and the Vijay Singh doping case that is hanging around the game like a case of halitosis.

The Fijian major champion acknowledged in a magazine interview in January he had used deer antler spray, which contains a muscle-building hormone banned by the PGA Tour. His declaration prompted an inquiry by the Tour and Dawson said he understood Singh’s case would be heard within a couple of weeks, which should bring matters to a head next week.

“The R&A were very keen to get anti-doping policies into golf,” Dawson said before accepting the body which does most testing in golf is the PGA Tour, whose testing of urine samples only cannot pick up the banned substance in the deer antler spray Singh admitted to taking. That substance can only be found by blood test.