As part of our collation of stats and facts from the GDR doping era in support of the long campaign for justice through reconciliation and recognition, this file offers insight into the red threads of systematic fraud and why the IOC's call for 'evidence' that might justify action is insulting to every victim out there.

Bringing together all members of the GDR women's teams that competed at the 1973 and 1975 World Championships and the Montreal Olympic Games in 1976, it's clear that 28 women from just eight swimming clubs amassed 31 titles, 16 silvers and 8 bronzes. And they did so in a highly controlled, centralised, system in which your choice was to play ball or get a red-card back to your one-size-fits-all future within communist confines.

That's a snapshot of a state-secret doping system that does not need picking apart for case-by-case analysis by Olympic sports leaders still dragging their heels on a matter that 'happened to them, not us'; still shrugging in synch with their lawyers and deciding it's all too hard to go back to the scene of the biggest heist in sports history, one that unfolded on IOC watch and at an IOC-accredited laboratory.

As the 50th anniversary of the 1976 Olympic Games looms on the horizon, swimming leaders must also realise that they continue to place women, athlete welfare and fair play at the back of the priorities queue behind the bricks and mortar of a move to a new HQ, another flashy new development centre in the Middle East, and anything else they can find too hide behind.

Of late, I was asked how feasible it is to produce a list of swimmers against 'evidence' of wrong doing, just in case here was a chance someone might get to it one day decades on. Well, not that hard at all. I'm almost sure it's something a very highly paid team of lawyers, media folk and others at the IOC could rustle up within a week if they gave it some welly - and knew where to look.

Do they need to? No, not really. The best defence against what might be seen as the Enhanced Games' bid to bankrupt swimming (for that is what a bill of $800m could mean) is to show just how serious the Olympic realm is about clean sport.

That's a much harder task when the opposition can hold court by scoffing at the very idea that the IOC, World Aquatics and USA Swimming - the three entities the EG is suing - are anything but hypocrites when claiming the moral high ground on the one hand yet maintaining a library of records and results stacked with doping swims as the official record of the sport on the other.

But it's all just too tricky, too complex, too legally challenging, I hear some say. No, it's really not.

So, here we go...