As a former professional cyclist, Jay Sweet lived the dream of racing on the biggest stage of all: the Tour de France.
He arrived in Europe in 1998, in the wake of the Festina doping scandal. He was young, brash and very fast.
Sweet had stars in his eyes when selected to race for a high-profile French team Big Mat-Auber.
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This was when he was immediately exposed to cycling's doping issues by the team doctor.
"He asked me which race I wanted to win, and I answered 'I try to win any race I enter', and he said 'OK, we start with EPO and some cortisone'. I said 'Hang on a minute. I am not interested in that".
He says years later, in a race in Spain in 2001, a race doctor injected him with cortisone without telling him what he was injecting him with.
"The race doctor injected me with cortisone, which he didn't tell me what it was until after he injected me.
"And I was really shocked that I was at a race, a UCI sanction race, being injected with a banned substance from a sanction doctor".
The UCI have done more than any other sport to eradicate doping.
Sweet says he had no idea of how dominant the drugs culture was in European cycling at the time.
Team doctors from Big-Mat have since been arrested as part of an on-going investigation into suspected doping.
"When you are competing and week after week, month after month they are just continuously winning, that's when you scratch your head and say, 'Hang on a minute'".
At his one-and-only Tour de France appearance in 1999, he was disqualified for failing to meet the cut on the last mountain stage.
Sweet is a victim of cycling's dark days.
"I honestly wasn't pressured. They weren't pressuring me, but obviously they weren't happy with it. And when I was getting 2nd and 3rd against the best sprinters in the world, considering I was 21 years old, rather than them coming to me and saying 'Great job, you are a great investment', they said 'You could have won today. You know what I mean,' and walked off. That was quite hard to take".
He has no regrets, but understands that by failing to conform, his career may have ended sooner rather later.
