When Fahey, a lawyer, takes over, he won't relocate to Canada. He's currently a part-time senior adviser for an international investment bank in Sydney, mostly working three days a week and commuting to his home about a 90-minute drive south of the city.

"I'm sure (WADA) will require my attention almost daily - thank God for telecommunications," Fahey said. "But there is a team of professionals in Montreal who are there all the time."

Fahey's ties with Sydney were never more evident than in 1993, when, as chairman of the committee bidding to bring the Olympics to Australia, he leapt high in the air when Juan Antonio Samaranch, then the IOC president, announced the winning vote for the 2000 Games.

"I guess I didn't think about it at the time ... but the footage is there," Fahey said from a 32nd-floor bank boardroom with sweeping views of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House.

"I think it's fair to say that there was enormous tension and that release of tension was a moment of my life that I will never forget... the most euphoric moment perhaps that I will ever have."

Less than a year later - in January 1994 - Fahey thwarted an attack on Prince Charles, tackling a man after two shots were fired from a starter's pistol during an Australia Day ceremony at Sydney's Darling Harbour.

"My wife warned me, 'There is a man running towards us with a gun', and almost at that point the gun went off," said Fahey, who didn't know it was a starter's pistol incapable of firing live ammunition.

"I have no idea what possessed me to run at him. I just knew that he had to be overpowered before he did some damage... he was clearly seeking to take out the heir to the British throne."

Fahey, then premier of New South Wales, went on to become Australia's finance minister, but quit politics when he developed lung cancer in 2001.

"I'm just lucky," Fahey said. "In my case it was a pretty lethal cancer. It was a pretty horrible time and a horrible prognosis. After I had one lung removed, the doctor said I had only a one-in-four chance of surviving until Christmas."

To help his odds, the former rugby league player decided to remove as much stress from his life as possible, and that meant leaving politics.

"Politics is life and death, at least in your mind," Fahey said. "I never turned off for 18 years. Now I've got a philosophical approach: I do everything I can as well as I can."

That includes new duties like taking his 8-year-old granddaughter, Amber, and 6-year-old grandson, Campbell, back and forth to school. Fahey and his wife, Colleen, whom he married in 1968, have become full-time parents to youngsters again following the death in a car accident last December 26 of their daughter Tiffany, a single mother who had fought a long battle with drug addiction.

"Life is about opportunities and challenges, and there is clearly a challenge here," Fahey said. "If we can't remove cheating in sport, then sport dies. That would be a tragedy."