It has without doubt been at the top of the list of the questions in sport this week.

Take a straw poll on the issue just about anywhere other than the FINA world championships' athlete hotels or on WeChat in China and it seems to come up 50/50.

Hardline anti-doping campaigners who would be normally expected to side with Horton are unhappy with his work. For some the medal ceremony is sacrosanct. For others it's a matter of innocence until guilt is proven. Others with unusually less opinionated positions think he's a hero.

In the media it's the same. So too among the expert assembled multitude at the National Integrity Forum in Melbourne on Tuesday.

So just how did we get to this point?

At the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Horton locked horns during training with his in-pool rival and the then nine (now 14) times world and Olympic champion Sun Yang because of the Chinese swimmer's 2014 doping ban for the use of a stimulant.

Horton labelled Sun a cheat on the highest profile sporting stage available to his sport.

Sun had served a three-month ban imposed by his own national swimming association for testing positive to trimetazidine which had only shortly beforehand been added to the World Anti-Doping Agency's banned list - as a stimulant and then only in competition.

Many aspects of that case, as with the latest, were messy for a whole range of reasons.

By 2015, after Sun's test and ban but before Horton's spat with him, the drug had been re-classified in the more serious category of metabolic modulators and consequently now prohibited in and out-of-competition.

The standard penalty in 2014 was two years but Sun successfully argued that he had legally long been prescribed the medication for a heart condition and had not been aware that it had been banned as from January that year.

The Chinese Anti-Doping Agency accepted that he did not intentionally dope and recommended a three-month ban which the Chinese Swimming Association accepted and imposed.

As it happens neither FINA nor WADA felt it appropriate to appeal the decision.

What didn't help was that Sun served the ban in secret and returned to dominate the Asian Games that year. Thus in 2016 Horton could point to an actual ban as his point of contention.

What's fired it all up again is a further doping controversy involving Sun from last September that remains unresolved.

After an attempt to conduct an out-of-competition test, it is alleged that Sun's bodyguard smashed the vials containing the blood collected. No urine samples were obtained. Sun was charged with refusing a test.

The facts of the case - even the undisputed ones are bizarre. FINA's doping panel nonetheless exonerated him on January 3, 2019.

WADA has appealed but the matter won't be heard until after the world championships.

That's simply not good enough. And in the end that's the root cause of Horton's latest stand.

When the Court of Arbitration for Sport was established the idea was for it to be simple, inexpensive and expedient in order to avoid this type of drama.

The whole Gwangju affair has prompted folk apart from the direct protagonists to say some silly things.

None more so than Sun's Australian coach, Denis Cotterell, who opted to enter the fray by proclaiming that his current charge was as clean as his previous world beater Grant Hackett.

Now while Hackett has certainly had to deal with some issues that may have tarnished his reputation, serving a doping ban of any type has not been one of them.

Predictably, he vented his anger at his old coach's ineptitude.

Then there were those who mused that Horton was a hypocrite because he was happy to swim alongside fellow Australian Thomas Fraser Holmes who spent 12 months out of the pool for "whereabouts" or missed test infractions.

But there is a significant difference with whereabouts bans - with Australia taking a way heftier approach than almost every other country. Except for the record when it comes to professional team sports where the athlete gets no penalty at all. Their club merely gets whacked with a fine. So some perspective please.

In the end though, Horton's stand might have been significantly more popular had he thought more carefully.

If indeed his real issue was with FINA and WADA's tardiness in dealing with the latest Sun indiscretion, then perhaps he should have shaken hands with Sun and instead shunned FINA's medal presenter.