I really can't get rid of these conditional statements in mysqldump?
It's really important to keep the conditional-execution comments. But if you absolutely know that the MySQL version that will load the dump is greater or equal to the one that creates it, you can remove the "comment" part with this:

sed -r  s'#/\*![0-9]{5} ?([^*]*)\*/#\1#'g


It will convert lines such as

/*!40101 SET SQL_MODE=@OLD_SQL_MODE */;


to 

SET SQL_MODE=@OLD_SQL_MODE ;


Because this line must run on any MySQL >= 4.1.1

Note that this will not remove multi-line conditional-execution comments, such as when dumping a trigger.

Since it's impossible to predict the future, it's better to store the dump with the comments on, and only remove them when you want to visualize it.

mysqldump ... &gt; dump.sql
cat dump.sql | sed -E  s'#/\*![0-9]{5} ?([^*]*)\*/#\1#'g &gt; dump.no-comments.sql