There'd be no no Golden Bull from Jones if Kiernan met her

TV VIEW:WE'D BE doubtful enough that Jerry Kiernan would ever be a contender for the Plain English Campaign's annual Golden Bull awards. True, RTÉ's athletics man might be in the running for a feather-ruffling gong or eight, but he's yet to rival the likes of, say, Jamie Redknapp, when it comes to unfathomable sporting punditry-speak.

“These balls now – they literally explode off your feet,” was one of the reasons why Jamie was honoured last week, although our personal favourite was: “Steven Gerrard makes runs into the box better than anyone. So does Frank Lampard.”

For these and other offerings Jamie deservedly scooped the “Foot in Mouth” Golden Bull award, and it’s about time too that his contribution to punditry received wider recognition. Much like an attempted-injury-time-penalty-conversion by Didier Drogba at White Hart Lane he makes us smile, and for that we – along with the Plain English Campaign — salute him.

Jerry, though, is more “a spade’s a spade” man, you’re really never left in any doubt about his innermost thoughts on any given athletics issue, largely because he has a habit of revealing them.

Blunt he is too, as James Nolan will attest. Remember? “Quite frankly, he’s become a bit of a dilettante, his work ethic just isn’t strong enough at this level,” he said in a tribute to the Offaly runner during the Athens Olympics. To which James memorably replied: “Who’s he to question me? Asshole”.

So, when Fionnuala Britton was pipped for bronze at the European Cross Country Championships yesterday, Jerry noted that one of the women who finished ahead of her, Turkey’s Binnaz Uslu, was a “drugs cheat”.

Which, it should be said, she is. It was just nice to hear that particular cheating spade being branded as such. Just the two-year ban, though, and she was up and running again. Not a bother on her.

Earlier, Jerry and Catherina McKiernan discussed the news of Spanish runner Marta Dominguez being taken into custody last week under suspicion of trafficking and distributing banned substances – innocent until proven otherwise, need it be said – while we looked at footage of Sonia O’Sullivan being beaten to gold by the very same Marta Dominguez in the 5,000 metres final at the 2002 European Championships.

All of which brought to mind Inside Sport: The Marion Jones Story’on BBC the day before, Gabby Logan meeting up with the woman who was stripped of her Olympic medals after admitting she took performance-enhancing drugs.

It’s hard to know what to make of Jones now, and it’s even harder to forget the thrill of watching her in action at the peak of her career. Beyond exhilarating. Could she have achieved what she did without the assistance of performance-enhancing drugs? “Absolutely,” said Michael Johnson, at a loss to understand the insanity of the decisions she made along the way. A patently smart woman consistently teaming up with the shadiest of folk, and then expressing incredulity when it turned out they were, indeed, shady folk? Truly unfathomable.

“People make mistakes,” she told Logan, self-pity oozing from every pore, “it’s what you do afterwards that you should be judged by”.

Well, tell that to the clean “suckers” she beat to win gold.

Bizarrely enough, Logan admitted after the interview aired that it was conducted in the presence of Jones’ “agent-stroke-lawyer”, that she was told she could only ask questions “about matters in Jones’ recently published book” and the agent/lawyer “said the moment I asked something (not in the book) he would stop the interview”.

At which point the BBC should really have said: stick your interview where the sun don’t shine. It was as searching as those puff pieces produced by a journalist or two on Qatar’s World Cup bid, after their all-expenses trips to Qatar paid for by the Qatar World Cup Bid Committee. The ones that neglected to mention, for example, the conditions under which the country’s migrant workers and domestic servants live.

Amnesty International: “Foreign migrant workers continue to be exposed to and inadequately protected against abuses and exploitation by employers. Women migrant domestic workers were particularly at risk of exploitation and abuses such as beatings, rape and other sexual violence. Some 20,000 workers were reported to have fled from their employers in 2007 alone due to delays in or non-payment of their wages, excessive hours and poor working conditions.” No worries, though, as a highly contented Irish resident of Qatar put it in a letter to this paper last week, Qatar is a “progressive, stable and most friendly little country”.

Well, unless you’re a migrant worker or domestic servant. “Golden Bull,” as Jerry might put it.