Locker Room: A few weeks ago a county councillor or city councillor, I'm not sure which, wrote to this paper to point out in what we could only assume were humorous terms that a Dublin Olympic bid was viable, writes Tom Humphries.

We say humorous but we are unsure. I think the councillor in question was of the Fine Gael persuasion and that which is commonly taken as humour outside of Fine Gael can often pass for high thought within Fine Gael.

Anyway, the councillor pointed out that this column was an absolute cad and a bounder for belittling little Gay Mitchell and his Gay Olympic Dream and went on to explain that Helsinki hosted the Games in 1952 and that Manchester bid for the Games (twice actually, eight years of campaigning finally yielded 11 votes ) and finally - and most drolly of all - pointed out that 2016 will be the Centenary of the Easter Rising.

All this is true of course, especially the cad and the bounder stuff. We don't doubt either that the world is as we speak planning a massive surprise party for us to mark the Centenary of the Easter Rising. We don't believe that Dublin has anything more going for it than Manchester had - in fact we know it has a lot less going for it - but all that is beside the point really.

The argument should no longer be about whether Dublin could hold an Olympics or if there would be any point in Dublin holding an Olympics apart from the usual fat cats making out like bandits. The argument is whether the Olympics are the sort of event that any community with a genuine abiding interest in sport should be interested in hosting.

What part of the Olympics do you believe in anymore? The swimming? The track and field? The weightlifting? The cycling? The gymnastics?

In San Francisco last week four men pleaded not guilty to federal charges relating to the distribution of performance-enhancing drugs. As it unfolds the case of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative will act like a dose of smelling salts on the nation which hosts it.

Somewhere in the unravelling are the names of gridiron stars, baseball heroes and track and field giants who have been clients of Balco. The authorities have lifted a rock and underneath are hundreds of startled creatures running away from the light, hoping to cut immunity deals.

Already there have been references to a track and field star who is "elite, a world-record holder and an Olympic gold medallist"; Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery are among those who have already testified at the Grand Jury preceding the trial. Five track and field athletes (the most prominent being Dwain Chambers and Regina Jacobs) have already been named as having tested positive for Balco's plat du jour, THG.

Drug czars (as they are always known, to distinguish them from drugged stars) have announced that they fully expect developments in San Francisco will lead to "the initiation of more doping cases against athletes and others".

What is impressive about the Balco situation is the speed at which things happen when sport isn't left to police itself. No more closed files in the offices of the USOC. No more endless whispering. No more lost tests. The government and the judiciary are throwing resources and power behind the case. That goes quite a way to levelling the playing field.

And in terms of big-time professional sport that is the most fitting intervention of pols in suits. We don't want to see them piggyback-riding on other people's glory. We don't want to see them help the usual suspects and donors to get rich. We want to see some guardianship of the common heritage of sport, some recognition that drugs cheating matters, that it doesn't happen in a vacuum, that it sends shock waves down through the entire body of sport and into the games our children play.

The great sports events of the world have been vandalised, the last events which hold us in communal thrall have been desecrated.

It's no longer an issue of how do we get ourselves a slice of the pie. It's about how we get ourselves healthy.

The last time we took a serious shot at hosting something in this country was the 1998 Tour de France. We had roads, therefore we were granted the chance to host the meaningless opening stages. And the race became the dreadful moral farrago it had long been threatening to become. It brought no honour to anyone.

On Saturday, Marco Pantani, the flamboyant winner of that besmirched 1998 Tour, was found dead in a hotel room in Rimini. A Belgian cyclist 13 years younger was found dead in an apartment room on the same day.

I liked Pantani and all his eccentricities but I never believed in him. The Festina business of the 1998 Tour put an end to belief in men like Pantani. So did a subsequent blood test on Pantani where he was found to have a haematocrit level of 52 per cent. At the time 50 per cent (an astonishingly high level in itself) was taken to be indicative of the use of EPO.

Pantani was asked to leave the 1999 Giro d'Italia, when he was just hours from recording a second consecutive victory. His demeanour afterwards said everything that needed to be said about the poignant circumstance of the big-time athlete who gets caught.

Pantani never recovered. His achievements were open to question everywhere and forever. In the future no matter what he achieved there would be an asterisk beside his name. If his grandchildren asked about Le Tour and the Giro, they were also going to ask about EPO.

People loved him and yearned to portray him as a scapegoat of the system but he was a victim in a purer way than any kid who tries to compete clean in a dirty sport can be a victim. The cheating took it all away. One suspects he looked back in quieter moments and knew that even the days when he should have made his legend permanent had the touch of fiction about them. Climbing through the mists on the Col du Galibier leaving Ullrich for dead five kilometres from the top, on the decisive day in that 1998 Tour? Nobody would ever watch it or talk about it again without the question of EPO arising.

Could he ever look back on that day and not wonder about himself? Was there any real fulfilment in it? Was that the most he could be or the most that he could be made into? He became erratic and even more volatile. He retreated into depression and stayed off the bike for long periods. Probably he should have walked away and into a new chapter of his life but his retinue of minders and fans kept prodding him.

He wanted it all back of course. They all did. Always do. He wanted words like heroism and integrity and legendary to be written in the same sentence as his name. This week the text that lurks beneath the headlines will have words like tragic and hollow and questionable.

And much of what the Olympic Games are about will merit the same descriptions this summer. We shouldn't yearn for the shillings that come from such a debauched celebration.

The Tour of 1998 was opened up for public inspection by a brave French sports minister. She stripped away the hype for us all. The Manchester Olympic bid involved a British Prime Minister, John Major, travelling abroad to abase himself before Antonio Samaranch. By exposing as a sham the event we craved a cut of, Marie-Georges Buffet made the greater contribution to sport.