It seems so pathetic now, all the money-grubbing, in-house bickering and spilling skies which sent the Tour de France on its way from Dublin several weeks ago. The great poem of the road was to descend into vulgarity and pathos almost as soon as the spokes started spinning in earnest. Our sins were venial.

There can never have been a case of sports people missing the point more comprehensively than they did this week when the peloton resorted to spoilt-child petulance. Laurent Jalabert, who heads a chain gang whose institutional vice is to artificially fatten their reserves with chemicals, announced that the riders wouldn't be "treated like cattle". Later in the week, as the arrests and detentions relating to the abuse of the kidney-hormone treatment drug erythropoietin mounted, Jalabert modified the view. They would not be "treated like criminals".

And so on Wednesday evening, after a tour stage freckled with bad-tempered melodrama, the riders sent the TVM boys to the front of the pack and let them ride over the line first with their arms raised as if it were some sort of triumph. Grotesque. There was no triumph. Not for anyone. There was consolation, but it was scant. The shabby debacle of the 1998 Tour de France has at last ceased to fool the public. The peloton, self-absorbed and wounded like so many haughty divas, crawled past to a smattering of boos and catcalls and ironic cheers. Naked emperors. The pervasiveness of their empire is still frightening, though. In Serie A soccer, they are convulsed in a row over drugs and money. In athletics, the names fall like poisoned pigeons. In rugby, forwards get ever bigger, ever more mobile, as the positive tests pile up. An Australian softball player got two years recently for refusing a test. Australian softball players? Well, who can we trust?

The colossal arrogance of professional sport makes the current debacle an apt punishment. That it should be cycling whose suffering is most public is fitting, too.

It is 32 years since officials first swooped on team hotels during the Tour de France, 31 years since Tommy Simpson left life on a bike carrying a bursting heartful of amphetamines, 30 years since the first systematic dope tests. The riders are still singing the same old song of defiance. The sport may be worse afflicted than all others, apart perhaps from athletics (where the president of the US Track and Field athletes' advisory committee, Dennis Mitchell, tested positive last week, along with recidivist and Olympic shot putt gold medallist Randy Barnes), but that is merely because it is at the cutting edge of experimentation.

A few years after 18 cyclists died of suspected abuse of erythropoietin, the cycling authorities, with their acute sense of public relations, moved to introduce blood testing for cyclists. There being no reliable (as in reliable for withstanding legal challenges) test for the substance, cycling decided to avoid stigma by testing for health reasons. A haematocrit level above 51 per cent would be "unhealthy". Cyclists would be advised not to cycle for a couple of weeks and instructed to attend a test in Lausanne before they went out on the road again.

These were measures for which cyclists should have been grateful. Instead, they switched to using something called Perfloro Cloruro (PFC), which is used medically in cases of extensive bleeding, but for cyclists augmented the oxygen level without raising the haematocrit levels. Off you go now, son, and may the road rise with you.

At least the people gave the peloton boos and catcalls this week. The events of the Tour have left no room for old illusions. People can't turn out and wave little flags and buy little momentoes to mark the passing of a mobile pharmacy. Having the greatest capacity for drug abuse is nothing to aspire to. At last. If the sporting public at last begin to behave like shrewd consumers instead of credulous dupes the message might percolate to the people who really run sport - television executives, agents and sponsors.

In John Hoberman's book Mortal Engines, a study of the dehumanisation of modern sport, the story is recounted of Roland Matthes, an Olympic champion swimmer in 1968 and 1972 who fled East Germany because of what were described as threats and harassment from ordinary citizens - what Matthes called a "mass hysteria directed against the elite sport of the GDR".

Matthes had minority leanings. The bulk of those sporting engines who fill our screens and our daydreams, who have the temerity to sell us products that they are paid to believe in, have approached new borders of brazenness. They no longer believe that their ritual disfigurement of the ethos of sport is shameful. If there is a consolation to be had from the Tour de France's crestfallen approach to Paris, it lies in the hope that we have realised that the understanding which professionals have of sport is something different to what the rest of us have. And that it is they who are wrong.

We, after all, should hold all the strong cards. We are the market and in that there is power. And now that we have discovered that we have a capacity for disillusionment and anger, perhaps it will be realised that we are the landlords of sport and the people who run sport are the tenants.

That thought is just a glimmer in the darkness at present, though. Our first job must be an eviction. When we gathered in the high-ceilinged lobby of the Lausanne Palace Hotel eight days ago, as swimming officials went about the almost quotidian business of doping hearings, the elderly man who slipped into the hotel past the bowing and scraping staff and on up to his suite was none other than Juan Antonio Samaranch.

Samaranch's lifestyle is built on the peddling of illusion, the sleight of hand which is the mainstay of the three-card trick. You know which card it is, so you pays your money and you takes your choice. Sucker! You know that by and large the Olympics are a great cavalcade of cheats, but Juan Antonio fans out the cards in front of you. See? No positive tests. Sucker! And please, ladies and gentlemen, no standing behind the great Juan Antonio. No attempting to glimpse the sheaves of positives which have been suppressed at successive Olympiads. Samaranch's lifestyle is built on this stuff. This week he was shuffling the cards again.

"Doping demands an exact definition," he said. "I have been asking for it for years. The actual list of products must be reduced drastically."

Of course, words mean what people want them to mean. This is the opposite of an exact definition. The IOC list of classified substances approaches 4,000 products, brands and derivatives and still lags behind the backroom chemists. What Samaranch is talking about is creating a loophole the size of the St Louis arch, whereby doping becomes, hey presto, not doping at all. Samaranch continued: "Doping now is everything that, firstly, is harmful to an athlete's health, and secondly, artificially augments his performance. If it's just the second case, for me that's not doping. If it's the first case it is."

This is an avenue of thought which leads to the appalling vista of deregulation, whereby sport abandons its ethos and vitality and permits athletes to consume what they will. Proponents of this perversion have yet to produce estimates from insurers of big sporting events who will soon be fishing dead Chinese women from swimming pools as the TV folk slink away and the sponsors stampede for the exit.

The nuance behind this thin philosophy of permissiveness is the suggestion that drug testing has been ineffectual and that it is high time to channel the funding into education and information. Juan Antonio Samaranch is moving towards this position. As a measure of the number of geographical miles sport has travelled from the real world, this position works just fine. It's a long time since heroin, let's say, had any good publicity. But heroin sells well even with the accompanying catchphrase that you have everything to lose.

To suggest that sports coaches, doctors, and athletes are going to abandon drugs because of pamphlets and videos is to possess the defiant optimism of the missionary who has just been speared in the heart. Athletes are taking drugs just to stay in business now. Is the analogy with heroin excessive? Perhaps in terms of the relative addictiveness and the comparative landscapes which drugs operate in. Yet the drugs which make shiny muscles for TV consumption are seeping into the mainstream. In May, the US journal Pediatrics published the findings of a survey conducted by Dr Avery Faigenbaum in four Massachusetts schools.

Of 965 middle-grade schoolchildren interviewed, 2.8 per cent of the boys and 2.6 per cent of the girls had used anabolic steroids. Athletic performance and body image had prompted use. This marked a development on a study by the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport whose 1994 sampling of 16,000 schoolchildren (an older sample group here) revealed usage of 3.8 per cent among males and 1.6 per cent among females. The US study found that steroid abuse was reaching younger age groups and was evening out among girls and boys. That is just one juicy worm from the can we are opening. East Germany, and the disfigured lives of the athletes who were once the muscular billboards of that regime, stands as a warning for us all in terms of deregulation. A little EPO wouldn't harm most of those queueing for visas to Samaranch's brave new world. A career which depends on the stuff will leave empty husks of lives.

And let's not pretend there isn't a queue of folk dying to share Samaranch's faulty vision.

Manolo Saiz of the ONCE cycling team noted that Samaranch's "were good words, to set us on a good course in professional sport". His counterpart in Banesto, Eusebio Unzue, was just as happy. "I'm completely in agreement with Samaranch." They would, wouldn't they? They don't have to sweep away the empty husks.

When the West German athlete Birgit Dressel died a slow agonised death the former director of Sports Medical Services in East Germany, Dr Manfred Hoppner, noted that the East Germans had avoided such cases because "we didn't leave the field open to medical charlatans".

Dr Hoppner's views on current legal proceedings against his East German coaches in Berlin would be interesting. That parade of shattered bodies and hollowed-out lives which have been passing through the courtroom suggests that the choices between charlatans and Dr Hoppner's vision is that between granite and a very hard place.

Two of his subjects made small indents into the news pages in May. Christiane Knacke Somme, an Olympic bronze medal swimmer from 1980, returned all her medals. Carola Nitschke Berak tschjan, another East German swimmer, asked for all her own records to be expunged. That's the sort of lifetime glow of satisfaction and achievement they were left with.

What are we left with by way of solution? There is no doubt that with the rich and varied menu of sporting opiates which are pushed at us through the television, the opaque deliberations of doping panels and obscure forensics of doping cases have only a slippery grip on our concentration. Our clear-sightedness is always fuddled by our own nationalist aspirations. Wave the tricolour and our athletes are instantly absolved of suspicion.

There is a weary fatalism also in the radio call-in philosophy of "everyone is doing it, so why shouldn't she/he?". And an incurable susceptibility among portions of the population to the old one-line defence case: "It's a vendetta against me."

Against all that we must view the fall of the Tour de France as a fine thing for sport. We have lifted the rock on a scuttling world of organised cheats, scraped away our own sorry illusions. We have exposed the threadbare intellect of the most powerful man in world sport. If Juan Antonio Samaranch fails to resign (he will fail), at least his moral authority is further whittled away. And we have seen a way forward perhaps. Sport must continue to fight the plague of doping with every weapon available. The involvement of the forces of law and order during the World Swimming Championships in Perth in January and the Tour de France this month has produced very satisfactory results and has restored to currency the worthwhile notion that sport is a civic asset, not a private party.

The criminalisation of those who would do to modern athletes the same things as were done to East German kids for decades is a recognition that the problem is merely a nuance away from being outright child abuse.

With the involvement of the old bill, suddenly cyclists who had been indignantly proclaiming their innocence were singing like birds. If convictions result, the chain must go all the way back to source and the drug companies, hospitals or medics who can't account for huge amounts of drugs which were never intended for such malevolent purpose.

All state funding of elite athletes should hinge upon our satisfaction with their record in drug testing. The secrecy which surrounds these tests must be stripped away. If an athlete is clean, then what harm in publishing the details of when and where they have been tested throughout their career? If they are fighting a case, let's hear the evidence. Why could the taxpayers who have funded so much of Michelle de Bruin's career not hear the deliberations which unfolded in Lausanne last week? If de Bruin is innocent, it would have been instructive. If guilty, it would have been informative.

Conclusive guilt at any stage of a career should bring with it the automatic erasing of records and honours. If we have blank spaces and confusing footnotes in our record books, well, so what? We might have fewer girls turning themselves into men with steroids, fewer ailing kidneys and strained hearts. And fewer clean kids hurling themselves with desperate futility at the records of hardened cheats. The funding of sport should be funnelled more constructively, too. As we await the day when Nike or Coca-Cola or McDonalds announce a major contribution to the quiet work of scientists researching these thorny problems, we can at least lobby for a percentage of all sponsorship monies to be devoted to the problem. Let's see governments make that a mandatory part of the expenditure.

Small nations like ourselves, who habitually keep company with the also-rans, should become more vociferous, too. The duplicity of the official responses to the Michelle de Bruin case are a lesson to us in what we might become. The chorus of loud-mouths who shushed the questions about her are conveniently mute in her time of trouble. We should, as was suggested in the Sunday Tribune last weekend, become a little more choosy about the competitions we enter and host and the standards we expect. And the sports officials we elect.

Finally, there is little room for homiletic posturings or for smug self-congratulation in this parish. We in the media have pushed the pretty pictures for all we were worth. The rap on sports journalists has always been that we are fans with typewriters. In fact we are something lower, something a little more cynical. The oxygen of access has depended on complicity. Our livelihoods - going up Juan Antonio? Me, too - have depended on playing the game. Sit a dozen sports journalists down over a good dinner and rich wines and let them trade freely in the below-the-counter gossip about who does what, who sells what and who stitches up whom. Then read our frothy accounts of the previous day's fun at the stadium. You'll see no clues about sport's dark places. We are facilitators, as much as the coaches, administrators and jangling money men. We have created the off-kilter world where the athlete is more victim than cheat. Hush with the laments. What we have all experienced in the past few weeks has been the foul smell of our own steaming mess.

Time for the clean-up.