There is a cult, a harmless cult but a cult nonetheless, which dedicates itself to propagating the absurd notion that motor racing is a sport. The misled laity believe that a lot of money and a lot of science, a bit of danger and a little talent is what makes a sport.

They are wrong of course. A lot of money, a lot of science, a bit of danger and a little talent is what makes modern athletics. That is a TV mogul, a chemist, the risk to athletes' health and the talent they started out with.

What a thrill it was to escape the athletics freaks yesterday and get to Croke Park in time to enjoy a sporting spectacle which still matters to the community in which it is held, a sport which can be taken at face value and for the moment has yet to be polluted by drugs or money.

In Athens last week this column must have spoken to maybe two dozen journalists. Not a lot, but this column never claimed to be popular. They came from Ireland, England, America, Australia, Canada and South Africa. Not one of them believed in the sport they were covering. Some of them loved it, because they were runners or jumpers or throwers themselves and the lure of it never quite dies for them. They love it but they don't believe in it.

It's not that athletics isn't thrilling. At its best it is the purest most compulsive sport in the world. There are few sights to compare with the human horses of the sprint events, or the moment of truth when Gebrselaisse kills a field off with that little smirk on his face. Sonia in her prime was a great thrill to watch. It's just that . . .

Well three positive tests in Athens? Three guilty parties amidst all that great herd of shining muscle? Nobody was buying it. Yet nobody is too sure what to do about it beyond privately swapping stories about who takes what and who took what.

Athletics is in sharp decline. In America the annual track and field championships which sparkle with some of the greatest talents on the planet earth attract the proverbial one man and his dog. In Ireland the dog feigns illness on the day of the BLE championships.

Athletics at the top level is held together by a collusion of sponsors' interest and television with us mutt-headed print guys weighing in to give support. Nobody believes in the purity of it, not all of it, but nobody wants to be elsewhere when the curtain goes up.

Every race is a little narrative and that is compulsive enough for us to want to write the story.

It's a unique journalistic dilemma, the business of reporting top line athletics as sport but giving the sham aspects of it credibility at the same time. Most of us just turn a blind eye.

If we are to accept the rather droll arguments put forward by the athletics pimps to the effect that all tests are infallible and therefore all athletes are innocent unless their urine suggests otherwise we must also purchase the charmingly humourous idea offered by Justine McCarthy in the Irish Independent recently that all drug users are outsized, hairy, acne ridden freaks who have voices like Lee Marvin. (Legal warning: As an outsized, hairy, acne ridden freak with a voice like Lee Marvin this column warns against sloppy syllogisms.)

We must accept the preposterous notion that despite the exaggerated rewards for athletic excellence the science of cheating has remained static and that despite the many impediments the science of detection has caught up.

We live in a world where access to education, wealth, power, security, influence, shelter, etc is determined not by talent or hard work but by class and environment and politics and cheating and a whole host of other unavoidable but unfair social determinants. Sport is supposed to be our escape from that world.

Sport is meant to be a utopia which exists in a parallel universe which rewards the hard working and talented and the expert according to their merits.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, everybody fiddles their taxes so why shouldn't we?

Everybody takes drugs so why shouldn't we? Well if you don't know the answer you don't love sport. The lamest, most intellectually unsustainable yet most common of all drugs arguments, all morality arguments is the one which suggests that the prevalence of cheating is a justification for cheating.

Sport deserves better than that, deserves to be more than a mass entertainment. Sport is a social tonic which benefits us all, makes us better people, gives us strong bones, tough muscles and good characters. The beauty of buying your child a Manchester United jersey is not that he or she might merely wear the thing but that he or she might actually run around and break sweat in it, learn about winning and losing in it and pick up something to dream about when he or she goes to bed wearing it.

Contaminated sport is the desecration of our own childhoods and the poisoning of our own children's dreams.

If we cannot believe in top level sport as something ethical and good and clean and healthy, something which we would like our children to enjoy well then what is the point.

If we believe as most European governments do that the great sports occasions, representing as they do a national resource, are worth keeping away from the hands of satellite dish hustlers and should be broadcast free by terrestrial bound television then we must be able to believe in the cleanliness of these events.

If sport requires the consistent suspension of disbelief than it is no more than slick TV soap opera, no more edifying than pulp fiction, and we in the newspaper business might as well forget about journalism, retitle ourselves Entertainment Today and peddle Fantasy Golf competitions till we die. And motor racing of course.

We spoke a lot in Athens last week about John Treacy. The context was the aching question of where the public funds of any sporting nation end up. In the great mess that is athletics, are the well intentioned grants ending up in pushers pockets?

John Treacy is one of the heroes, a wise and decent man who filled this kid's imagination when he galloped through the mud of Limerick Racecourse in March 1978. John Treacy meant something.

One worries sometimes if a lifetime of courageous running is adequate preparation for the cut throat sleeveen world of sports politics but that is where John finds himself today, head of the Irish Sports Council.

John Treacy's legacy should be safeguarded by the assurance that those who join him in the pantheon of Irish sport are as clean and honest as he was. He has the means at his disposal, the platform and the funding, to ensure that even if they all come trailing the field our athletes are heroically clean.

None of us could agree on how he would do it but we were happy that he could do it. Then we finished our coffees and went back to report on the musclefest.