LockerRoom: I often wonder if Germans get less news in their newspapers than we do. Or do those long, strung-together words which they like so much express such nuance and depth of feeling that a German hack can say in the space of a paragraph what it takes us an entire column to convey.

(How often do I wonder this? Actually, never. Every column needs an intro, no matter how contrived, though, and I've just found this lovely epic German word which I am determined to press into service.)

Yes, they have a word for everything, the Germans. They probably even have a word for the whole notion of having a word for everything. The last one I came across was, ta-da, Vergangenheitsbewaltigung (do they have spelling-bee contests in Germany?) and it means, so I'm told (I'm open to annexation, here) the cathartic process of coming to terms with the past.

As soon as I came across Vergangenheitsbewaltigung I decided that come what may, I was going to use it in a column about athletics. So I wrote the word on the back of my hand and all the way up my arm as far as the elbow and waited.

The World Athletics Championships began this weekend. Remember them? They were the subject of the popular comedy Honey, I Shrunk The Sport and, once upon a time, the World Athletics Championships meant something to us.

This week we sent a brave cadre of Irish journalists to Helsinki to send back daily audits of the Irish casualties and to give us what news there is of new drugs to make the boys and girls run faster.

We are living in a post-Balco world and the news that there were little shops of horrors out there selling designer ooomph to anyone with cash or the prospect of it has confirmed what we suspected all along.

Balco, said Istvan Gyulai, the general secretary of the IAAF last week, has been bad for the sport of athletics.

It's hard to see how. Would it be better if the rock had never been lifted and we didn't know what was creeping and crawling around underneath?

Balco conceivably was bad for Nike and NBC and others who live like parasites off the fat of artificially enhanced stars but a little truth can't necessarily have been bad for athletics.

Last week with the belated zeal of the converted, the US athletics people brought a motion to the world athletics people. The Americans sitting on top of a soiled athletics world wanted, after years of leniency and looking the other way, to introduce life bans for first-time steroid abusers.

The Americans, of course, are just coming to the end of a phase of the Balco scandal which has left them quite shaken. The last of the four defendants to appear in a US federal court, an elderly Ukrainian chancer named Remi Korchemny, made a plea bargain and got his rap reduced to a misdemeanour and won't be serving any time consulting with guys in the prison yard about how to make their muscles bigger.

So the Americans have been there with the involvement of feds and investigators and the shredding of illusion. The IAAF wasn't quite ready.

"A life ban would undermine the IAAF's anti-doping programme," said Arne Ljungqvist, the IAAF's vice-president, who in fairness is usually hawkish enough on these matters.

"I'm one who would certainly like to see stronger sanctions but this is not the moment to take that decision. We would inevitably run into legal problems," he said.

Ljungqvist is probably right. It's an uneven battle - always has been - but the fear is that athletics, needing as it does enduring and believable stars, is learning to live with what it regards as an acceptable level of cheating.

The facts are that to be tested positive at a major athletics meet you have to be so dumb that you shouldn't be going near sharp, pointy things like syringes in the first place.

And the holes in the net which out-of-competition testers trawl with are so big as to make it a mere matter of routine vigilance to avoid detection. So long as everyone keeps quiet and something ugly and unexpected like Balco doesn't befall one it will always be summertime and the living will always be easy.

How easy? You can be assured that resources mean there will be little or no testing out of season. You can get away with two missed tests every 18 months, but generally the network of early-warning systems will tell you when testers show up in your world.

In less-developed but sunny parts of the world you can train happy in the knowledge that there is no local, independent drug-testing agency. The code of see no evil, hear no evil persists.

Athletics needs some Vergangenheitsbewaltigung. It needs a truth and justice commission where everything that has happened can be put out on the table without recrimination and the business can take a good look at itself and reflect on the small number of ways it actually resembles a true sport. Athletes, even clean athletes, need to reflect on the ways in which they have conspired to destroy a sport which presumably they, each and every one of them, at some time loved. They are all part of the process.

Instead of the dreary rote of denials and rationalisations it would be, well, cathartic to hear the cold, clinical facts, to hear the sort of things athletes whisper about in training camps, to hear how the knowledge and lore of doping gets passed down.

And then start from the beginning again. Smaller, cleaner, slower.

Last week Christine Arron, the statuesque French sprinter, reflected aloud that she felt she had probably been denied world championship gold medals over the years by cheats. Her conquerors include Balco celebs Kelli White and Marion Jones so it was a moot point. How many others leave the game feeling the same way?

Remember 10 years ago? Gothenburg. We were hovering on the edge of disbelief back then but Sonia's astonishing form at the time kept us fascinated. She was golden then, a natural, an athletics star you could believe in.

In Stuttgart just two years previously she had been mugged by the Chinese and there were some of us, including for a while Sonia, who wanted to believe the Chinese but the Ma Junren story unfolded slowly and in the end Sonia's decision to go away and do double what she had been doing in training before Stuttgart is probably what ultimately drained her for Atlanta and cost her a good chunk of her prime.

Even about Sydney, when she came back from depths which few athletes have ever visited, she must have had her doubts. To be beaten by a stride by an athlete whose car is intercepted some time later carrying EPO? Ho hum.

All those medals stood, though. All the Stuttgart gold medals stood. And Sydney. And the suits celebrated those meets as a tonic for the troops.

Balco hasn't been bad for athletics - it has been good. It lifted the rock and showed us the creatures underneath.

It's been bad for sponsors and TV companies but that's a different thing entirely. Time for radical progress.

Bring on the Vergangenheitsbewaltigung.