Locker Room:Me and Ms Jones. The final dagger driven into my splintered old heart hit home on Friday. Marion didn't have the decency to wait for a Saturday night to tell me, and the world, that she'd had a thang going on with the drugs. All the scribes with the swanky Saturday and Sunday columns got to stomp all over her bony ass in a Riverdance of high indignation while I lay down in a dark room.
I suppose all that is left to say is that we won't get fooled again and thanks for wising us all up, Marion. The first Olympics I got sent to armed with my little goose quill and parchment (as we used back then) was the Atlanta Olympics, and on the first night Michelle Smith won a gold medal.
We had been instructed by the veterans of such things to get some quotes off Michelle in the afternoon when she won her heat because the formbook on Irish swimmers was that they had a tendency to drown if they reached finals and were thus difficult to contact for a while. So we stood outside in the afternoon sun as the swimmers trooped out of the arena and our freckled little lady of the chlorine came through and looked like an entirely different species from the rest of the gals. And some of us thought, oh no.
That evening Michelle ploughed through the final like a turbo-charged plough horse (careful when you're mixing those metaphors there, sonny) while all the other dainty little mermaids drank her wash. And later that night we stood outside in this grassy garden and watched herself and her drug-cheat husband, Erik, performing for the media.
Erik threw the head at one stage when asked about drugs and stomped off. Michelle was more polished. When she left we talked in little groups and, like Amy Winehouse with rehab, we said no, no, no.
And some of us wrote no, no, no. More of the gang, members who knew better, rolled with the big show and hung out the bunting.
For a couple of years it was bitter and cold between us all, and even still in Irish sports journalism, though things have been mended, we all recall who wrote what when it came to Michelle and our little civil war.
What I remember of that Saturday night in the balmy little garden though was meeting, for the first time, a hugely impressive American journalist called Gwen Knapp, who worked out of San Francisco and by virtue of covering the circus that is American big-time sport had tons more experience than any of us at the business of shaking her head and saying no, no, no.
Gwen knew swimming and she knew ideals and she shook her head vigorously and said thanks, but no thanks, she wasn't buying anything Michelle and Erik had to sell. And for those of us who wanted to write the same thing in our columns that was helpfully inspirational and sent us off to ask our questions and write our pieces with a bit of steel in our floppy little spines.
Funny thing: when I cranked up the internet (as Homer Simpson says, they have it on computers now, you know) the other day it was Gwen Knapp's syndicated column that came up giving me news of Jones's sudden conversion to truth and justice.
Gwen was her usual crisp, elegant and brilliant self but I wondered reading through her lines how she endures the job she does. Atlanta was 13 years ago and since then Gwen has been working at the coalface of American sport as star after star, icon after icon, saviour after saviour, has been brought down. She works and writes in the very city where Barry Bonds has just concluded the charade that was his drug-fuelled theft of baseball's home-run record.
How would you ever write something positive about professional sport again if you had been up close and personal (workwise) with such a parade of cheats and liars and disappointments? Bonds and Jones in particular are the sort of stories many people passionately wanted to be deluded about. As was Michelle Smith. And the scale of the professional divisions and outright disillusion Michelle left in her wake among journalists is minuscule in comparison to what Bonds and Jones will inflict.
So we all hike off to Beijing next year and journalistically the choices are pretty gloomy. Do you act like a PR flak and report everything face up and ask for them to byline you simply as Pollyanna? Or do you get the scepticism in first?
The story buzzing around the press rooms before the Sydney Games was of a well known and formidable journalist from the New York Times who had asked his editors if they could put an asterisk at the end of each filed report of his and a few words stating he didn't actually believe in anything he had written above. To me it seemed like the ideal solution to the self-respect problem.
No paper will go down the asterisk route though. Television, because it funds sport like a rich sugar daddy, will work up a froth of excitement about anything it buys, and in newspaper offices at editorial meetings smart people will tell each other that what the paper needs in the morning is a big dollop of that there froth from the telly.
So we will plod through another Olympics. We'll wonder if we have the guts to be another Gwen Knapp, the nerve to keep calling it as we really see it even though the whole world wants us to stand on our hind legs and clap along.
On Saturday I watched two underage camogie games. Maybe 50 players in championship action, and it was the most committed, heroic, impassioned, genuine sport I have seen in a long time. It was everything young women in sport could be.
A friend, a good soccer man, texted me afterwards and said he wished some of the 50-grand-a-week merchants who suck on the big fat teat of the Premiership could have been made watch it all.
Dida, that poor, concussed, possibly terminally damaged AC Milan goalkeeper, was on his mind. Poor man got half a smack in the head from some Celtic yobbo last week and to judge by how the power tragically drained out of Dida's body he may never lead a normal life again.
I texted back a few suggestions as to which players could have benefited from seeing the commitment of the girls. And then I thought of Marion. And Michelle. And the Ma Junren girls. Of Birgit Dressel and the whole line of cheats who could have been exactly what you would want your daughters to be but transpired to be the last thing you would want any kid to turn into.
I don't really care how Marion felt writing her angsty little epistles of apology to family and friends; I don't care that I wasted some of my life sitting listening as she doled out her smooth patter in press conferences; I don't care that I bought into her whole schtick for a while. But she sold out the kids in the parks and on the pockmarked running tracks; she screwed over all the girls who bought her Nike trainers and looked at her nice, goofy smile and thought that they'd go and train like Marion so they could be like Marion. That's tough to swallow.
So I think of how quietly inspirational and encouraging it was to meet Gwen Knapp that night in Atlanta and think of all the girls who must have found something even more encouraging and inspirational in Marion Jones and her megawatt smile.
On Saturday in the Phoenix Park and in Marino even that seemed not to matter. There are parts of the sporting universe Marion and Nike and Balco cannot reach and you just have to go out looking for those places if you want to keep on keeping on in the sports biz.
And if I ever see Gwen Knapp again I must ask her what keeps her going because she wasn't in the Phoenix Park on Saturday morning. Now, Gwen, that was sport. You would have loved it.
