Mark Spitz was in Australia this week to pick up a little gong for his immense services to swimming. Surveying the tangled webs of deceit and mistrust which surround the world championships in Perth, Spitz suggested that swimming was doomed.

"They test for five when there are now 25 substances," he said of current drug testing. "I am through with the idiocy that is involved with the sport." Swimming is already dead. The greatest swimmer of all time just seems to have been among the last to hear the news. One of the greatest and most attractively simple of sports has failed to emit a pulse for some time now. Swimming has been chemically poisoned.

The sport was out on the slab long before Australian officials seized 13 vials of human growth hormone from the hapless Chinese team as they entered Australia via Sydney airport early on Thursday.

The specific nature of that confiscated substance merely underlined the futility of almost all debate on the efficacy of drug testing at major sports events and underscored the touching naivete of those who always deem athletes innocent until a fluke of modern drug testing proves them guilty.

Human Growth Hormone (HGH) is a swimmer's dream product, a modern alchemy which refreshes the parts other banned drugs don't reach. It is merely the latest stepping stone used by nimble minds to avoid the feet-wetting shame of detection.

And the best thing about HGH is that if you really want to you can wave it around at the airport, brandish it on the pool deck, wear the letters HGH on your swimming trunks or change your name to plain HGH - and good old Human Growth Hormone will never betray you by showing up in your urine samples. You are untouchable, unimpeachable, the clean-as-a-whistle cheat. All the available evidence about you will be merely circumstantial. Remember, if a customs official hadn't stopped Yuan Yuan at Sydney airport this week the chances are that China would have emerged clean and glorious from the pool and their doubters would once again have been stockaded by dunces in pointy hats.

That untouchability, that virtual immunity of the moderately sophisticated cheat from drug laws, is the one thing which above all else has defined swimming in general and women's swimming in particular for the past 30 years. The mess which the Chinese let crash to the shiny polished floor of FINA's World Championships in Australia this week needs cleaning up at a time when the sport is still coming to terms with the unspooling of the sporting history of the former East Germany and seems to be on the verge of splitting down the middle on the issue of official ineptitude in dealing with the drug problem.

When FINA officials inspected Chinese facilities in the wake of a wave of positive drug tests soon after the World Championships of 1994, Gunnar Werner, a member of the commission, noted that "during the interviews, it appeared that almost all the swimmers expressed surprise at the finding of DHT (a steroid), and their only explanation was that it could have come from the Chinese medicine or Chinese herbal remedies. Most of the coaches were equally adamant."

The deja vu was jarring. The Golden Flowers were evincing the same wounded innocence as had come from the Wundermadchens of East Germany. Swimming veterans thought of the little blue pills which generations of East German swimmers consumed during their 20-year reign at the top of the sport.

The little blue pills, or vitamins, as the swimmers believed them to be, were the emblems of State-sponsored cheating, a mass perversion of the principles of sport for the end of political prestige. In the 1970s and '80s, East Germany produced 32 Olympic swimming champions, 44 world champions, 106 European champions. All of them bogus. They came from nowhere, wave after wave of them, crushing opponents, shattering the morale of a sport as surely as they shattered its records. They burst right from the blue, just like the Chinese in Rome in 1994. They made their entrance in the World Championships in Belgrade in 1973, winning eight of 12 events and setting three world records; by Montreal in 1976, they were winning 10 of the 11 individual golds on offer, setting seven world records and taking gold and silver in five events, gold, silver and bronze in another.

Great, great swimmers with nothing but pure dedication to fuel them finished up with tears in their eyes as they watched medal ceremonies from the stands. Shirley Babashof should have been an American immortal, should have taken five golds home from Montreal. She was derided as a bitter loser. Michelle Ford should have been an Australian icon: she finished fourth behind an East German 12-3. Nancy Garapick should have become the doyenne of Canadian swimming. Enith Brigitha of Holland should have been the first black Olympic swimming champion.

Their victimhood is less lurid then that of the East German women who turned into men, less tragic than the stories of the women who became walking cancer wards later in life; their pain is less newsworthy than that of the male East German thrower who grew breasts and developed breast cancer; their story is less compelling than that of the scientists who invented nasal spray testosterone and a veritable bat cave full with gadgetry of cheating. But it is their story which marks the death of swimming. When the clean athletes abandon hope, a sport is beyond rescue.

Swimming rode the merry-go-round for the first time in the years after Belgrade and Montreal. Pointed fingers were slapped down by Pollyannas in blazers. It was rude and unsporting to whine in defeat. Sure, East German muscles made a bulging mockery of standard physiology, of course their improvements defied credibility and their stamina was unprecedented, it was disconcerting perhaps that their greatest improvements came in the strokes where strength mattered more than technique, and naturally their training was secretive. But, but, but . . . It looked like a duck and walked like a duck and quacked like a duck, but it was bad form to pronounce the East German sporting nation to be a canard.

We know now what in our hearts we always knew. As Swimming World magazine put it last summer: "Every world-class East German swimmer was systematically doped as a matter of state policy."

You have to go back to a time when The Beatles were still good pals with each other to find an era when women's swimming could be taken at face value. Since the early 1970s scientists have dominated the sport like no other.

The jagged graphs of tainted events and spurious times begins back then. The familiar, gentle curves made by honest humans slowly pushing back the limits of natural endeavour vanished. For instance: the 400 metres individual medley, once the supreme test of an all-round swimmer, goes haywire once the record of Australia's Gail Neall (five minutes, 02.97 seconds) is erased in 1973 by Angela Franke (5:01.10) of East Germany.

A succession of East Germans set the pace thereafter. Gudrun Wagner sliced four seconds away, Ulrike Tauber pared another 10 seconds away in a period of dominance interrupted only by her compatriot Birgit Treiber. There was a brief intrusion by Tracy Caulkin of the USA before Petra Schneider began a reign which culminated in a world record which lasted 15 years - until Chen Yan of China swam 4:34.79 in Shanghai last October.

It was claimed by apologists and by those who wished or needed to believe that the East Germans had hit upon a particularly rich vein of their population who were genetically disposed to swimming faster than fish. They were credited with crack training methods, with training smarter than the rest of the huffy puffy universe. What struck cynics most during that period of swimming history was the unlikely depth of the "talent" which the East German system produced, and the odd fact that the benison of superior training methods was bestowed on East German women only. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall suspicion has hardened to fact. The work of biochemist Werner Franke and his wife, the former athlete Brigitte Berendonk, has drawn back the veils on an apparatus of state cheating which defies the imagination of even the most hardened cynic. Using a windfall of Stasi documents, Franke revealed that "the treatment of young girls with androgenic hormones was especially rewarding in the medal-rich swimming events, where it secured consistent international success . . . The treatment of talented swimmers in the mid-80s with androgens usually started at age 14."

Scientists developed their techniques from the crude, mass steroid dosages of the 1970s to the point where, by 1982, before the international test for testosterone was introduced, the East German's had a solution on hand.

"They showed that short, fatty acid esters are preferable, and that three days after injection of 25 mg of testosterone propionate the ratio would again be legal. They also determined that treatments with Human Chorionic Gonadatropin and clomiphen did not change the ratio." Testing? No problem. Clearance profiles were always well ahead of testing procedures. It was, as Franke has said, "a global experiment in secrecy".

It becomes increasingly more clear every day that China has been experimenting with the same secrets. Twenty-three Chinese swimmers have tested positive for drugs (mainly steroids) in the past three-anda-half years.

After an unaccountable lull in performances in Atlanta in 1996, when they won just one gold, came the stunning events of the Chinese National Games in October when the last of the East German records tumbled, the Chinese submitted 10 winning times superior to anything which Atlanta had seen, and Chen Yan and Wu Yanyan set world records in the 400 metres and 200 metres individual medleys respectively despite being ranked outside the world's top 50. All well again. Then the incident at Sydney airport this week.

The carelessness in getting caught is all that distinguishes the Chinese from their East German sisters. Having came to world attention in 1994 in Rome with the astonishing, near whitewash which brought them 12 out of 16 golds in the women's world championships, they moved from having five swimmers ranked in the world top 10 in 1989 to having 28 by the end of 1993. Of those, 24 were freestylers or butterflyers. Again the improvements came in the strength events. The disparity between Chinese male and female swimmers mirrored that between East German men and women.

The depth of the system was even greater than was first evident. By the end of 1993, there were 98 Chinese women ranked in the top 25 in long-course events, as compared to 30 the year before. Last year, in six out of 13 individual Olympic events for women, China produced at least five of the 10 fastest times submitted.

The suspicions have always been there. After Rome in 1994, the world's leading coaches lodged a formal petition of protest with FINA citing the mass of circumstantial evidence that China were cheating. Weeks later, random tests in Hiroshima ensnared seven Chinese swimmers - including two world champions, Lu Bin and Yang Aihua.

The surprise test used at Hiroshima was a breakthrough in detection and had been developed by a Japanese team at Mitsubishi Laboratories. It was the first test to allow for the detection of dihydrotestosterone (DHT), a drug with a much faster clearance time form the body than conventional testosterone products. DHT science had evolved the substance into a gel which could be taken sublingually (underneath the tongue). Seven swimmers tested positive and rumours have long persisted that up to 10 others were borderline positives which were "thrown back" to protect the swoop from legal challenges.

Ironically (or depressingly), the FINA spokesperson who announced those positive tests, Dr Allen Richardson, was disciplined by FINA for allegedly making a "premature" break from the traditional cover of silence which swimming authorities like to throw over these matters.

Months later, the Chinese were in trouble again. In March 1995, a FINA committee arrived in Beijing for inspections and were handed a letter which stated that eight more positive tests had been uncovered in a time span going back to 1990. These tests had been reported not to FINA, but to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which failed to share the news with anyone.

Remarkably, later in 1995, at the opening of the Asian Games in October, Juan Antonio Samaranch, the president of the IOC, gave China a clean bill of health, using the sort of lazy justification which was previously the exclusive property of pub bores.

"I do not think the Chinese are using drugs," said the most powerful man in sport. "And they are certainly no worse than many other nations in this regard."

Australians have long been vociferous in their scepticism and two Australian swimming bodies lobbied FINA in 1995 for the suspension of the Chinese pending investigations. The American Swim Coaches Association and the World Swim Coaches Association did likewise, and this week it was looking more and more likely that the latter body might finally and impatiently break away from FINA for good.

When Zhou Ming, the Chinese trainer who has recently finished serving a one-year ban and is back in Perth this week, visited the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra in the late 1980s, physiologists there were astounded at the training logs of some of Ming's swimmers, who appeared to be swimming 90 km a week at altitude while also including intense weight training and other land exercises. Swimming experts formed the opinion that all that was stopping the women from physical breakdown was drugs.

Sydney this week might just have been a watershed, a final, cataclysmic shaming which tips the balance against a state-sponsored programme of cheating.

Even if that is the case, it is too late for women's swimming. The sport is left with little choice other than to turn the clocks back.

The angels have long since contended that if swimming is to become a great sport again it must purge itself. That purging will be painful and commercially disastrous. The past must be rewritten. Honest athletes must have their medals, a token of the reward they were due. Discredited records must be scratched from the books. Blood testing must become a fact of life. The ethos of real sport must be revived.

Beneath the blazers there aren't many hearts strong enough for that battle. It's always easier to keep on rouging the dead face of swimming than to cope with the consequences.