Thirty-six hours. Friday was the longest day in the history of the world. British Midland's 12.45 p.m. flight failed to get your eager scribe to Heathrow in time for the 4.40 p.m. connection to Athens. British Midland then gave your ravenous scribe a hand-written chit for £5 (sterling!) and set him loose for six hours to enjoy it. To be delayed by British Midland is to have won first prize in the lottery of life.

The next flight to Greece didn't get off the ground until close to midnight and was filled with smoking Brits in straw hats and a nice but disgruntled American sociologist who sat beside your jaded scribe and told him, by way of unfavourable comparison with Greece and Ireland, that America's prototypical contribution to the world is the disposable camera.

"A piece of plastic wrapped in a box made of cardboard and plastic, handed to you in a plastic bag, so that you can use it and throw the whole lot away tomorrow. Compare that to the Acropolis."

Your irritable scribe compared that with the Acropolis more than once and then shot the American sociologist with a cold grey Luger he always carries and tried to get some shut eye.

In Athens, at 4.30 a.m., your humble scribe is the only arrival in need of a welcome from the vastly over-staffed World Athletics Championships welcome desk. They warmly welcome your overwhelmed scribe in many types of fragmented English. Tears are shed.

Most touching is the brunette who lifts your lazy scribe's luggage and says enthusiastically: "Take me. Okay?" After some moments of cross-cultural confusion, your misunderstood scribe takes his own bags to the courtesy car.

The car drives your pampered scribe around the airport to another terminal which, as luck would have it, is crawling with Irish holiday makers. Your red-faced scribe is escorted through the crush of tired Paddies by his large retinue of welcomers and installed in splendid isolation on a luxury coach which will, he is told, take him to Athens when the driver turns up.

This is the courtesy bus and your courteous scribe spends the next 20 minutes courteously telling people in Dubs shirts that they can't get on, that the bus is for down-at-heel scribes only and that the welcome people would reek terrible revenge were they to find their courtesy bus filled with happy holiday makers. Eventually, like a plump and unpopular dictator, your plump and unpopular scribe is driven away. There is the sound of booing and, in the Athens night, I think I saw some vegetable produce being thrown.

It is dawn as we approach the city and the Acropolis looks magnificent. "Compare that to a disposable camera," your chatty scribe says to the courtesy bus driver, "the portable camera which is the prototypical American contribution to the world."

At the Meridien Hotel, your fearless scribe makes a brave decision. Having arrived at 5.30 a.m. (Greek time), exactly 5 1/2 hours after the press accreditation office shut for the night (thanks British Midland!), your remorselessly hygienic scribe decides to stay up and proceed, after a shower, to the accreditation centre to surprise the Greeks early in the morning and, from there, to proceed to the Olympic stadium which hosts Sonia O'Sullivan's preliminary heat first thing.

Many hours later, having watched Sonia on Greek TV in a waiting area at the accreditation centre, your bitter correspondent starts badmouthing British Midland to complete strangers.

There is a silver lining, however. Sonia looks happy and the rest of the Irish contingent, those goody, goody two-shoes bastards who came out early and got to the race, confirmed that, in person, she was shorter than she looks on TV, but just as happy.

Nobody's happiness is as infectious as Sonia O'Sullivan's. There are other Irish athletes here, of course, and during the week we will describe their fate in a pre-written sentence at the end of reports. "Meanwhile, there was disappointment for the Irish contingent when (fill in blank) the promising (fill in blank) runner ailed to finish/finished last/ finished second-last in his/her first-round heat/semi-final of the (fill in blank) metre event."

Sonia is the main event, though, and if Sonia is happy, we're happy. A good news story about which we have no reservations. If she's happy.

She might stop and chat a while about being the main event and about her remarkable resurrection. We hope this is the case because later in the week grumpy people are going to be calling from sports desks in Ireland wondering why bloated scribes are writing light colour stuff with the word "pantheon" hideously over-used. They'll want Sonia interviews instead.

The Irish press corps are slightly downbeat, however. As are the Brits, who have devoted many acres of newsprint to long speculative stories about Kelly Holmes' chances of coming here and winning gold medals. Now it appears that for the past fortnight the dogs in the street were barking the news that Holmes was injured. None of them barked near enough to the offices of the newspapers who were hoisting Kelly on to their shoulders, however.

There is another reason for the downbeat sheepishness of course. It is a year since we were altogether in Atlanta and arguing about the ethical difficulties of covering drugs in sport stories.

Most of the goody, goody two-shoes hoors who got to Athens early have had to cover the deliberations of the IAAF, who last week decided to halve the sentences for drugs offenders. Journalists, who have for years dutifully covered athletes whom they knew or suspected to be cheating, have been running around asking those athletes for their views on this development.

Everybody feels a little downcast. The name of the game in sports journalism is access. If you ask the big star a hard question about drugs and the big star decides that life would be more comfortable if he or she were never to speak to you again then you quickly become a career martyr.

There is little point in grumpy editors sending you places if people won't speak to you. For newspapers, sport is about good news or it is about nothing at all. You either bite the bullet and play along or you stay at home and stew. Most people chomp down hard on the bullet and the public concern about drugs in sport just gets more and more diluted.

A few of us talk late into the Athens night about the problem. We don't have to wonder where it will all lead. It will lead to more cases like that of Lisa de Villers, the 14-year-old Johannesburg schoolgirl who has been done not once but twice for steroid use.

By starting early, Lisa presumably hopes to avoid the unseemly scrutiny which would come with big leaps in her performance levels later in life. By putting steroids into her adolescent body she risks hormonal turmoil which might be permanently damaging.

In Athens this week, however, the rewards are at an all-time high and the punishment is at an all-time low and those of us on the press courtesy buses are looking at the splendour of the Acropolis and trying to tell ourselves that we are good and conscientious journalists.

What can we do, we shrug, what can we do?