Back in the mid 1980s, the people who marched up and down outside the Dunnes Stores outlet in Henry Street used to face a peculiar and ticklish political problem.

They were carrying placards for what, from the impossibly smug perspective of the Celtic Tiger era, looks like a startlingly noble cause. A worker had refused to handle fruit from apartheid-stained South Africa. Dunnes Stores management had reacted with predictable fury. The Dunnes strike was born.

In retrospect, with the right all piled on one side of the street and the wrong all sitting steaming on the other, it seems impossible that the dispute could have dragged on for so long and with such unrelenting ugliness. It is difficult now to conjure up the Flatleyesque moral tap-dancing which the government of the time performed.

The harvest of apartheid should have simply been unsaleable, the Dunnes strikers should have been garlanded as national heroes. Their actions fitted perfectly with our cosy national self-image, the little country which plugs for the underdog.

And yet. People wanted cheap fruit and cheap food and better value. They resented having their consciences pricked. And so the strikers would stand outside Dunnes in Henry Street arguing with people who didn't care (or thought they couldn't afford to care) about the history of the produce they were about to purchase.

I thought of all that while reading some of the reaction to the death last week of Florence Griffith-Joyner. We in the sports media business are in the business of flogging cheap fruit.

Flo-Jo, though, wasn't an anonymous East German with a difficult name or one of the production-line Chinese who have flitted across the horizons of our sporting awareness in the past couple of years. She wasn't an also ran or one of those faceless cyclists who dropped dead with sludgy epo clogging up their veins.

Flo-Jo wasn't Birgit Dressel. We have written here before of Dressell and the excruciatingly painful death the West German athlete suffered 18 months before the Seoul Olympics. Dressell's face doesn't summon up anything in the imagination though. She evokes no more vivid images than a South African fruit-picker might.

Flo-Jo is different. And her death proves that no amount of poisonous rain can corrode some people's capacity for convenient self-delusion. There was pious bleating from certain ovine quarters that the memory of poor Florence Griffith-Joyner should be left in peace.

Certain journalists found nothing to prick their curiosity in the tale of a woman who could run a world record for the 100 metres in 1988 and drop dead of an apparent heart seizure just 10 years later. One confused old sad sack even pointed out that she never tested positive, and anyway look at Butch Reynolds, it doesn't mean anything even if you do test positive. So there.

This would be a logical and understandable stance for people close to the athlete to take. If you loved and knew Flo-Jo, you would like to preserve her legend in aspic, holding out an image of her which might be acceptable to the seven-year-old daughter she has left behind.

For the rest of us, though, there is an uncomfortable sense that, in the wake of deaths like Grifith-Joyner's, all of us who consume sport and retail sport are culpable.

The story is often told of the atmosphere in the press tribune in Seoul when Flo-Jo was performing her wonders. The international press just sat there silent, unmoved and depressed. There was a similar phenomenon to be observed in Atlanta when Michelle Smith was winning races.

Journalists listened to the questions, arguments and fears of people within the sport, looked at the obvious lack of warmth and respect from those beaten in the races towards the winners, studied the extraordinary changes in bodyshape and examined the statistical improvements in times of the athletes concerned.

Journalists did these things and withheld their applause, but by and large didn't withhold their printed praise. Cheap fruit. Great value. Come on in.

The reasons are complex. We are fans. We crave access. We live in a televisual world. Television serves big time sport up as a simple black and white business. Winners and losers. No asterisks or question marks.

Print journalists work to editors and bosses who sit back home and consume television and become fans. If Dunnes Stores in Henry Street liked to sell cheap fruit, regardless of its origin, sports journalists like to serve up pleasing copy regardless of its sincerity. Sports journalists, by and large, are slaves to the machine. Our industry is about propping up a bigger industry.

We produce flattering, soft-focus images of deeply obsessed people and we retail them aggressively. Flo-Jo was flamboyant, beautiful and colourful, and, like the pledge from the South African government that all fruit workers actually lived like kings, we had the stamp from the IOC lab that Flo-Jo had never tested positive. Come on, treat yourself: lovely, lovely fruit.

Florence Griffith-Joyner left behind sprint times which suggest she was the greatest sprinter who ever lived. She buried Jesse Owens' marks and she set marks which no woman has come within a six-inch fingernail of touching. We will withhold the really obscene rewards until somebody comes along and breaks those records.

It is uncomfortable to examine our own role in Flo-Jo's death and our efforts in making her story fit the norms of sporting heroism. We would rather retail the good value of a sub-10.50 seconds 100-metre sprint than ask you to consume the certified clean business of an entire field coming in around the 11 second mark.

As consumers and retailers of the product that is sport, we are all complicit. Those who whine uncomfortably about the impropriety of asking questions of her death and cynically use the well-being of Flo-Jo's young daughter as a pretext for not disturbing her legacy, tread a thin ice of deceit. They know that the answer to the question as to how this could have happened comes, in short: we let it happen.

The last (but most worthwhile) service which Florence Griffith-Joyner could do for a sport which almost literally consumed her is to serve as a road sign for all the other seven-year-olds who will follow her, for all those who resist the notion that a percentage of network and sponsor spend on sports should be devoted to the science of detecting cheats.

We often quote the survey of athletes who cheerfully announced that if they could win everything for five years and then die of the side effects of their drugs, well, then they would make that Faustian pact. It is a startling little nugget, but it somehow glamorises the sordid business of cheating by dressing athletes who are killing themselves in the garb of second World War fighter pilots.

It appears that Florence Griffith-Joyner reached payment time on that pact last week. If so, we should be told and our abiding memory should be of what her face might have looked like when she saw the bill.