The story of steroid abuse in the Olympics is a long and tragic one with not alone many villains but also countless victims - and those we should never forget.
'WELL, NOBODY'S perfect," declares Osgood at the end of Some Like it Hot. Perhaps that ought to become a slogan in the ever-strange and wonderful world of the Olympic Games.
When it comes to packing for Beijing, many people will be torn between lugging David Wallechinsky's Complete Book of the Olympicsas source material and simply opting for the Oxford Medical Dictionary. Both weigh about the same as a well-fed toddler. But while keeping in touch with the races and results is a relatively straightforward business, keeping up with developments in the laboratories is, as they say, a whole new ball game.
And the endless race between the good guys in the white coats trying to unmask the increasingly ingenious and dastardly concoctions the evil guys in white coats are inventing so our athletes go higher, faster and stronger is only part of it.
It isn't just about the human compulsion to cheat in order to win that blurs the divide between medicine and sport. No, the arcane history of gender testing provides a poignant and powerful comment on the bizarre and often sad heart of the great Olympian festival once you strip away the flags and anthems, the packed stadiums and the slow-motion shots of the pursuit of athletic perfection.
Those of us who grew up in the late 1970s and 1980s will vaguely remember insinuations about the somewhat butch aspect of some of the females who emerged from behind the Iron Curtain to take part in the big athletics nights in the liberal cities of Europe.
During the height of the Cold War, the shot or javelin contests on Olympic summers could be used as perfect illustrations of everything that was wrong with the East and right with the West. It was fascinating stuff, a soap-operatic scandal perpetrated before the eyes of the world, with stern-faced frauleins with baritone voices grimly hoovering up the medals in the field events and the swimming pool, leaving their more manicured and photogenic adversaries from the West crying on the shoulders of their coaches.
The chaps at the BBC could hardly come out and speak their minds: that this was, well, chaps against ladies. But it was clear they were perturbed. David Coleman did famously remark, "And this line-up for the final of the women's 400-metre hurdle includes three Russians, two East Germans, a Pole, a Swede and a Frenchman." Was that a Freudian slip or did old Coleman know something we didn't?
The whole enterprise of men impersonating women has long provided a rich vein of material for film and music, from Dame Edna Everage to Dustin Hoffman's Tootsieto the perennial Christmas classic Some Like it Hot.
"You don't understand, Osgood," pleads Jack Lemmon's Gerry.
"Eeeeh . . . I'm a man."
But the notion of men masquerading as women has been part of Olympic lore for three-quarters of a century; testing started as far back as the 1930s. The practice has grown more scientific and invasive over the years. But the most troubling aspect is that, unlike testing for drugs, gender testing has, since Sydney 2000, been done not randomly or uniformly but in response to suspicions voiced to the Olympic authorities about specific competitors. In other words, an athlete can be subjected to a battery of invasive and, one assumes, humiliating tests simply because someone dislikes the look of her.
There is surely a Salem Witch Trial dimension to putting people through the imposition of having their very identity questioned on the whims of another.
It is a delicate matter for the International Olympic Committee, as the infallibility of chromosomal testing has, in the past decade, been challenged after it became apparent some of those who failed the test - eight females failed in Atlanta 1996 - had irregular chromosomes and were thus guilty of nothing.
This has led to ruinous decisions. Perhaps the most famous "victim" of gender testing has been Santhi Soundarajan, who won a silver medal at the 2006 Asian Games in Doha, only to find herself stripped of the medal and the subject of widespread infamy after she failed a gender test. It is thought the complaint came not from other athletes but from a drug-testing official. Soundarajan, bewildered and unimaginably hurt, protested her innocence. It was subsequently concluded a limited diet - she was raised in rural India - might have contributed to a hormonal imbalance that caused her to fail the IOC test. Soundarajan attempted suicide last autumn, her athletic career - and self-esteem - obliterated.
There have been cases of blatant gender deception in the Olympics. The most infamous and tragic centred on the 1936 100-metre final. The American Helen Stephens won gold, but according to Wallechinsky's bible, she had to deal with not only unwelcome advances from a smitten Hitler but also allegations by a Polish journalist that she was, in fact, a man.
The accusation probably stemmed from the rivalry between Stephens and the Polish sprinter Stella Walsh, the 1932 Olympic champion, with whom she had engaged in an enmity with plenty of sparks. That race had all but been forgotten, though, by 1980 when Walsh, living in Cleveland, was shot dead during a robbery on a department store. At her autopsy, it was discovered that Walsh had a condition that defined her, under Olympic rules, as a male. She is listed in the record books as Stanislawa Walasiewicz.
Tragic as those natural chromosomal ambiguities may have been, there was something much more sinister about the systematic hormonal conditioning of thousands of athletes from Eastern Europe. The alarm bells were sounding from 1960, when the throwing events were dominated by the Soviet sisters Tamara and Irina Press, who won five Olympic gold medals and set 26 world records, only to disappear from public competition after gender testing began. The state-sponsored campaign in East Germany to create super teams for the Olympics is thought to have involved 10,000 young people, force fed drugs for the glory of the GDR.
The full consequences of the abuse are still coming to light. Heidi Krieger is the most high-profile victim. As a teenager in 1970s Berlin, Krieger attended the Sports School for Children and Youth and made stunning improvements in the shot after taking her "blue vitamin pills". By the time she was 18, she was a European champion, weighed 200 pounds and was often mistaken for a man. Her coaches referred to her as Hormone Heidi, and by the early 1990s her joints had all but buckled under the ferocious training regime and her career was over. After several black years, Krieger had a gender-change operation, and today Andreas Krieger is one of the most outspoken critics of the old GDR regime.
In 2000, during a highly publicised court-room confrontation with Manfred Ewald, the godfather of the East German sports, Krieger produced an old photograph of Heidi and said, "They just used me like a machine."
Machine: such a simple and damning last word - for the Olympics are supposed to be a celebration of the human spirit.
And so as we move to Beijing for new glories and, inevitably, new scandals, it is perhaps worth remembering those spirits that have been damaged because they did not live up the Olympic standards of the fairer sex. Their stories are footnotes in the great library of Olympic material but they ought not to be forgotten as the vast, messy pageant of humanity unveils its latest splendours.
