Imagine an Olympic Games were every athlete could be believed in. Even when the times they ran or the distance they jumped seemed utterly unbelievable. It used to be the way, until power, money and then drugs slowly broke down the distance between what could be seen as real and what is not. It's hard to know exactly when this belief began to waver. There were always suspicions about the East German athletes during the late 1970s, although it was much later before some of those truths were revealed.
Ben Johnson rocked the Olympic spirit again in 1988 and so too did other high-profile damaging acts such as Marion Jones and, more recently, Justin Gatlin. Even the belief in our Michelle de Bruin has been largely suspended since she won three gold medals at the 1996 Games in Atlanta. But nothing compares to the scale of cheating revealed last week by the Independent Commission report into doping practices in Russia.
Not only does the truth behind most of their performances – particularly at the London Olympics – add up to one big lie: the athletes, coaches, doping authorities and even the governing body of athletics, the IAAF, were all in on the act, and that has shaken the foundation not just of the Olympics but sport itself.
Worse still, commission chairman Dick Pound was insistent that Russia wasn’t the only country with a doping problem or that athletics was the only sport with a doping problem. It’s no secret that several other countries, including so-called athletics superpowers such as Kenya and Jamaica, had major lapses in their anti-doping procedures around the time of the London Olympics, and if or when they are subjected to a similar investigation, there might be even less to believe in. The London Olympics, we know now, were largely sabotaged by Russian athletes – who finished second on the medal table behind the US.
Banning them from next summer's Rio Olympics may go some distance in restoring our belief in what is on show, and yet for Sebastian Coe and the other leaders of world sport, the task of restoring full credibility is only beginning.