A few years ago during the long, tedious and tragic national soap opera that was the unravelling of Michelle Smith's deceptions I had a row with somebody from RTE.

The national broadcaster was then and is still in a complete state of journalistic denial about the whole tawdry business of Our Lady of the Chlorine and finding a Montrose fundamentalist with whom to have a row wasn't difficult.

Anyway this chap had a special bee in his pretty little bonnet. Paul Kimmage. Of all the people who had traduced the name of O.L.C Kimmage had the least right. Kimmage was a "bitter little bastard" a "failed second-rater" and the nation's "only acknowledged drug cheat". He had a large single's worth of chips on each shoulder and was so ravaged and twisted as to be beyond all hope of admittance to polite society.

Kimmage's great sin of course, apart from being more conscientious and hard working than the rest of us, was to have declined to live off the two bob's worth of celebrity allotted to him. When he got off the saddle for the last time in the late 1980s we all loved him for his witty Magill diaries and his frank after-race quotes to Jimmy Magee. He could have bought the blazer and played the part, made the same speech at a million dinners and written wistfully about the good old days for the rest of his life.

Instead of course he spat in the soup, told it like it was. He took drugs just to hang on, just to survive. We had to put our hands over our ears like kids. We're not listening. He'd been on the inside and here was his report back to us. We're still not listening. So he stood buck naked before us and we hated him for it of course.

Knowing that he couldn't - and if he could, well, he was in the wrong place - he was asked to name names on RTE. The old put up or shut up argument.

I thought of Kimmage this week while reading Werner Reiterer's big gloopy glob into Australia's pre-Olympic bisque. Reiterer is a two-time Olympian, a Commonwealth Games champion and a gleaming product of Australia's unique sporting culture. In his book Positive,

released last week, he details not just how he came to be a drug user, but the ways in which the sporting culture and sports authorities around him sent him signals that taking drugs was the smart thing to do.

Positive isn't as moving or as well written as Kimmage's A Rough Ride but its story is the same and its significance is equal. Idealism hammered down over the course of a career, the realisation that virtue is what makes you the butt of everyone else's jokes.

Reiterer recalls instances of Aussie athletes of all persuasions getting their hands on gear, swapping tips about dope, instructing each other about how to dodge the testers, how to work the calendar. You could graduate in biochemistry just by absorbing enough locker-room hearsay.

Reiterer never tested positive but he reckons that on at least one occasion an Australian lab must have returned a positive test. He got the nod and the wink from officialdom.

It went like this. He'd begun dabbling and he'd had got his maths wrong in early 1995. An Australian official sauntered up to him at the World Championships in Gothenburg and said softly that it had been noted that Reiterer had changed his training methods. Reiterer stared at him panic-stricken. The official repeated that the "change" hadn't gone unnoticed back home. Reiterer was still speechless. "but you'll be alright today though, won't you?" asked the official gravely. Then he just walked away.

Of course in Australia this week they hate Werner Reiterer not the official. They set up an inquiry so that he might name names. He announced he wouldn't name names, his complaint was about the entire system. End of story. So they threw up their hands and said "See! Let Our Happy Clean Games Begin."

The show will go on, of course. Reiterer was a discus thrower and discus throwers are never missed. Reiterer recounts a lifetime passed in the throwing circles of the grand prix circuit, watching men who had transformed themselves into livestock beating him out of the medals.

Finally he caved in. After Gothenburg he cut the Atlanta Olympics from his plans and then came back to make a deal, he says, with the Australian sports authorities. Reiterer's throwing was such that he had the potential to be Australia's only field gold medallist in Sydney. In a sports crazed land this was worth a punt. He would be given a clear run on testing through to the Olympics, in other words when he was ready to be tested he would be tested and when he wasn't ready he would be left alone.

He worked with a doctor designing the usual menu of steroids and masking agents and growth hormones. He found that by a quirk of his physiology his testosterone level seemed unable to rise above a ratio of 3:1 with his epitestosterone. The IOC limit is 6:1 and the IOC can't even test for growth hormones. Plain sailing.

And then earlier this year it all hit him in the way that it must hit lots of other athletes. He could climb on the podium, wear the medal, stand for the anthem but he'd never be a hero to himself and he'd never be able to tell the whole story to his two daughters and look them in the eye while he did it. So he quit and wrote his book instead.

Of course the Aussies hate him. He says worrying things about their heroes, he fuddles the feelings of simple nationalism which sport incites. Reiterer has made a lot of people very uncomfortable. Sections of the media have abused him in a way which Paul Kimmage would be familiar with.

The reaction of the Australian Olympic Committee of course has the usual comical touch. Told by one of their prize athletes that he has tested negative while knowing that he is positive the blazers are now rushing to make sure that Reiterer gets a two-year suspension.

The horse hasn't just bolted, it's doing the chat show circuit.

Never mind Werner, the show will go on without you. There will be times when you will look at the great show on television in September and wonder if your book ever appeared at all. No cheats. You can bet on that. And when your wee kids sitting on your lap ask how come you're not there it'll be too much to explain to them in one go, but worth it in the long haul.

Go ask Paul Kimmage.