Familiar whiff from the pool lingers

The track and field fun begins here today and you could raise a weary laugh at a press conference by asking one of the sweat brigade if they think that everyone they are competing against is clean. Athletics has been through all that stuff, thanks. We all know the score. Don't mention the war.

At the press conferences which follow the swimming events, however, the same question would just prompt a collective rolling of the eyes. Swimming is at that awkward age. Swimming would prefer not to talk about drugs just now. By and large, swimming is in denial.

Yesterday, Inge de Bruijn's post-race press conference was preceded by an announcement by an Olympics press flunkie that there were to be no questions on doping or the press conference would end on the spot. The same flunkie made a point of breaking up a promising discussion on the doping situation between several journalists and Jacco Verhaeren, coach to both de Bruijn and Pieter van den Hoogenband.

The drugs question won't go away no matter how devoutly swimming might wish. There was a hint of annoyed exasperation in the air when US coach Richard Quick raised the issue late in the week. He said that, based on "intuition", he thought there was something a little shonky going on.

"I absolutely do not think this is a drugfree Olympics. I am disappointed in the quality and frequency of the testing that is done by the governing body of the Olympics," he said.

Intuition. Top female swimmers don't have breasts anymore, they have iron triangles of muscle tucked underneath their shoulders. The records keep coming in the strength events. People keep coming at us with good reasons for their sudden improvements. We still don't have a proper blood test in place. Unfortunately, intuition is the strongest word one can use.

Swimming is exhausted after the battles with the East Germans, the Chinese and with Michelle de Bruin. There is an unspoken will to pronounce these Olympics clean and effervescent. You've never seen a sport in need of heroes like swimming is right now.

Timing. On the first day of the Games in Atlanta, Michelle de Bruin came out and won the 400m IM with such power that we trembled. Things turned sour instantly. On the first day of the swimming competition here, Ian Thorpe won two gold medals, the second in the greatest relay race ever seen. He was 17 and brilliant and we pronounced him clean. It was hard for anyone to raise the subject of drugs after that. The timing was wrong.

The mood in swimming has changed. There is no appetite for questions just now. Mention of doping can draw a theatrical sigh from the body of the press interview room. We're here for fun. Enough of your mean old suspicions. We aren't talking about indiscriminate finger-pointing here, we're just talking about the odd sensible question. We're talking about Richard Quick's intuition, we're talking about precedent. We're talking about the difference between PR and journalism, the line between scepticism and cynicism, the cynics being the ones who don't care, won't ask. If you don't believe everything you see, what are you supposed to do? At time of writing we've had 11 world records. Boom! Boom! Boom! Why?

We are told that the pool is very fast, although for the first four record-less years of its existence it was considered very slow. We are told the body suits are a wonder, but the wonder of wonders, Popov, doesn't bother with them and they don't seem to work wonders for practitioners of the more technical strokes. Questions. Why do swimmers like Ian Thorpe and Michael Klim show the normal signs of tiredness as the week progresses while others don't? Why are the swimming careers of women getting longer? We stood outside the press tent yesterday, standing in the darkness with our questions. We gave them first to Jacco Verhaeren and then to Dr Cees-Rein van den Hoogenband (father of Pieter).

Dr van den Hoogenband and his wife run a foundation in Eindhoven for swimmers. They have 15 swimmers. Eleven of them were in Sydney. They are all coached by Jacco Verhaeren, whom they spotted coaching a small club a few years ago. Dr van den Hoogenband liked Jacco's ideas about less being more. It sounded like "training smart". We pressed on.

Soon harsh words were exchanged. There is no way of framing a doping question without accelerating rapidly to finger-pointing and denial.

"Richard Quick is the most stupid idiot in the world," said Dr van den Hoogenband.

"It just pisses me off," said Verhaeren as soon as the question of doping was raised. "If you want to talk about freezing blood, why don't you just give out the medals four years later?" Dr van den Hoogenband spoke angrily about his time of involvement with the Panasonic cycling team in the 1980s.

"I saw what was going on and I just walked away," he said of the doping situation he encountered working as a trauma surgeon. "Did you say anything?"

"Why should I? There were thousands of journalists there. They didn't say anything. They knew." Indeed.

And so it went, a little circular argument complete with raised voices and high blood pressure and of interest to maybe a dozen people, standing in the dark.

We parted company, nobody believing or trusting anyone else. Four years on from Michelle and the poison in the pool is still there. Swimming is just learning to live with it.