Sideline Cut: Thursday night in the stadium might be construed as the moment the Greeks let their guard down. They had been perfect hosts for the previous fortnight but the removal of Kostas Kenteris from the Olympics remains a thorny issue here.

Given the laid-back manner in which local Athenians took to the games, the ferocity and anger behind the prolonged chorus of jeers that delayed the men's 200 metres final was frightening. Generally speaking, the Greeks have watched Olympic events with a loose brand of enthusiasm, taking or leaving much of the fare on offer.

For their own athletes, though, they can whip themselves into a frenzy at the touch of a button, as was instanced by Fani Halkia, who won the 400 metres hurdles on Wednesday night in front of a phenomenally partisan crowd clearly ravenous for some sort of track glory.

When Greek athletes compete, they are given a warm, passionate ovation. On Thursday evening, however, locals in the stadium began chanting for the ghost of Kenteris, the man who was preordained to become Olympic champion in the 200 metres.

Kenteris was never officially expelled from the Games and is free, along with Ekaterini Thanou, to compete in athletics tournaments right now if he chooses. He has been viewed from an increasingly sympathetic local perspective as several doping cheats have been identified and disgraced by the Olympic testing authorities.

Over the last year, the Greeks were not unaware of the international portrayal of their apparently slack and haphazard preparation for these Games. One volunteer said that in the months before the Olympics began Greece was made to feel "like the villain of the world".

Despite all the cynicism and scare stories that surely dampened people's enthusiasm for investing in an Olympic holiday in Athens, the Greeks organised a wonderful tournament. It must have been galling to prepare such a lavish feast for guests that were happy to slag them off within earshot. But they welcomed the world with warmth. Their enthusiasm for the Olympics was, however, compromised by the Kenteris affair.

From a detached perspective, anybody can see the way Kenteris and Thanou behaved on the night of August 13th was deeply odd and suspicious. But for those caught up in the emotion of seeing a beloved national hero more or less evicted from his home Games amidst a series of diplomatic decisions that were at best shady, it is different. It must have felt like the last straw.

To most of us listening to the uneasy minutes of jeers and chants of "Hellas" on Thursday, it was as if the local fans were unashamedly calling for the restoration of an athlete whose reputation has been tarnished. But the real reasons are probably both more complex and innocent than that. Because the Kenteris controversy was based on a night of staggeringly inept bungling, it is just about possible for Greek fans to wilfully convince themselves the sprinter was somehow caught up in a tragi-comedy of errors and was chosen as a sacrificial lamb by the IOC.

As Halkia complained about her training partners on Thursday, "They were put against a wall. There was a firing squad. People imagine the wildest things."

And that is just it. When it comes to the contemporary Olympics, audiences are asked that their imagination have no limits. Halkia herself registered the most explicit request in this regard by essentially reinventing herself as an athlete over the past 12 months, making the leap from a mediocre novice hurdler to someone who now leaves her opponents for dead.

Halkia's gold-medal win on Wednesday night was not really a race; she was really just competing against her own Olympic record. But although the Greek reaction was unforgettable, the mood in the corridors and mixed zone of the stadium afterwards was of sweetly veiled cynicism. Nobody really believes Halkia can be for real. Except her Greek fans. And they must.

Just as it would be tantamount to treason for them to accept that there cannot be a reasonable - if unlikely - cause for Kenteris's disappearance and motorbike crash and withdrawal from the Games - they have to fall on the side of wide-eyed innocence when it comes to Halkia. In Ireland, we should have some sort of empathy with that depth of feeling having found ourselves in a similarly credulous place after the Atlanta Games.

So it is easy to call the way the Greeks behaved a disgrace. But after these Olympics are over, those seven minutes of raucous and unpleasant jeering of the athletes whose mistake it was to appear in a 200 metres final without Kenteris may be interpreted not as the most eloquent comment on the state of athletics but definitely the most powerful.

Because the thing is, people are completely in the dark just now. In athletics and, it seems, many Olympic events, there are no sides of good and evil, just a general murkiness.

When Thursday night's 200 metres finally did get under way, after repeated appeals from the dignified Namibian veteran Frankie Fredericks, the stadium cheered. And wondered. You looked at the alarming bulk on Shawn Crawford's upper body and you wondered. The truth is that nobody - from Greek fans who just wanted to see a Greek man sprint to victory while the Olympics resided in its spiritual home to old track men who regard everything with forensic detachment - is quite sure what to believe.

Believing your eyes is a dilemma. To celebrate athletic achievement that does look wonderful to the naked eye is to risk the chance of being made feel like a fool. But to declare that all is poisoned and the Olympics a waste of time is to hold an unforgivably bleak and nihilistic outlook. To hope against hope is the best solution.

It is hard when you hear the tale of the Hungarian hammer thrower Adrian Annus fleeing for Budapest as the IOC officials chased after him seeking further samples. Annus yesterday announced his retirement.

It is hard when you watch Halkia zooming around the track and winning gold at a canter. And it is equally hard because, in the present climate, no feat of running is accepted without at least one or two words of innuendo.

There are people who know and love athletics wandering around the Calvatoro stadium locked in a permanent tussle with themselves over how they feel about athletes who are the last saints of the track: Hicham El Geurrouj, Kenenisa Bekele.

Of course people want to believe what is probably true - that these are the guys who embody all that is inspirational about elite athletics. But athletics has wounded those who love it most so it is hard to celebrate anything right now with a completely free spirit.

Somehow, that elemental Greek chorus got to the heart of the matter. People are tired. People are confused. They don't fully know what they should be cheering for anymore, what is real and what is not.

Choose your poison, they are saying. As the Games warmed up with some sensational nights on the tracks, Kenteris became the spook that nobody wanted to talk about. The Greeks were not going to let that happen. We are not ashamed of Kenteris, they said. Not in this world, not in these Olympics. Not when we see all that is going on around us.

And however imperfect and flawed that principal, however removed from the athletic ideal, who could argue that it was not understandable?