Locker Room: I work in the attic of the house. The job has its perils. By now I am accustomed to the altitude sickness but I live in dread of being trapped by the landslides. A moth may fly in the window and come down to rest upon a precariously balanced mountain of old newspapers causing the whole thing to topple, which sets off a domino effect, and soon there will be books, magazines and papers everywhere and it will take men with specialised equipment three days to break through and rescue me.

We had a major catastrophe last week when a rogue wind disturbed the delicate, man-made balance between untidiness and pure chaos. I was doing the emergency clean-up job when I was distracted by a little heap of books on a low-lying shelf, an old attempt, it seemed, to classify the attic's sports books by theme.

As well as academic works on doping and the well thumbed copy of The Idiot's Guide to Looking as if You Know about Drugs in Sport, there was Michelle Smith's Gold and there was Speed Trap by Ben Johnson's old coach Charlie Francis and Juiced by baseball star Jose Canseco.

There were perhaps a dozen biographies filed together down in the "Cheats Etc" section. At the bottom of the pile, literally if not metaphorically, was Linford Christie.

I blew the dust off the cover. Ah. I had forgotten just how much I loved the chutzpah of a big cheat who could call his autobiography To Be Honest with You.

The charm of To Be Honest with You is that it was published in 1995, a few years before Linford served his drug ban and a time when, presumably, he might have considered other titles like Still Fooling You or Clean, No Really.

My favourite chapter is Chapter Eight, titled Dealing with Drugs, where Linford does his "poor li'l ole me" act and explains the mortification of having to wee into a bottle after races and talks in wonderment about rumours he has heard concerning the things bad, dirty athletes will do to get away with cheating.

The chapter unfolds in terms of wide-eyed bafflement. The testers come and take Linford's friends away. They couldn't be cheating though. They were all so nice and they liked a laugh. Linford begins to get "serious doubts about the entire testing procedure". Linford is getting tested so frequently that rather than being reassured because his sport is doing what it can to be clean he reckons, "the more I compete and take part in tests, the better chance there is of being set up." Such prescience.

I sat on the floor reading Linford's words and genuinely felt it was a pity I would probably never again be able to lift them and stuff them into a Monday column. The London Olympic bid had, for instance, had the wisdom to make sure Linford's presence didn't compromise it. The BBC seemed to still find him charming, but we know from experience that TV stations worry little about the purity of sport.

And then with Floyd Landis and Justin Gatlin still fresh in the headlines, UK Athletics handed Linford Christie a role as a coach with the national team. Christie will be working as a mentor to the UK's top athletes in the run-up to next year's World Championships and the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

To the spirit of the London Olympic bid, to the people who genuinely worry and fret about the purity of sport, to the young athletes who try to stay clean, the appointment is an extravagant flipping of the finger.

UK Athletics has shed its last, thin layer of credibility. This of course is the same UK Athletics who back in 1999 when Linford's sample came back with nandrolone in it decided to declare him not guilty anyway.

The IAAF, which has never claimed to be the straightest copper on the beat, had to overturn the decision, and the British Olympic Association (what fuddy-duddies!) announced Christie would never be given team accreditation for any future Olympics.

(We call them fuddy-duddies, of course, because our own Olympic nabobs conjured up an accreditation for the still-banned Erik de Bruin back in 1996. We're more broad-minded of course.)

So where does UK Athletics go from here? I think it would be a nice gesture in the spirit of To Be Honest with You if Linford and say, Dwain Chambers, who is just back from a two-year ban, took to wearing those little red ribbons Paula Radcliffe wears to indicate her desire for more scrupulous and extensive testing, including blood testing.

True, it would be like having the local hoodlums signing up for duty at your local neighbourhood watch meeting, but it would be no more cynical a gesture than any other in the current cycle.

Britain can hardly have a credible sprint medallist over the next few years. Seeing a muscle-bound British athlete on a podium, the true athletics lover can only have the mixed feelings of the man who learns his wife has been spared in a car crash but the three sailors on shore leave she was with at the time are okay too. There may be medals but every reputation is tainted. Even the reputations of sponsors.

UK Athletics announced proudly that Linford's appointment was possible not just because they don't care about ethics or perception but because of Norwich Union's £50-million sponsorship of athletics through to the London Olympics in 2012. Is that what Norwich Union are in it for? Success at all costs? The chance to share the taint?

So Linford Christie jets off today to Gothenburg and the European Championships, there to serve as a walking, talking reminder as to why athletics lies alongside cycling in the morgue for deceased sports.

Will we see him celebrate a British relay win? Dwain Chambers's positive for the designer steroid THG in 2003 (he subsequently announced - quelle surprise! - that he had been taking drugs since much earlier) caused a handful of Chambers's former team-mates to be forced to hand back relay medals they'd won at the last European Championships, four years ago, and the world championships in Paris a year later.

Now Dwain is back! And Linford too! In some of the news reports concerning Christie's appointment, there was a little footer announcing Harry Aikines-Aryeetey, Britain's world 100m and 200m youth champion, had just severed ties with Justin Gatlin and his coach Trevor Graham. Harry is 17, and his British coach, Matt Favier, announced in all piety of Graham's menagerie, "It's not an environment we want our athlete to be a part of."

It was as if Favier had spent the last couple of years with his head in the sand before sending off his 17-year old protege - as if he had missed the long, spectacular fall of the former 100-metre world champion Tim Montgomery, a Trevor Graham athlete; had missed the gradual embroilment in the squalid Balco scandal of another Graham athlete, Marion Jones.

What about other Graham athletes? Dennis Mitchell (two-year ban), CJ Hunter (two-year ban), Jerome Young (life ban), Alvin Harrison (four-year ban), Calvin Harrison (two-year ban), Michelle Collins, (four-year ban), Patrick Jarrett (two-year ban). So just last week Trevor Graham's North Carolina camp became an undesirable environment for a 17-year-old?

To be honest with you, Matt's having a laugh. Linford's having a laugh. UK Athletics are having a laugh.

The joke is on us and Norwich Union. The joke is on any honest kid with talent. Don't watch the sport and don't believe in it. That way nobody gets hurt.