Keith Duggan/Sideline Cut: Somewhere in South Korea, a plot has been hatched to bring together the stars of the notorious 1988 100 metres final for a track reunion. A group of businessmen have put up the rather measly sum of one million bucks to entice the heroes of that ill-begotten hour back to Seoul for an anniversary sprint.

The race would take place just after the close of the summer games in Athens, which is bound to throw up its own moment of infamy.

The idea of a Ben Johnson v Carl Lewis rematch is in such preposterously poor taste that it probably must be classified as ingenious. Why not, after all? What have the individuals or indeed athletics in general left to lose? The Race that Killed Athletics Redeux: it just might work, you know.

Poor Ben Johnson, he is up for meeting his old pals again but that is hardly a surprise. Ben has fallen a long way from that dreamy hour or two in Seoul when he, along with the rest of the watching universe, enjoyed the languorous afterglow of a great athletic and human tussle where the kid with the stammer became the fastest man of all time.

Hangdog and broken and unable or unwilling to try and atone for his cheating, Ben has watched himself portrayed as some sort of demon of the track - see the yeller in dem brown ole eyes - and has sunk and grown desperate, desperate enough to line up against horses. Ben would race anything that moves, even if that meant facing Carl Lewis again.

And Carl, that knight in shining armour of Reagan's America, has indicated he too might be persuaded to lace up the spikes again for old time's sake. Carl Lewis: was there ever a more graceful-looking athlete? People used hate his prissiness, his self-righteous proclamations and the way he jutted his chin just so during his many Olympic podium ceremonies. But God, was he not a stunning sight leaving the others for dust as he came clear from lane three while tens of thousands of camera bulbs made the air around him sparkle?

Lewis at peak motion was the visual definition of purity. You had to feel sorry for the merely mortal athletes who had the misfortune to be born in the same era as he and therefore had to stand all clunky and meaty beside this panther of 1980s athletics. Guys like Linford Christie, muscle bound and earnest and fast, yes, very fast but nonetheless pointless when placed in the same stratosphere as Lewis. The beauty of the sprint was that although contenders like Christie were just the blink of an eye away from touching Lewis's natural ability, we could all see that there were in reality entire lifetimes between them; that the fleeting gap was unbridgeable.

Christie's sole purpose from 1984 to 1988 appeared to be to fill in the vivid canvas behind Lewis; he was one of those left in the vapour trail, leaning forward, hurting, beaten, always beaten. It was as if Lewis were unaware that guys like Linford Christie were even on the same track as him.

That is how it appeared then anyway, watching the Olympic events and the summer meetings across Europe from stadiums of that era, crackling with atmosphere and celebration and greatness. Now, as athletics prepares to return to its spiritual home in a state of perpetual shame, it all seems very different.

Not a lot has been heard from Carl Lewis in recent years but it is safe to say that his once-saintly reputation has been badly bruised if not permanently discoloured. A drink-driving escapade during a period when Wade Exum alleged that Lewis had tested positive in the run-up to those 1988 games kind of threw Carl in with the rest.

Maybe Exum was just a bitter ex-Olympic official looking to cause a bit of embarrassment for the USOC. Maybe Lewis blanked him at canteen time all those years ago. Nothing has been proven against Lewis - it is, after all, just an allegation. But in a time when such rumours come hot and heavy and generally carry weight, allegation causes permanent damage.

Christie, too, has plummeted in public estimation since sheer perseverance and a loaded physique eventually landed him his Olympic gold in Barcelona, just when all of athletics was beginning to come under withering scrutiny. But it is Christie that is apparently the reluctant one to step into the blocks alongside the other boys of Seoul. For Christie is still making a living out of athletics as a coach - and racing against Johnson, serving a life ban from the IAAF, would automatically endanger his licence.

All the promoters can do is hope he comes around. See, this is an idea just mad enough to actually happen. Like the last days of the Old West, when Wild Bill Hickok paraded great Native American leaders like Sitting Bull as the star attraction of his grotesque carnivals across the States and Europe, so too could we have a roadshow featuring the most notorious episodes of sport.

Why limit it to the mere race? Treat us to a dramatic reconstruction of Ben's nefarious deeds in the weeks and hours and days before the final. Invent a dressing-room showdown between the main stars. Make it pure theatre.

Daily, it feels as if we have reached the last days of sport anyway. Gluttonous and bloated and arguably pointless, all the major games are clinging desperately to hold not our idle attentions but our hearts.

Athletics is different. It was never exactly major to begin with and now it is shrinking irrevocably. In the 1970s, when the Eastern Bloc countries paraded their own version of he-males and she-males during the games, sour and joyless and frankly frightening looking people, athletics seemed like a perfect microcosm of all that was wrong and scary with what went on behind the Iron Curtain. Western athletes may have finished second but they smiled and looked glossy. There was a comfort in that simplified breakdown. We could live with the evil medicinal practices from the Eastern bloc because they knew no different. It just made the friendly countries appear all the cleaner.

The year 1988 changed all that. Then it became clear that no-one was above tampering with powders and vials. And no drugs-related discovery or ban or allegation has ever gripped the general imagination as forcefully as Ben Johnson being stripped of his gold medals. Nothing ever will.

A shroud fell over athletics then - and there it has remained. And now enough time has passed that society can look back upon the sadness of the moment with nostalgia and maybe turn a fast buck out of it.

Tacky? Sure. But say this for it: at least it wouldn't be pretending to be something it is not. At least such a race would acknowledge its own infamy.

Maybe lionising the blackest moment is the most honest route to take. See it as an expurgation. The Dirtiest Race in History. You have to admit it's got a ring to it.