Keith Duggan Sideline CutThe thought of thousands of Playstations destined for this country being stuck in a ship somewhere on the Suez Canal is amusing if you imagine entire villages of kids suspiciously examining the new hurley and Jimmy Magee video mistakenly deposited by Santa in their stockings on December 25th.

To those who are left out in the cold when it comes to the joys of Playstation, it is tempting to depict games which are probably just too sophisticated for us to understand as anti-social or as a threat to sport. But then the latest series of revelations about doping abuse at the highest levels of sport keep crossing the airwaves from San Francisco and you realise that, as ever, the new generation is just one step ahead of the rest of us. It is as if we mugs have been watching virtual sport for years without realising it.

At least with Playstation, they are in control of the games they play and don't even try to pretend there is something spiritual or transcendent about them. There is no morality or piety attached to Playstation: you either drive, run and shoot and score better than your opponents, be they real or virtual, or else you are out. Then you raid the fridge because working out on whatever joysticks are called nowadays is bound to be hungry work.

Perhaps it is about time to apply the same set of rules to all of big-time sport. It has been stated again and again by despairing commentators we can no longer believe what we are seeing, particularly when it comes to the orgy of athletic endeavour of the Summer Olympics. But what is less clear-cut is if how many people actually care about the authenticity of what they are seeing.

In the past 15 years, sport has become such a slick and aggressively marketed means of entertainment that the cause, the why of competitions like the Champions League or Formula One cease to matter. We have reached the frightening stage where most people could sit in front of a television and watch sport, non-stop, for the rest of their lives. While television has completely altered the perception and possibilities of sport in the last 20 years, most extravagantly for the athletes participating in the various disciplines, there remains a sense of something traditional and time honoured about actually attending a big event.

Genuine atmosphere cannot be manufactured, although most sports arenas are so obsessed by the notion of the "entertainment experience" they transmogrify sports venues into shoddy circuses with terrible half-time entertainment. It is as if the thrill of the contest has to somehow fight its way through the confection of air-conditioned, up-beat noise.

The empty seats in Athens were constantly commented on during the Games but these were down to the fact ordinary Athenians needed to turn a buck during a boom month for the city more than they needed to see Maurice Greene in person.

The Olympic movement continues to try to clean up its image with the on-off spate of purges against doping cheats, with the IOC this week throwing its weight into investigations of the supplementary habits of Marion Jones, the most famous female athlete of the last 10 years.

Whether Jones will eventually be brought down by the accusations of disgraced BALCO boss Victor Conte is of big interest in this part of the world but for Americans, it is the involvement of Barry Bonds in the testimonies that matters most.

For all the stars the United States produces, athletics is essentially a sideshow. Baseball is sacred. It is no coincidence that the three themes chosen by the great American filmmaker, Ken Burns, to capture the evolution of the country were the Civil War, jazz and baseball.

Barry Bonds is one of the greatest exponents of the game of all time. His reputation is on the verge of going up in smoke, he has declared under oath he believed the potions he received from BALCO to be nothing more than flaxseed oil.

The excuse has been met with widespread derision because it sounds like something that John Boy Walton would purchase down at the general store. And maybe the mere mention of flaxseed oil tapped into the ideal that baseball is at heart an ode to America's past, a paean to the bolder and more imaginative eras of Babe Ruth or Joe Di Maggio.

The fairytale ending to this year's World Series, when Boston's beloved Red Sox won the world series for the first time since 1918 was certainly bathed in sentimentality. And Bonds is baseball royalty, being a godson of the great Willie Mays. His own pedigree goes back almost 15 years - he won the first of his MVP trophies with Pittsburgh in 1990, when the issue of doping and its advantages were much more crude. But his dramatic and compulsive assault on baseball's home run records coincides with his relationship with the BALCO company and now fans and commentators alike are struggling to comprehend that all those humid nights when he slugged against the achievements of dead men were a lie.

For a summer, he owned baseball and it seemed magical. On a television debate this week, an authority on baseball evoked the legacy of the great jazz man, Charlie Parker, who sustained a terrible heroin addiction throughout his life. It was said contemporary players felt if they were to sacrifice themselves to heroin, they too could make music like Bird. Which, of course, was almost definitely not the case. And equally, a series of injections would not make any old baseball player hit like Barry Bonds.

And although this kind of reasoning might be highly questionable and ethically spurious, it does highlight the confusion and dilemmas that are out there.

The old chestnut that sport is ailing badly if not actually dead does not tally. If so, why isn't every game like Wednesday night's eerie spectacle between Real Madrid and Roma, silent and haunted without the public? Why is sport still broadcast around the world? Why has the New York Olympic committee reserved the rights to all 600,000 billboards in the city for the 2012 games although the odds are against them winning the bid? And why do fans keep showing up at the gates? It is because the choice of watching sport with all its imperfections and repeated frauds is better than the alternative.

If Barry Bonds is downed and disgraced it will probably dent baseball's assured place in the affections of Americans but not in a permanent way. Bonds' sad decision to compromise an undoubted talent through cheating will quickly be drowned out in the excitement of seasons to come and people will still be enticed to pay to watch the elite players do their best.

There is such a deluge of professional sport these days the contemporary heroes cannot stand out like the 20th century icons, men and women who commanded an audience with greater attention spans and less cynicism. If and when Bonds or Jones are declared outcasts, someone new will deflect attentions elsewhere. And there will always be moments when it is possible to detect the faint, obstinate pulse of something you know in your heart to be special and unrepeatable and perfect.

Perhaps people can no longer revere the heroics of big-time sports heroes as they did a few generations ago. Yet for all its terrible flaws they will always give it another chance. Not to do so would be tantamount to admitting a failure among human kind. It would leave a terrible void. And Playstation would never keep up with the demand.