What an extraordinary and depressing week. As one who has asked questions of Michelle de Bruin over the past couple of years and who has been identified with one side of what instantly became a bitterly polarised argument, there has been little joy in it.

It is possible to believe passionately that the purity of sport should be upheld at all costs, that the aggressive policing of sport is necessary if an culture of openness and enjoyment is ever to replace the atmosphere of cynicism and loathing which we find ourselves inhaling. It is possible to believe in those things yet still to flinch when in proximity to the clumsy mechanisms of sports regulatory bodies.

It would be easier by far if we knew nothing of the current process until Michelle de Bruin's guilt or innocence had been ultimately determined. The coverage and analysis of the past week has been a slap in the face, however, to all those whose interest in top-level sport extends no further than enjoying it as a televised production, to be celebrated when our own do well. Most people don't want the layers peeled back. If Michelle de Bruin is an icon or a heroine then belief in her is important to many people because outside of sport virtually no other arena produces such figures, people whose footprints we don't constantly examine for traces of clay.

The public wilfulness on the issue has been enormous. There is a huge unwillingness to accept that questions should be asked at all, an extraordinarily laser-like focus on the demeanour of the couple at the centre of all this which puts all else out of focus.

It is a strange business bound up with our own nationalism and sense of ourselves as the little guys. There is an inclination to react with outrage and hostility when it appears, as in the case of East Germany or China, that a government is sponsoring the manipulations of people's bodies at the expense of our own. Remember Sonia O'Sullivan trailing in behind three Chinese women and the wave of xenophobia which swept the land.

In the case of individuals pitted against the faceless machine which runs sport, we are equally prisoners of our prejudices, even if the logic is threadbare.

So has this week not just been more Janet Evans and American-inspired innuendo which has gotten out of hand?

No. Neither Janet Evans nor the Americans have ever been part of the equation. As another Irish swimmer, Marion Madine, told the Belfast Telegraph last year, Evans was a media scapegoat in Atlanta. Long before her Olympic splash Michelle de Bruin was addressing the issue of the rumours which surrounded her progress. In 1996 when Michelle de Bruin's star was at its highest, an Irish swimming official declined further office citing the rumours which had been around Irish swimming for the previous couple of years.

Has the past week been about the world swimming body conducting a large-scale conspiracy to oust a woman who has been witch-hunted since sticking her head above the parapet?

Well, Michelle de Bruin, more than anyone, will contend that nothing in sport is truly impossible. Yet it seems so unlikely that the mild and often ineffectual people who run swimming and the technicians who wade through urine samples would have found the sudden motivation and opportunity to destroy the reputation of a triple Olympic champion.

For the swimming world, after three decades of absorbing the implications of East German and then Chinese state-sponsored doping programmes which rewrote the history of women's swimming, the emergence of a redhead from Ireland should have been a marketing dream, a story of such lilting romance that her participation would become part of any package sold to television by FINA in an attempt to rehabilitate the sport.

But questions were there which we haven't always wanted to hear, questions which hurt a lot of feelings, but which now are about to be definitively examined for once and for all.

It was odd, idiosyncratic, but scarcely indictable behaviour that in the aftermath of the biggest success in Irish Olympic history, the de Bruins opted to keep their winning formula secret, even in the face of rising scepticism. One suspects, as Michelle de Bruin intimated in a newspaper column during the European championships, that a couple of frank interviews and invitations to watch the revolutionary training process would have made the questions evaporate and set a gravy train in motion. That never happened and it would take an extraordinary sweeping verdict of vindication for it ever to happen in the future.

In the meantime anybody having trouble coming to grips with the relevance of an ugly process which pits a beleaguered couple against chemists and lawyers should read the definitive book on the issue, Mortal Engines by John Hoberman, which begins with a graphic description of the awful death of German heptathlete Birgit Dressel in 1987 after a life of competition in which she had permitted her own sports doctor to inject her over 400 hundred times using dozens of different substances.

It is a vast, disturbing and sobering work, but it sets the context for what has happened last week. Ultimately the business of the past week has been about more than its two central figures.

I spent Saturday evening in a swimming pool in Raheny watching kids from Marino compete in the local community games. For the under-sixes and then under-eights, it was an introduction to the pleasures of innocent competition, to the joys of exploring their own limits. Michelle and Erik may very well prove their innocence and emerge as stars with traduced reputations, but the process itself is about the right of parents to know that their child's chosen sport will always be just that.

Nobody wants to consign their kith and kin to the twilight zone of the chemical science industry. The process is about public policy on sport, whether as communities we should continue funding elite athletes, to examine why we should fund them at all if sport is not what we believe and want it to be. It is about a court room in Berlin which is currently starting to hear the testimonies of those whose lives were blighted and whose bodies were broken and distorted by chemists in track suits in the old East Germany. And it is about two tots straggling the width of a pool in Raheny, that swimming and sport might always be a gift to them.

The drama of the last week has robbed the central participants of much of their dignity and caused immense stress to the Smith family and those who believe passionately in the woman who got them to stay up late at night for one dizzy week in the summer of 1996.

That is what sport has become however. As a society we have distorted its values, infused it's purity with chemicals and nationalism and a culture of greed. For that we are paying the price. Guilty or innocent, Michelle de Bruin and Erik de Bruin are victims of a world which has dehumanised sport.