Tom Humphries' new book, Laptop Dancing and the Nanny GoatMambo, recounts a year in the life of the Irish Timesreporter. In this extract, he stumbles upon a scandal at the 2002 WinterOlympics

When you go away on a work trip, there is a pattern to conversations with Mal, The Sports Editor. I point things out. Mal observes that there is a thin line between pointing things out and just plain whining.

"So?" I whine. "What's your point?"

He says things like, "It's not that bad is it?"

I say, "It fucking is you know."

And he says, "Oh well. You're always grumpy on the first day. Relax."

Then he gets down to business. When Mal gets down to business he gives the hit-the-ground-running pep-talk.

"OK. Now. What I need is for you to hit the ground running now that you are there."

and/or

"I need to hit certain people with your by-line out of there from day one. So lets hit the ground running."

This second injunction concerning "certain people" feeds into the widely shared theory in the sports department that the rest of the journalists on the paper loathe us. They loathe us and our dimwitted ways. They despise our unstructured jobs here in the paper's Toy Department. They assume that we spend all day, every day, flicking towels at each other's butts and talking about Pamela Anderson. Especially, they abhor our expensive habit of travelling abroad to cover events that are on the TV anyway. When times are hard, their loathing of us increases as an exponential of the paper's diminished revenue and circulation.

Our revenge should just be to live well and screw the begrudgers, but always we feel we are just one step ahead of the work-study people. We suspect that, out of spite, some pointyhead in the bean-counting department will just axe sports coverage from the paper one day. We know deep down that working in the sports department is really a form of assisted living, that we couldn't survive in the real world. So "we hit the ground running". We hit those "certain people" with our bylines from day one.

Thus we don't get to lie in bed the morning after arriving. It's a stark, gruelling fugitive existence keeping "certain people" off your case.

Outside it's America, at least it's that briny fold of America to which Brigham Young led the mormons after Joseph Smith was killed by an angry mob of plain folk in Illinois. Just the sort of plain folk who'll be coming to town this week.

Outside, in fact, it's the Wasatch Mountains and one of the largest sebkhas in the world. Sebkha. How often do you get to admire a sebkha? In the words of Mark Kurlansky, the leading historian of salt, this sebkha is "a flat, thick, 100-mile-long layer of salt which became a mainstay of the Mormon economy".

Any wonder Mormons have a poor reputation when it comes to fun?

Disappointingly, there isn't even a little scab of snow anywhere to be seen outside my motel this morning. The place is either too cheap to get snowed on or I'm in Mexico.

In my dream of the Winter Games, the Wasatch Mountains and their model tenant, Salt Lake City, are spread out over a table of pure white linen. Crisp white and crinkled. From the mountains to the salt flats, everything is pure and everything is white. Purer than Marie Osmond, whiter than Donny's smile. And all of it, all this goodness, is graciously replenished each night by Mother Nature. Across the road this morning, I can see an In 'n' Out burger joint and an establishment that uses neon to advertise its willingness to cash welfare cheques.

I'm about to investigate the possibility of getting a taxi towards civilization when I spot one of the distinctive lilac-coloured Winter Olympics media shuttles parked outside the relatively salubrious Motel Six just up the road. I'm in business.

Media shuttles can be lifesavers or they can be the express vehicles to hell. Once, at the Atlanta Olympics, myself and some doomed colleagues boarded a bus from the airport. It was driven by a jolly little soul called Venus. She put the foot down and drove us away from Atlanta and towards Augusta. After about fifteen miles, somebody plucked up the courage to point this out to Venus. After about twenty-five miles, she herself became convinced of the truth of it. After about forty miles, we found a spot where Venus felt comfortable turning the bus around.

Today I have Vern instead of Venus. Vern is from Montana and his grandkids are called Virgil, Vern and Vonny. He's a good guy. He gives me orange juice and a banana and promises that he'll swing by the hotel every morning early. He says bananas are good eatin', as if he is the first human to have discovered this.

I love Vern.

My plan for this first day is to gather some colour material on Salt Lake City for a weekend supplement piece that has to hit the computer system back in the office by early tomorrow morning at latest. I'm not expecting much from this piece. Nobody is. It just means that the departments share some of the expense of having me here. In exchange, the magazine will get some polygamy jokes, knowing references to various Mormon scandals in the bidding process for the Games and a quick, largely uninformed survey of life here.

"How things have changed in Salt Lake City. You can party here till 9.30 pm some weekend nights, by golly, and teeter home filled to the brim with Grape Knee Highs." That kind of thing.

On the way into the media centre, I strike feature-writing gold though. Right across the street hangs a multicoloured gay rights flag. A gay bar! Across from the press centre! I'm surprised there isn't a shuffling queue of feature writers right outside the place.

This is too good to be true. What better way to illustrate Salt Lake City's rather self-conscious progress towards diversity than with a few paragraphs on gay life in this buttoned up Mormon town. This could actually turn out to be a good story. A sign on the door to the bar below says: "Open 10 a.m." It's 11 a.m. now. Still shut. I wait twenty minutes. I bang on the door so that the security men at the press centre across the street stick their heads out to take a look at what's going on. I shrug back. Just hungry for some hot gay action, then I'll be with you boys. I bang some more. Nothing. Damn their deviant gay hides, they should be ridden out of town on a rail, every last one of them.

I cross from the gay bar to the Salt Palace. The Salt Palace is as big as a medium-sized Irish town, but the average IQ is lower. Security measures will deprive you of a good chunk of your day every time you visit here. Fifteen thousand security personnel surrounding 2,400 athletes. A security budget that, once upon a time, was under $10 million, rose to $310 million. Delays are the least you expect.

I'm not sure why they bother though. I suspect that, if Americans were to nominate a target to sacrifice to Osama, a building full of paunchy hacks would do nicely. If they could squeeze a few lawyers in, they might even paint a big helpful target on the roof.

From the outside, the Salt Palace is a hugely impressive building. To the passing hordes, it must seem as if there are millions of us journalist drones working away inside, extracting the pollen of gossip from reluctant sources and busying ourselves making the sweet honey of media stories. Like most aspects of media operations, how it looks is not how it is. Inside the Salt Palace we live in the sort of listless silence one finds in a library reading room late in the afternoon on the hottest day of summer. By and large, everyone just sits and waits for the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed volunteers to come around with the latest press release. It's a half-life.

I wander aimlessly through the Salt Palace for a while. The place is divided into two halves by a median corridor. One side is reserved for the offices of the big hitter media organisations, the wire services and those European papers that pay abnormal attention to slipping and sliding. They have shelled out handsomely for the right to have their own small serviced pads. On the other side, the rest of us live together in one big room, teeming and irritable.

I meander down the passageways that delineate the offices of the big media players. All hacks are media groupies and it's always fine and reassuring to see some big-name scribbler walking past you in a hurry. Makes you feel that you're at an event that really matters.

Personally, I like to hang around outside the Sports Illustrated office hoping that, at any moment, a harried editor is going to stick his head around the door, look up and down the corridor in exasperation and then turn to me and say, "Hey kid, looks like this is your lucky day. There's a luge pile-up out on the big mountain and we need three pages. You up to it kid? Can you write luge kid?"

On the other side of the corridor is the big room where the rest of us work. The Garden of The Common Hackery. Cliché Central. At most Olympic celebrations, this is called the General Media Work Area. Here, with some Salt Lake zippiness, it has been made over with a little high-gloss testosterone and designated the Bull Pen. I'm not sure how my female colleagues feel about this, but just ask and I'll throw my weight behind any campaign for a Cow Shed.

Not to butcher the bull metaphor but, as I am about to enter The Pen, I am almost killed by an exiting stampede of journalists. The herd, clearly startled, is making its way towards the escalators. Now I am as spiky an individualist as anyone here (yes, we are all spiky individualists who do the same job), but right now the herd instinct is strong in all of us. When you see a stampede, it's not time to be asking those awkward how or why questions. Wordlessly, I join in.

It could be big news.

Or it could be that the free souvenir bags have arrived.

We stampede upstairs and turn right into Press Conference Room A. I don't know it yet, but this will be my home from home for the next week. Right now I don't even know what I'm doing here.

Presently, a small stocky man with a worried expression comes in and sits at the head table. He has the shifty look of an Italian sports administrator. The old stereotype about Italians and the mafia no longer holds true. These days, the Italians have moved into sports administration. It is their legitimate business. They became lawyers and then they became sports administrators. Good ones too, although this chap looks like he doesn't know where he is or why he's having such a day.

Well, it's Wednesday morning and this is Ottavio Cinquanta, a Milanese business whizz and the don of the International Skating Union (ISU). He is here to placate us. He is here to bamboozle us. He looks as if he has a very bad taste in his mouth right now. He sits in the chair in this large room for eighty minutes and he sweats a lot. As an act of bamboozlement, it lacks something.

We media, however, we are many and move as one. Apparently there has been a scandal. If not a scandal, something that will be touchlit now and blown into one by tomorrow's editions.

We can sense the story even if most of us can't understand it. You don't have to be a labrador to smell the fear in here. It's coming from Ottavio. sometimes Ottavio sounds defensive. A lot of the time he sounds surprised. Mostly he's scared. Yup, Ottavio has a real-life breaking news story on his hands.

Here's what went down. On Monday night, during the pairs finals, the Russian team of Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze took to the ice and, if verbal reports are to be taken seriously, they were in a condition of apparent inebriation. Belching and farting as they went they made a string of grotesque errors that weren't just flagrant, they were downright offensive. Women swooned and men reached for their pistols. For a while it was feared that somebody would lose an eye and that would put a stop to the whole thing. All fun and games until somebody loses an eye isn't it?

They even looked ugly. Ugly and unshaven and very 1980s Eastern European, the pair of them. They looked like they'd pay good money for a pair of Levi 501s. They finished their routine in a giggling, burping heap and left the ice shouting rude and obscene things about the Osmond family.

Not surprisingly, the heart of the audience was subsequently stolen by the unfeasibly good-looking and wholesome Canadians, Jamie Sale and David Pelletier. The Canadians have sheets of white ice where their teeth are supposed to be. Their choppers make Matt Damon's teeth look old and yellowed. As they glide the ice, Jamie and David radiate an aura of simple, uncomplicated goodness. They skated, word has it, like fairies performing a winter dance on a frozen pond. They were sooo enchanting. They skated to the theme from Love Story.

The conniving huckster judges gave the gold to the Russians, however. Goodness and decency were kicked in the teeth. Everything that Salt Lake folk believe in (while not engaged in Olympic-bidding wars) was repudiated. Salt Lake City has been in a state of revolt ever since. You might as well have contaminated the Salt Water Taffee supply.

We, the media, are in full witch-hunt mode. We shall fight on behalf of goodness and reason here. We shall return serenity to a troubled people. We shall make the world safe for shiny teeth.

Looks like I got here just in time. Local Mormons are so incensed, they've been crushing grapes with bare hands, and there have been two ugly cases of wanton littering. Somebody is to blame for all this and we, the media, will find out who. Meanwhile, we advise the local community to stay calm and to consider Monday night's pairs skating as a mere market testing of the audience. You want a different ending? We the media will go and fix it.

We don't know how we'll fix it, but we will. On occasions like this, we, the media, are both outraged and relieved at the same time. It may be a scandal the finer points of which we know nothing, diddley squat, nada about, but it is a scandal nevertheless. We are all on the same page about that fact. There are perhaps three hacks in this crowded sweaty press-conference room who understood anything about figure skating last week, but now we find ourselves suffused with that feeling of instant expertise. We lean towards each other across the backs of chairs saying things like "that Russian double axel was so poorly done it could have killed somebody. Hey, I mean that's Triple Salchow 101 guys."

Being a sports journalist means never being out of your depth. I imagine, for a minute, what it must be like to be Ottavio sitting there in the leather-backed chair looking at this great wall of faces and beyond to the stern cliff face of cameras at the back of the room. What must it be like to listen to so many questions pitched with perfect self-righteousness but larded with pure ignorance of the subjext? Lawyers never ask a question they don't know the answer to. We hacks, unfortunately, have the opposite affliction.

Luckily for The Irish Times, I am an exception. I am a horny-handed veteran of the ice-skating scandal circuit. In 1994, I was dispatched to the Winter Games in Lillehammer. Those Games marked the beginning of the antic tradition of accommodating me in neighbouring territory at Winter Games and are also remembered for the endurance and shining dignity of two of its skating competitors, Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan.

Not only was I there to mine cheap laughs from the spectacle, but it was my good fortune to be one of forty or so journalists whose names came out of a hat in a draw for the right to see the showdown in the flesh.

The other 50 million practising ice-skating experts on hand in Lillehammer had to make do with watching large screens in a tent the size of Denmark. You may think that the large screens would be adequate, but I had the privilege of being among a small group of journalists who were personally asked by Ms Harding to "get the fuck out of my fucking face" when the competition was over . Treasured moments like that put me in the upper percentile of figure-skating expertise here in Salt Lake City.

We are coursing Ottavio now. I don't know who Ottavio has offended, but Inotice just behind me an elderly IOC member feeding tricky questions to nearby journalists who then request the microphone and pass the questions on to Ottavio.

Ottavio has that look on his face, best captioned as "why me?" He can hardly have imagined that the lucrative dog-and-pony show which is figure skating could have stoked up such passions or intrigue. Or that it could have created so many instant experts among the media. For the second time in a decade! I sympathise. It's only going to get worse for him as we ratchet up the temperature.

Since Monday night, when I went to bed early, right through Tuesday, when I did nothing but travel, this scandal has been fermenting. Now this morning, right on cue, the Games have been convulsed. My reaction is typical.

Hurrah!

Instant copy!

Somebody call the Sensations Editor!

Humphries in ground-hit-running shocker!

Bylines from day one!

"Certain People" impressed!

As Ottavio drones on, the room is humming with happy anticipation. We have a witch-hunt and we have a witch. We have, apparently, located a flaky French judge and decided to pile all the blame on her. C'mon down Marie-Reine Le Gougne. To be bleak and wintry about it, we are a pack of howling huskies and Mme Le Gougne is an ailing, but tasty, moose.

Mme Le Gougne has been rumbled. Her deft machinations are no match for our nimble, pitted wits. Mme Le Gougne has been seen crying. She has been observed howling at the moon. Spotted devouring grass outside the Mormon Tabernacle. All very suspicious.

This new French twist suits the American media especially well. If the root of all evil turns out not to be Muslim and fanatic, well then your average American will take short odds on it being French. A French judge diddling the French-Canadian pair? We'll show those hoity-toits in Paris!

And because the victims are Canadian, well, the Americans will feel no need at all to be reticent. Canadians are loveable, library-dwelling creatures who need protection. Because the perpetrators are French and Russian, the American media will feel that they actually have God on their side. Let's free Ottavio. Let the lynching of Marie-Reine Le Gougne begin.

Ottavio finishes up. He doesn't know if Marie-Reine Le Gougne will be available for stockading in the next couple of days. We'll have to ask her.

We drift out. By skilfully deploying that most reliable journalistic technique, talking to other hacks, I am able to piece together the entire background to the scandal and become an expert on the nuances of it all before I go back downstairs.

We have key questions to ask of each other.

"What was all that about?" "What does it mean?" "Who was that guy?" "Spell that?" "Who'd know about this?" "Anybody actually at the event?"

We know that ice skating is big. There's some statistic that, seemingly, never goes out of date concerning the biggest TV audience for a sporting event being for an ice-skating showdown. Anyhow, in Salt Lake City, it's the only place you can see a man pick a girl up by the crotch and dispatch her like a bowling ball down the ice.

That's got to be worth something.

We're going to have to investigate.