Locker Room: Sometimes you look at the whole world of big-time sport and you shake your head like a disappointed parent.

Where did we go wrong? It's not as if you don't expect your kids not to go astray from time to time but when you lead them by the ear into the parlour and sit them down and tell them it will be worse for them if they lie, you hope they might stutter out at least a little fragment of truth.

You are so wrong.

Denial is that the first thing they teach the physically blessed when they go to the big finishing school for professional athletes. Denial and the news that the meek won't actually be inheriting the earth.

No matter what the evidence is, deny. Be brazen. Always deny. Even if you are walking like a duck and looking like a duck and squawking like a duck then you should deny your duckliness. Lie through your duck bill. Deny. Deny. Deny. Even as they roast you in orange sauce, tell them there's been some terrible mistake. You are a dove.

Take Barry Bonds, the big kahuna of baseball, who is but one of the splendid cast assembled for the long-running, but quite riveting, BALCO Scandal on the west coast of the US.

Bonds is a big grumpy old slugger for whom the causes of his bigness, grumpiness and remarkable slugging have been helpfully identified as drugs, namely two designer cocktails of drugs known to customers as The Clear and The Cream.

You put The Clear under your tongue and rub The Cream onto the soft flesh on the inner side of your elbows and hey presto, depending on how you look at it, you are now a THG cheat or you are now an athletic superhero.

So Barry Bonds has been using this stuff and he has been powering baseballs out of ball parks all along and then all of a sudden the BALCO shop of pleasures breaks open and Barry is embarrassed. Not for being a cheat but because he thought, see, that he was using flaxseed oil and an arthritis balm.

Doh!

Listen, don't sweat it if they catch you with a needle in your ass and a big tag hanging off the needle which says "steroids", deny. Say somebody put it there. If they catch you, claim conspiracy, claim freak, claim bafflement, claim diabetes or narcolepsy or set-up. It's been a long time since you were honest, why start now.

Take Dwain Chambers. Dwain was caught on the outside of a dose of THG, the primo creation of BALCO.

Indeed Victor Conte of BALCO has recently recalled the following. "I met Dwain at a track at the University of Miami in January and eventually gave him the full enchilada: 'The Clear', insulin, EPO, growth hormone, Modafinil and a testosterone cream I'd started using that didn't show up on standard drug screens. By August he was European 100 metre champion."

Dwain is as shocked by all this as you or I. "I was harshly treated. I wasn't the only one who had gone out and got in trouble for supposedly taking steroids, yet I got banned for life from the Olympics."

Supposedly!

"Apparently only Britain and one other country kicks athletes out of the Olympics. I think that's messed up, considering I had been running up and down for England and putting my arse on the line."

Poor Dwain.

Still the island paradises of Delusion and Denial aren't states with strict visa requirements. Cheating athletes get waivers. After all, if you've been a cheat even just for a little while in changing-rooms and on starting lines and on medal podiums in the company of honest athletes you've been there.

You've looked honest people in the eye and you've firmly shaken their hand even while you're other grubby paw was busy lightly pickpocketing their morale.

Deny. Lie. It's what you are good at. You do it for every phoney record you set which the kids coming up behind you will never break, for every chunky endorsement deal you took, every smile at the camera with your rows of pearly whites and for every honest kid who never made it into the big leagues because you were cheating to occupy a place. You do it for every pumped handshake given to some honest sap who finished a place or two behind you. You've been lying and denying all your life and you do it for the good of the sport, for the integrity of the illusion. Of course you do.

Then there's Kelli White. Kelli is one of the BALCO whistle blowers. You'll remember her for the whimsical inventiveness of a previous denial. She tested positive last year for Modafinil, a stimulant, and quick as a whippet explained there was a family history of narcolepsy. If she didn't get her Modafinil she might just doze off on the start line.

Now to save her hide Kelli is blowing the whistle like an old-style traffic cop. Still at the beginning, she wants you to know she was as innocent as any athlete who took a little flaxseed oil and arthritis balm.

"I'm not sure if Victor (Conte of BALCO) felt guilty for lying to me," White said last week when talking about her initiation into cheating. "He's the one who told me that it wasn't what he said it was."

You have to admire the chutzpah! I mean you've screwed your sport over good and proper. You've made it scary for sponsors (I mean, when will Waterford Crystal go waving the chequebook again?), lethal for TV people. You've spoiled it for the kids but what the heck you're You! You're different and you're special. Keep denying.

Marion Jones denies like the champion she is. She had a husband CJ Hunter who had so many chemicals in his system he couldn't break wind without creating a toxic threat to the environment. Marion never knew.

There is a financial paper trail connecting her to BALCO. There is the evidence of CJ Hunter who says he saw her injecting herself. There is the fragmented reputation of her current beau Tim Montgomery. There is her open desire to be coached by Ben Johnson's old mentor Charlie Francis. There is the fact it was her old coach, Trevor Graham, who spilt the beans on the whole BALCO/THG thing. There is the accusation last week from Victor Conte that he watched her inject herself in a hotel room right after he'd taught her the right way to do it.

Some mistake surely?

So says, Marion. They are apparently all out to get her.

We'll see. We'll see about Cian and we'll see about Marion and we'll see about many, many others and when we are finished, if we are ever finished, we'll know one thing. Sport isn't what the Nike ads say it is. Sport isn't what the TV Olympics say it is.

Sport is kids in a park with hurls in their hand. Sport is guys with beer guts playing soccer on a Friday night.

Sport is the race that happens when someone says beat ya to the next telegraph pole. Sport is the fun that happens before money and TV get involved. The best sport is the small stuff. The other stuff is entertainment and illusion and the money and the cameras will always push it on us.

Where did we go wrong? No need to ask.