the world has never been anything other than what it is. mean, lean, brutal, angry and vicious and yet paradoxically beautiful, serene, peaceful and a plain old wonder. it is the breathing, heaving definition of contradiction. nothing is mutually exclusive when it comes to this planet. even amidst war and death there is a burning and vivid beauty, a living, dying parable of exhaustion and renewal, of the coming and going, of the fleeting and the eternal.

as a kid though our elders strive to keep all this from us. we’re instead offered myths like the Easter Bunny, Santa, gods, in some cases, and (not all that much different from be-sneakered saints) sporting heroes. the real realities of life are hidden under carpets, stuck in the back of kitchen drawers and muffled into whispers when the little ones appear.

if we are lucky that is. some of us had raging parents  and other relatives to deal with, adults who were no more equipped to deal with life themselves than they were to shield us from it.

but for many of us, looking back on our childhood brings a warm sigh and a wistful smile, for its warmth still emanates like some auburn light from a promised land, long gone but still visible with a glance over our shoulder. as often with remembrances, the truth may in fact have been a little different, but that doesn’t make the memories any less tangible.

we can, most of us, mark certain dates and events along the line of our lives as moments in time when the edifice of that safe and relatively trouble-free world began to crumble. a bully, perhaps, or stress from school reports, or the emergence of a confusing awareness of the sexual.

in a sporting sense, i had two that live large in my mind. one was when i was 11 years old. i was playing for the Sydney Firefighters in the semi-finals of the regional soccer championships. we were one goal down with a minute remaining on the clock. we got a penalty after a hand ball, and as the usual taker, i stepped forward. as i hit the ball my studs caught the turf and i mis-hit the ball terribly, watching it scud and dribble hopelessly wide of the post.

cried all the way home, a two hour drive. it was 8 years before i took another spot kick. i laugh about that one now. it seems sweet, that it all meant so much to that little boy.

the other memory is not sweet at all, never even got close. it was an absolute and definitive moment in time that smashed a hole clean through my vision of what sport was, and, more specifically, destroyed the Olympics for me for evermore.

the moment came when Des Lynam, the BBC sports commentator, appeared on television one day in the summer of 1988 and announced that the Canadian Ben Johnson had tested positive for steroids.

‘i’ve just been handed a piece of paper here,’ said Lynam,’ that if it is right, it will be the most dramatic story out of this Olympics, or perhaps any others.’

i’d grown up with sports my whole life, swimming, soccer, running, hockey, cricket, baseball, rugby – you name it, i tried it. my dad had been close to a pro soccer contract before damaging his knee days after a trial with Blackburn Rovers, and a champion swimmer in his youth. it was in my blood. there was nothing more fun to me than to be playing a game and trying to win, but,then as now, it was how you played that mattered most. winning by cheating never even entered my mind.

what would be the point? cheating wasn’t in the rules of any game i played  – maybe if it had been, i would have been ok with it.

soccer and the World Cup was my first love but the Olympics came a close second. the history blew me away, all the way back to the Greeks, incredible. the Olympic flame seemed to symbolise all that was good and eternal about sport, and though it may have been a fairytale, it was one i could actually see, right there on the tv screen. it united people, brought them out onto the streets to cheers its passing, to congratulate the carrier.

and then Johnson came and destroyed it all. it was that brutal. i’d never liked Carl Lewis and his arrogance, he was way too smooth and disparaging of his rivals. in Johnson i saw the perfect underdog, this stuttering, shy individual who used to get beat by Lewis hands down, who suddenly turned into a superhero and ran like the wind.

but then, on that day, with the news delivered by Lynam, it was all over. the Olympics died for me that day. athletics ever since has failed to capture my imagination. i was 16.

i’d been cycling for a year, a day or two after Roche and Delgado battled on La Plagne at the ’87 Tour de France. i was pretty decent too, winning my first race, then the next, all the while getting deeper and deeper into the amazing history of the sport, becoming infatuated with reading about the great races and the legendary riders.

but just about the time that Johnson’s positive became known, i read about Eddy Merckx testing positive way back in ’68, ’74 and ’77. then i read about Tommy Simpson dying on Ventoux, a mix of alcohol and amphetamines discovered in his blood at the autopsy. then i read about Anquetil saying basically ‘yes of course we dope.’ learned about Marshall Taylor taking nitroglycrine, about the early Tour riders on cocaine, about the rider caught with a balloon of someone else’s piss under his arm at a testing procedure.

and on and on it went. it was quite obvious to me at that time, aged 16 and three months, that if i ever wanted to become anything but a mediocre professional rider i would have to take these kind of substances. it also dawned on me that, if so many cyclists were on the dope, and that if, as some said or at least alluded, you had to take drugs to compete, then there must have been others on that start line with Johnson that were taking steroids.

then came the news, hitherto unknown to me, that the East Germans and Russians were rumored to have a comprehensive doping system.

i had, i could see, been naive, but then if i was guilty of that then so too were millions of others before that fateful 1988 100m final. where so many of those who were shocked at the news of Johnson’s positive failed themselves though was by believing for so long that only Johnson was dirty. that same head-in-the-sand mentality allowed Armstrong to get away with it for so long also, even after the death of all those young Dutch riders thanks to EPO in the early 90’s, after Festina, Puerto, and on and on.

so there i was, 16 and a half, in love with the actual act of cycling and racing and wanting to dedicate my life to it, dreaming of one day riding in the Tour, yet increasingly aware that the whole thing was filthy. proper dodgy, riven with doping, decimated by cheating.

i rode for another year, still getting good results, then, halfway through the 1989 season, just before i turned 18, i quit. i never regretted that decision, and the fact that i was able to restart my racing career at 37 was just amazing, but what has never left me is the anger i feel for those who dope. i’ve had teammates since i returned to racing that have told me they used EPO when they were younger, and on hearing about their heart tremors and their fear of latent illnesses, i had zero sympathy.

i don’t live my life in black and white, and i try, hard as it is sometimes, to not judge others because life can be damn hard, but when it comes to cheating i do not see any excuse for crossing the line. once it’s done you never come back. those that cheat and dope destroy everything that is to be cherished in sport and in competition. perhaps they accept reality better than me, but if that is real i want no part of it.

i’ve met enough ex-dopers (and, though i didn’t know it at the time, current dopers) to know that something dies in you when you dope. you can see it in Vinokourov’s dead smile, sense it in Armstrong’s cold eyes. once caught they mew and bleat like pathetic lambs, but the truth is no one wants to hear from them. they come back like reborn sinners to tell us that they want to help rebuild the sport, but what they have to grasp is that they have reneged on the agreement implicit within the core of all sport – that is, that you do not cheat.

all a little holier than thou? i don’t think so. i am full of inconsistencies and have made, and still do make, hundreds of mistakes in my life. but i, like millions of others, won’t cheat to win. and i look at it this way: if i had broken the rules in some other area of life and been kicked out, i wouldn’t have the nerve to think that i deserved to be accepted back.

you reap what you sow, brother. never a truer word.

you may love the sport too, but you lost your seat on the bus, son, when you broke the cover on the vial.

yes this is a cruel world at times, and yes our parents may be misguided in the way they attempt to shield us from the realities of existence, but there is a reason why the rules of sports, of these games we play, are so hallowed and should be respected: because they offer us a glimpse of what we can become. they offer a vision, and even a reality, of greatness within the human spirit, in and amongst us.

that’s why it matters. and that is why it has to be clean.