Graham himself is on trial in federal court in San Francisco on three counts of lying to federal investigators in a drug investigation and faces up to 15 years in prison. The case went to the jury Tuesday. Young also testified in the Graham trial, indicating that he used drugs first provided to him by Graham from 1999 to 2003—Sydney apparently no exception. That Sydney Olympic relay team, which included the last golden performance by the great Michael Johnson, now seems certain to lose its medals.

For Graham, once the coach of the brightest array of track stars, including Jones and Athens 100-meter Olympic champ Justin Gatlin, it has been a dizzying fall from grace. Remarkably, he set the events in motion not by his alleged cheating but because it was Graham who secretly sent a vial of an undetectable steroid to USADA.

It has never been exactly clear what his motives were or what he expected to happen. Perhaps, tired of hearing rumors and allegations about his program and his athletes, he hoped to drop a dime (or a vial) on a rival coach. He certainly couldn't have imagined how wide the net would be cast. The vial led to a massive federal investigation, beginning with the raids on BALCO, a self-described hi-tech nutritional company, and ensnared dozens of athletes including Jones and Bonds. And ultimately it came full circle back to Graham.

I do salute the current athletes who at great inconvenience are going above and beyond what is required of them to try to prove that they are clean. And I applaud the news that Olympic drug testers will be going after cheats in Beijing like never before, with more random tests. And, hopefully, they will be armed with a reliable test for HGH that has been, for a couple of Olympics now, rumored to be on the way but then always turned out to be missing from the testing arsenal.

But cynicism tends to protect one against disappointment and has pretty much always proved to be the smarter response in these matters. I hope these Beijing-bound athletes are clean and that they return the sport to a righteous path. But nothing in recent history suggests that will turn out to be the case. The science of cheating has always outpaced the science of detection. And while the lessons from the fall of Jones and others is no doubt chastening, there will always be those who see the lesson in a slightly different light: that Jones would never have become America's Olympic queen had she not cheated in the first place, and that her only mistake was getting caught.

© 2008