KEY POINTS:
Pollution is clogging the Olympic build-up, but it is the illicit substances that cloud world sport that should be choking these Games.
The Olympics are a fairytale where commentators who should know better will feel obliged to regale us with stories of heroics and skill.
Forget the argument
about China's human rights record for now, because the Games will only be held there once. The long-term Olympic debate is whether performance-enhancing drugs and technology should be legalised so as to somehow legitimise this festival of fantasy.
Because, as with all prohibitions, the drug ban in sports just doesn't work, and one of its dreadful effects is to send the smog of suspicion over the law-abiding competitors.
Are the Olympics actually worth holding if they continue to operate on values that would make a conman proud? The athletes are not only cheating in competition, but going to any lengths to cheat the drug testing systems.
In the end, you are forced to ask: Why bother? - with both the drug testing and the Games at all.
There was something sadly naive about the way the New Zealand team trumpeted the appointment of a travelling barista. How thoroughly modern, taking a young women to make a nice brew while the rest of the village are jabbing themselves with stuff that would make a flat white leap the high jump in fright.
At least New Zealand's sporting record is reasonably clean, apart from the odd stain, but this is small comfort come Olympics time. As we head into the opening Beijing fireworks, remember, dear citizens, that historical Athens turned hysterical in 2004 when two local sprinters staged a motor accident to avoid the drug testers.
There are so many ironies with the drug testing regime. While it aims to present a clean competition to the world, it actually threatens to expose an ugly truth that ruins the image. And yet, it also reaches a point where there are so many positive results that the negative effects get buried under the avalanche.
What you will never get, however, is a point at which the Olympic movement runs up a white flag and admits both to defeat and that it is running a charade. It wants the athletes to come clean, but it won't do the same itself.
These druggy Olympics make Woodstock look like a Christian rock festival. The evidence of cheating is everywhere, and the whole Olympic movement is surviving on the fact that for most of the time, most of us simply don't want to look at it.
The supposedly wonderful Australian Games of 2000 tell the story - a tale of medal recalls that has rendered what happened on the track there as utterly pointless.
I recall a pivotal moment at those Games when it was revealed that Marion Jones' boyfriend was a drug cheat. You just knew deep down that it meant the golden girl of the moment was also on the juice, but the show went on, and Jones was duly feted although the applause was muted.
The Victorians had nothing on this Olympic mob, who parade the traditional virtues of sport all the while knowing that cheating is thriving below a cracked surface.
The situation is so bad that the long line of athletes suspended prior to the Beijing Games has struggled to even make the headlines.
This news, or lack of, says it all.
I remember a chief reporter in England dealing with an angry caller who was appalled at the decision to put an act of thuggery all over our front page. She asked why we didn't do more to highlight all the good in the world.
"The day it isn't regarded as news is the day you have to really worry, madam," came his reply.
For those who have missed it, nearly 20 athletes have - in recent times - been sacked from these Games before we've even had a chance to see their rippling muscles emerge from the sponsored tracksuits.
That's not to mention the decision of Bulgaria to stop their entire weightlifting team attending an event in which it was hoped they would prove their drug addled past was indeed history.
It is still possible to enjoy the Olympics by accepting it as a soap opera - chemical soap, that is.
But whereas you could in times past consign the fraudsters to the explosive, muscle bound sports as a way of cheating your own way through the Games, there are no safe havens anymore.
A look through the list of Chinese athletes alone who have been banned since the mid 1990s debunks the myth that sprinters, cyclists and weightlifters are the only dopers - triathlons, distance running, soccer and even walking make this gruesome grade.
Even the great outdoors is taking a trashing - just last week a Danish mountain biker was sacked from the Games for using EPO, which for the uninitiated is not a dodgy Scandinavian Post Office.
And while the dirty Dane at least had the decency to admit his crime and quit pedalling, many of the positive tests are followed by ridiculous claims that further denigrate sport.
The coach of seven suspended Russian women athletes, whose tricks included urine swapping, has claimed the bans are a wicked Chinese plot.
The news just ain't going to get better over the coming days, and over the coming years many of the young men and women who do claim medals in China will be gradually unmasked just as Jones and her mates were.
The awful truth includes the notion that the good guys don't come second. In the Olympics, the good guys come seventh and eighth if they are lucky.
Even the most cynical and suspicious among us are certain that the truth is even worse than is portrayed.
