Somewhere along the way, cynical became the cool thing in sports. Maybe it happened after 1998, after Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa thrilled America by hitting all those home runs. Three years later, Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs, the new record, but by then everything in baseball had changed, steroid talk was all the rage, and nobody quite believed in what they were seeing.

Maybe it happened after all the Olympic drug scandals, after 1988 when sprinter Ben Johnson ran 100 meters in 9.79 seconds, a world record, an Olympic gold, a startling run, only to have it all taken away when he tested positive for drugs. Maybe it happened later, after Marion Jones won five Olympic medals and made a lot of money playing America’s athletic sweetheart. She so angrily and passionately denied ever using performance-enhancing drugs. She’s in prison now serving time for perjury, and U.S. Track and Field sent a vicious letter to President Bush pleading that he not pardon her. It’s hard to stay idealistic after that

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