HERE'S how sad sport has become.

A great athlete admits he took performance enhancing drugs and we have to be grateful for his honesty. Forget about being clean, we're just happy an athlete is coming clean.

Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees, arguably the best talent in baseball, said, yes, he had taken performance enhancing drugs in 2003. He plain cheated. Now he's owned up, but only after being confronted by evidence. This is good?

In a way, yes. Everyone's so sick of lying athletes, even when they're confronted by proof of cheating. Almost every champion who is caught, says with a straight face, "who, me, no way". You can almost hear agents and PR people in the wings, whispering "deny, deny, deny", as if somehow if you evade the truth long enough the story will go away.

A long-distance runner once said that his toothpaste had been spiked with an illegal substance. Marion Jones, after lies, and then more lies, went to jail, returned, and still told Oprah: "I didn't love myself enough to tell the truth."

In the context of all that, Rodriguez calling himself "stupid" was somewhat unusual. Refreshing sounds like a compliment.

But it's still scary. Jones said she never questioned her coach about the substance he gave her. Rodriguez said he didn't know precisely what performance enhancing drug he had taken.

Didn't know? If someone is putting a foreign substance in your body, don't you want to know? Or is becoming great, quickly, so important that it doesn't matter what it is, as long as it just gets you there?

But there is one wonderful thing in all of this. You, the watcher.

Nothing is worse in sport than an admired athlete being exposed as a fake, a counterfeit hero. It is akin to a betrayal and it has been constant. Track sprinters. Tour de France cyclists. Barry Bonds. Chinese swimmers. East German swimmers.

You, we, should lose the faith. But we don't. Somehow we remain convinced by the nobility of the athlete. Perhaps we look to Roger and Rafa, Lewis Hamilton and Kobe Bryant, Michael Phelps (who is a different type of dope for sure, but not a cheat) and Valentino Rossi, Lionel Messi and Serena Williams, and we are grateful to them.

For they tell us through their clean skills, it is okay to keep the faith.