ATHLETICS has conjured up some wonderfully memorable moments: Jesse Owens making a fool of Hitler in the 1936 Berlin Olympics; Roger Bannister's lung-bursting four-minute mile; the epic duels of Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett in the 1980 Olympics; the astonishing accomplishments of Paula Radcliffe in the modern era.

But today, athletics faces its biggest crisis as a drugs scandal to beat all drugs scandals casts a huge shadow over the sport.

A "designer" steroid, previously thought to be undetectable, has been linked to Britain's star sprinter Dwain Chambers, and athletes around the world await their fate as samples previously given the all-clear are taken out of cold storage for retrospective checks.

The question facing Chambers is this: Is he a cheat who thought he could not be caught? Or is he, as he insists, somehow an innocent victim of misleading nutritional advice?

The question facing athletics is this: Can we ever trust the sport again?

The implications are enormous. Millions of pounds of sponsorship are in jeopardy, along with the credibility of next year's Olympic Games in Athens.

Modern science has found a way to detect what was previously untraceable.

Modern science is just as capable of finding a replacement by producing another performance-enhancing drug which - at least for now - cannot be detected.

The consequence is that no gold medal can be won, no record can be set without the question being asked: "Are we watching a real champion or a cheat?"

For the real champions, who have dedicated their lives to running faster, jumping higher, and throwing further than their fellow human beings, it is an appalling injustice. But that is the point we have reached.

Somehow, athletics has to find a way out of the mess in which it finds itself.

But it is very hard to see how trust can ever be truly won back in a sport which has produced such treasured memories.