FOR many it will hardly seem like a year since the London Olympics started, such was the momentous impact the Games had.

Amid the cauldron of competition, familiar legends were reinforced and new legends were forged, while the reputation of Great Britain as being the ideal host for such a sporting spectacle has never stood higher, especially as a near-perfect Paralympics followed the five-ringed able-bodied assembly.

One year on and the Olympic stadium has been given over to the Anniversary Games, an athletics celebration featuring many of the stars from 2012, who have again agreed to grace the venue.

This time around there’s nothing at stake, but as the athletes re-gather and re-gird their loins at a stadium where so many feats and memories were chiselled into the record books and human consciousness, the reputation of track and field is back occupying the low lane.

The drug scandal that has ensnared world-rated sprinters Tyson Gay and Asafa Powell has returned the stain of cheating to a sport that barely a year ago could do no wrong.

Usain Bolt, the most aptly-named, multi-decorated sprint champion, was even caught up – as if he is ever overhauled – by the new crisis.

At a press conference confirming his participation in the Anniversary Games, he was quizzed about the new drug outrage in which fellow Jamaican Powell and four other Jamaican athletes had reportedly failed drug tests.

Bolt was unequivocal about his own athletic attitude, approach and ardour. He was “clean”, always had been he said, recalling how he had been a serial breaker of records ever since he was 15 years old.

He assiduously referred to his god-given talent declaring: “I was made to inspire people and made to run.

“I was given a gift and that’s what I do. I am clean.”

Those three words should be an absolute godsend to athletics as should the similarly defiant message of Tour de France winner Chris Froome to cycling.

For all the efforts of countless numbers of athletes and cyclists who do compete clean, both those sports, more than most, remain tarnished by the spectre of drug abuse.

It’s not just a question of wanting to believe that the true titans of the sport are free of non-natural stimulants, supplements and chemical aides, we need to believe them.

Anyone who loves sport needs to be sure that those who prevail, those who succeed do so because they do have a natural ability to blast their rivals out of sight.

For all manner of gamesmanship, mind games, call it what you will – and which was touched on by this column last month – there has to be a pure essence about sport. At whatever degree it has to be about a level playing-field for all in terms of physical output.

If purity is blemished, if sport is compromised, then it loses its appeal, its allure, its attraction, its reason for being.

Yes, rivals never have the same resources, some players may be the physical equal, but not upstairs in the mind, or inside in the heart, stomach, bottle, however you want to describe it.

But they have to be free of something concocted in a laboratory, whose purpose is to give an unfair extra edge and, even more pernicious, be undetectable, untraceable, unfathomable.

But when you find heroes and heroines whose feats are nothing more than chemical clay then it becomes deeply distressing and dispiriting.

The supreme example of such treachery has to be Lance Armstrong.

His accomplishments in the saddle were, as subsequently revealed, aided by “one of the greatest drug operations” ever seen in cycling, perhaps even in any sport.

Yet given the circumstances of Armstrong’s early battle against cancer, his was a story people wanted to embrace, entrust and be inspired by.

Those of a more hard-bitten nature, those of the need to get at the truth, thankfully, kept pursuing the quest until it was unfurled in all its steaming rotteness and Armstrong was unveiled as a drugs cheat.

In his wake have come two British wins in the Tour de France, first Sir Bradley Wiggins and, just last week, Froome.

Both have steadfastly declared their achievements to be clean, and the Sky team they have so gloriously headed was founded on and remains wholeheartedly committed to being untainted. They remain a breath of fresh, unpolluted air.

Now athletics needs to be able to fasten on to a hero, a heroine, who is clean, unsullied by drugs, and is all that we can’t be because he or she is blessed with undeniable talent, spirit and endeavour.