Past scandals force even true believers to smell a fish

I'm wondering if you believe, because, I admit, I'm not quite there yet. I need a nudge to buy all the way into the time-defying tale of 41-year-old swimmer Dara Torres.

And I'm not proud of it, this dipping my toe in the water, when in a younger day I'd otherwise be diving in. I don't want to keep my head on a swivel, watching and listening for the other shoe to drop before or during the Beijing Olympics.

I don't want to just raise my eyebrows and say, "Hmm. Torres is unbelievable." I want to throw my hands onto my head and exclaim with confidence, as a sports fan and a sucker for human achievement: "Wow. Torres is unbelievable!"

Subtle tonal change; huge literal difference.

But I can't, because of all the usual cynical reasons and all the usual cynical suspects: those - no need to rehash the guilty, the brazen and the brazenly guilty - who have thrived in this age of artificial athletic improvement.

For sure, you have to marvel over Torres' climb from two retirements, two recent surgeries and childbirth back to the top of a grueling sport - a sport that we know becomes especially harder to command the older a swimmer gets.

It's an Olympian feat in itself, winning the 50- and 100-meter freestyle sprints at the Olympic trials and setting a national record in the 50. Torres qualified for her fifth Olympic Games and earned the right to swim both individual events in China.

On Monday, however, she bowed out of the 100, skeptical of the physical demands required to race two solo events as well as two relays.

But Torres' worry about how much remains in her tank is different from the worry of fans who remain loyal despite being jilted so often in the recent past.

Torres, of course, knows this as well as anyone. She's made a production out of opening herself up - 24/7 - as fair game for anybody in a lab coat to stick a needle in her or ask her to fill a little plastic cup or whatever else.

Says Torres: I am clean. I have nothing to hide. I have never failed a drug test.

This, though, has all been said before, by athletes who have wagged fingers and clucked tongues and cried tears over horrible, baseless accusations - until the latest tests caught up to their latest masking agents. Or they were turned in, and subsequently turned out of their sports in disgrace or even fitted for prison suits.

This is the modern frame within which Torres is painting an unprecedented story as the oldest female Olympic swimmer ever, and, sadly, it darkens the picture's edges. But how can it be any other way? There is too much tainted water in that pool.

A special treat in giving yourself over to sports is delighting in the long shot, the rise of champions, the sustaining of excellence, even over a generation. Against time. Against decay and decline in many forms.

Often, we convince ourselves that these victories illustrate higher-minded things that turn out, in the light of day and in the quest for shameless glory, to be mirages at best and devious plots at worst.

Which is not to claim the unbelievable story of Dara Torres is anything but what it is: one of the sports year's most compelling arcs.

It's too bad for her and for us it picked this particular era to come alive.

Tom Robinson, (757) 446-2518, tom.robinson@pilotonline.com