By Ron Borges

You always want to believe them, which is the real problem isn’t it?

It’s that desire to believe, to hope for the best in our best, that leads to the crushing disappointment when all their wild-eyed protestations and indignant denials turn to sand and they have to admit, with heads often bowed, that it was all true.

The latest of our greatest to slide down this slippery slope is the American Olympic track star Marion Jones, winner of five medals in Sydney seven years ago. Apparently all of them came because she was, quite literally, running on high test.

Now knowing what we know about the high-octane world of track and field more than a few of her competitors may have been as well but she’s the one who got caught seven years after the fact and so she is the one who had to send a sad letter home to her family apologizing for the embarrassments that were about to become public.

It is sad, really, that the importance of winning has come down to this. No sport is immune any more. Once there was a time when we mistakenly believed this stuff was the province of bike riders, track and field athletes, hammer-headed wrestlers and perhaps the occasional misguided football player. Now they’re getting ready to drug test GOLFERS? Lord, what would a fatty like Julius Boros make of that idea?

Recently much beloved New England Patriots safety Rodney Harrison got caught up in the same sting operation that seems to be pulling in athletes in all sports at a rapid pace when he bought human growth hormone (HGH) over the internet using his own name, address and credit card number. Such is the boldness of the professional athlete who believes he’ll never be caught because the NFL does not yet test for HGH and even if they did the timing has to be so immediate that it’s nearly impossible to catch them.

That’s why many of the latest to get nabbed like Jones, Harrison, heavyweight boxer Jameel McCline and baseball players like Troy Glaus are being caught not by testing but by credit card receipts. Sort of like bagging Al Capone on income tax evasion because the government couldn’t get him on the hundreds of murders he’d authorized when running the Mob in Chicago.

There is, of course, no comparison between those crimes because one is basically inflicted on the self (and a few thousand competitors) while the other is a crime against society but there is a larger price in these seemingly unending steroid busts of our athletes than one might at first notice.

“Rodney cheated?’’ a young boy, maybe a second grader, said to his mother at a Massachusetts coffee shop the day after Harrison’s suspension became public. “How could a Patriot cheat?’’

The mother had no answer. At least not a good one. To his credit, Harrison admitted his culpability immediately. He didn’t do a Marion Jones or a Rafael Palmeiro and shake his finger at the world, scolding them as well as denying the crime. He didn’t even to try the more popular excuse of saying he thought it was flaxseed oil and had no idea these drugs had miraculous powers. Instead Harrison said he did it to recover from the effects of past injuries and we accepted it. At least we understood it.

It all made some sense, to most Patriot fans at least, because Harrison was an aging player who had missed the better part of two years with serious shoulder and knee injuries. Who wouldn’t try whatever he could to hang on to that lifestyle for another year or two? It might be wrong but who could really blame him?

Only later did we learn Rodney Harrison allegedly had started taking HGH before those injuries in New England ever happened. Harrison has been mum about that and his claim that he never took HGH “to gain a competitive advantage’’ is nonsense on the face of it. What did he do to prevent that natural occurrence (running faster, jumping higher and recovering quicker) from happening? Drink a quart of gin a night? I think not.

Just as getting busted has become an unintended consequence of wanting to win – or at least wanting to maintain your multi-million dollar lifestyle – so too are the positive short term effects of steroid and HGH use. Marion Jones ran faster and jumped further than the women she competed against in Sydney after allegedly being shot up with HGH by her then husband, a scumbag and disgraced shot putter named CJ Hunter, who would later out her after their divorce.

Did she beat them because she was better or just because she had better fuel? We’ll never know now and neither will she. That’s one sad consequence of all this.

Same is true of the feel good story of the summer, the remarkable comeback of Rick Ankiel, who went from broken down pitcher who had lost all his control of a baseball into a power hitting outfielder this summer only for us to later learn he, like so many others, was a customer of an on-line company called Signature Pharmacy. They are under investigation for illegally distributing prescription medications like steroids and HGH by using a group of physicians who would sign prescriptions without ever seeing the patient.

Ankiel has denied he did anything untoward, claiming everything he took was prescribed by a licensed physician. You want to believe him but do so at your own peril because his words were carefully chosen. A licensed physician doesn’t mean it was his doctor. Or even a doctor who ever met Rick Ankiel. That’s how the game has apparently been played lately and for people who truly love competition and sports it’s become more than sad.

It’s become infuriating because we no longer know who or what to believe in. We want to think these people are in the minority but how many Tour de France winners have to test positive before we don’t pay any attention any more to what they’re doing?

How many more baseball players, track stars, boxers, football players and on and on are we going to believe when they say either they never did it or, in what has become the latest thing, they didn’t know what they were using? The boxer Shane Mosley went so far as to admit he shot a hypodermic needle into his stomach on several occasions before a rematch with Oscar De La Hoya but didn’t know what was in it. If that’s true one has to wonder when the courts will make stupidity a felony.

Heavyweight challenger Jameel McCline reportedly purchased stanozol, nandrolone, HGH, testosterone and tamoxifen, an estrogen blocker taken by steroid users to keep them from developing feminine physical characteristics between March 2005 and last December. He’s never tested positive for steroids after any professional fight, of which he’s had 48. Marion Jones allegedly used steroids for two years PRIOR to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney and never tested positive for anything. So much for testing.

She now claims she got the substance “the clear,’’ which Barry Bonds has also been accused of using, from her then coach Trevor Graham, who had been long accused of shady dealings before. Jones will now plead guilty to making false statements to Federal investigators and may serve a brief prison term but prison time is not her real penalty. The real penalty is having to live the rest of her life wondering why she did it and if she could have won without it.

Jones had been targeted since high school as an extremely talented multi-sport star. She was a tremendous basketball player and one of the best sprinters and long jumpers in the world long before she met Trevor Graham. She may indeed be stripped of the three gold medals and two bronze she won in Sydney and may be banned for the rest of her competitive life from track and field competition but not even that is the real penalty. The real penalty is she has been stripped of her dignity, even as she still seemed to be trying to lay the blame at the feet of others.

Graham has since been indicted himself and goes on trial Nov. 26 in the BALCO case that has swept up as many as two dozen professional athletes in allegations of performance enhancing drug use. At least four of his former track stars have been banned for doping violations. Soon enough the same Federal authorities who have been nipping at Barry Bonds’ heels will leap on him as well because it’s open season now, as the sad face of a woman who once won us all over as much with her smile as with her prowess on the track found out three years after suing what turned out to be her dope supplier for defamation of character. The irony of that doesn’t need to be elaborated upon.

Perhaps saddest of all is that guys who have made this kind of cheating possible, guys like Victor Conte who ran the BALCO operation that distributed these drugs to Jones, Bonds, Jason Giambi and many others and showed them how to use them, have been proven to the only truthful ones in the whole sordid mess. Jose Canseco, an admitted steroid user, wrote a book his enemies said was full of lies about steroid use in baseball. Turns out he was the only guy telling the truth, exaggerated though it may have been at times.

But how exaggerated? We have no way of knowing any more. All we know is that we want to believe but with every new revelation it becomes harder and harder for fans of sport to believe in anything, or anyone, any more.

“It’s the destruction of a heroine of the day,’ Dick Pound, chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, told the New York Times after Jones confession became public. “It’s sad at one level, but it’s still tawdry cheating at another level.’’

What’s saddest of all is that such great athletes felt the need to cheat with their bodies, which were so clearly gifts to them from God.