Cathy's night, and it was a privilege to be there

If this is taken as lack of patriotic spirit so be it, but for all the fine British performances in the Olympic stadium, the night belonged solely to an Australian.

When Cathy Freeman sat alone on the track after winning the 400 metre gold that this crowd desired with such primal force, you saw from her inability to smile the bizarre pressure placed upon her by a unique trinity: her new stature as lighter of the cauldron; her position as Australia's only gold medal chance on the track; and repository of the hopes and expectations of the Aboriginal people. She won and she won well, and the relief was paralysing in its intensity.

Beside me, a venerable athletics reporter said he'd never heard anything like the noise that accompanied Freeman down the straight until finally she shrugged off the Jamaican Lorraine Graham and the British runners Katharine Merry and Donna Fraser. The volume was truly awe-inspiring, the nakedness of the emotion behind it more so, and the tears of the winner as infectious as anything you are ever likely to see in sport.

The Games needed this to take away the taste of testosterone and nandrolone left in the mouth by the positive drugs test of US shot putter CJ Hunter, husband of 100m champion Marion Jones.

No doubt unfairly, the margin of Jones's victory - wider even than the late Flo-Jo's in 1988 - and the resonance of Michelle Smith's downfall after marrying Belgian Eric de Bruin, who tested positive just before the 1992 Games, makes suspicion by association almost inevitable.

With Jones attempting to become the first track Olympian to win five golds at one Games, the revelation of her husband's cheating carried a special resonance and a heightened threat. This inescapable business with drugs doesn't exactly poison everything. Rather it takes the edge of unrestrained pleasure out of it. It's like dining in a wonderful restaurant but one from which one of the chefs has been sacked for being caught preparing food with dirty hands. The food is just as good as before, but how can you be sure that the other chefs are any more hygienic? You can't. All you can do is hope that the succulence of the banquet stops you worrying about grubby goings-on behind the scenes. Tonight it has.