How did I not hear Adam on the stairs? He could so easily have caught me.

But he didn’t.

Being bad and getting away with it: there’s no feeling like it.

WHO’S A BAD SPORT, KEIRAN?
Damon Blundy, September 6, 2011, Daily Herald Online

In the Times yesterday, Keiran Holland explained why he believes that disgraced sprinter Bryn Gilligan doesn’t deserve a second chance, now or ever. Having read Holland’s sermon and found it unpalatable, both conceptually and digestively, I would like to offer Holland one of the greatest gifts one human being can offer another. By coincidence, it’s the very thing he seeks to deny Gilligan: the gift of a second chance. Keiran, you must be embarrassed about what you wrote, so why don’t I take a week off to reread my Jeeves and Woosters, and you take my next column, with my blessing. Use it wisely. By which I mean, use it to lament the ethical cataracts that prevented you from seeing clearly in the bad old days (yesterday, this morning) when you were a hapless churner-out of received opinion.

My regular readers know all about Bryn Gilligan, since I’ve written about him more than once. Gilligan was found guilty of doping and, having first protested his innocence, eventually made a full confession and apologized. Later, he apologized more satisfactorily, for all the good it did him. Yesterday, his appeal to overturn his lifetime Olympic ban was rejected by the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Keiran Holland believes Gilligan’s life sentence must remain in place because “His contrition is plainly not genuine.” “If that sounds harsh, it isn’t,” Holland assures us. “Bryn Gilligan is a liar and a cheat, and has admitted as much himself.”

There’s a problem with this argument that I hope all proud owners of more than half a brain cell will be able to spot instantly. It was the lying and cheating Gilligan did that created the occasion for his apology. People who say sorry tend, on the whole, to be those who have made mistakes, often serious ones. If the fact of their having done something wrong dictates that we mustn’t accept their apologies, doesn’t that mean there’s no point in anybody apologizing for anything ever again? Should contrition be banned outright?

Keiran Holland doesn’t think so. If he did, I might have more respect for him. Personally, I’m a fan of the centuries-old tradition of acknowledging one has fucked up and resolving to do better in future, but I respect a man who can hold a consistent line on an issue, however outlandish. Keiran Holland is not that man. As usual, he simply hasn’t thought it through. Indeed, what he claims to have wanted from Gilligan was a better apology, one that was less “weaselly.” Holland wanted the pure, special stuff: contrition of the highest grade.