Keiran Holland has of course seized on Gilligan’s latest public statement, holding it up as evidence of the sprinter’s dishonesty, and proof of what Holland knew all along: that none of Gilligan’s apologies have been genuine. Once again, I’m afraid, Holland has missed the point as desperately as a man confined to a Siberian gulag must miss the comforts of home.

Gilligan cheated and he knows it. I assume he has no desire to be ridiculous as well as reviled, so why is he objecting to the use of the word? Could it be because idiots like Holland keep forgetting the crucial distinction between sin and sinner, and trying to persuade anyone who’ll listen that Gilligan is not merely someone who has cheated, but “a cheat”—innately and irreversibly, as if it’s in his DNA and he can never change? If we create a climate in which anyone who does something wrong must be branded a scumbag forever, can we really blame those who lie and cheat—which, by the way, is all of us from time to time—for pretending that they haven’t, even after admitting that they have?

Think about how hard, not to mention ineffective, it would be to stand up in public and say, “I did something unforgivable that only a scoundrel would do, yet I’m not a scoundrel and you must forgive me.” It sounds like a paradox, doesn’t it? Well, it’s one we must embrace if we are to make any progress as a species, because we all do the bad things that only bad people would do, as well as the good things that only good people would do, which is why we mustn’t hold anything against one another. If we want better apologies, we need to be more forgiving—it’s as simple as that.

If Keiran Holland wants to hear Bryn Gilligan say, “Yes, I cheated and I’m truly sorry,” he ought to think about what he himself needs to say first. I suggest something along the following lines: “I’m not going to condemn you, Bryn. You cheated, but we all do—especially me, on my wife, with former Labour MP Paula Riddiough—and so I’m not going to write you off and call you ‘a worm with minimal integrity,’ because you’re probably a decent guy, or else you have the potential to be one, and I believe in you. You’re a talented sprinter who must have been under a lot of pressure when you made the mistakes you made, and I think you deserve a second chance.”