I DIDN’T watch Justin Gatlin win the 100 metres gold at the World Championships; or, perhaps better put, I didn’t watch Usain Bolt lose. However, an outburst of screeching from elsewhere in the house was startling enough to lure me just in time to witness the booing and catcalling that followed.

This unexpected defeat was, most agree, not on. That Bolt, named by the Gods, a near-superhuman escapee from Greek myth, should be diminished in his final scene was poor script judgment. That he was bested by a man described by one commentator as “Voldemort in spikes” was really stretching cinematic credulity.

We may be sniggering, sceptical, post-everything sophisticates but we still expect the good guy to win. Denzel Washington or Will Smith would have pulled it off, you betcha.

It seems the person coping best with the outcome is the vanquished Bolt. “I always respected him as a competitor,” he said of Gatlin. “He’s one of the best I have faced. For me he deserves to be here, he’s done his time and he’s worked hard to get back to being one of the best athletes.” The rest of us have yet to achieve this state of grace. The lurid abuse directed at Gatlin over the past few days by people who are not Bolt has been remarkable even in today’s toxic climate.

The American sprinter could scarcely be less popular had he set a horde of soul-sucking Dementors upon his Jamaican rival mid-race. Even prostrating himself before the great man in the immediate aftermath did nothing to divert the flak. How dare he run faster than the other, nicer guy?

Gatlin’s inescapable crime is not that he is a murderer or a rapist, but that he is a drugs cheat; or was a drugs cheat. In 2006 the athlete was banned for eight years, later reduced to four, when he failed a test for the banned steroid testosterone.

This was his second offence – he served a year’s suspension in 2001 for a drug he said he’d been taking since childhood to combat attention deficit disorder.

Is he still a drugs cheat? The response to Sunday’s race suggests there is only one way to answer that question. Lord Coe, president of the International Association of Athletics Federations, put it bluntly: “I’m not eulogistic that somebody that has served two bans in our sport would walk off with one of our glittering prizes, but he is eligible to be here.”

I hold no candle for Gatlin. I don’t know anything about him beyond what I’ve read since the weekend. He may be a scumbag who deserves every jeer and sneer.

But I confess I’m quite impressed that a 35-year-old can run 100m in 9.92 seconds, in the process beating the fastest man of all time, who is five years his junior, and take the top prize in an elite international athletics competition. I’m also impressed that having served two suspensions, one of them lengthy, Gatlin had the capacity to soak up the criticism, resume training, return to the sport and reach its pinnacle, presumably while clean.

You don’t need to like him but you can’t deny he has guts. And if Bolt can accept that “he deserves to be here, he’s done his time”, shouldn’t the rest of us?

The 19th century historian, Thomas Babington Macaulay, had it that “we know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality”. That’s no longer true.

Today’s public does not have periodical fits of morality; it has a single, perpetual hissy fit. Its occupation is a daily, often hourly, search for wretches upon whom it can turn its immutable rage.

Despite all we have experienced, we continue foolishly to demand perfection from others. It is a lesson we refuse to learn.

We hold the rest up to the light of the best; the few – the very few – who can claim to be anything close to blameless. We judge them harshly; we give no quarter; we lack mercy. And yes, journalists are the worst of the lot.

It is those in public life who bear the brunt of this sourness. By public life I mean anyone who has the result of their efforts, regardless of profession, trade or vocation, subjected to mass, inexpert scrutiny by the mob.

There is a smallness to modern debate that makes Teddy Roosevelt’s point for him: “It is not the critic who counts … the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again … who spends himself for a worthy cause … and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly.”

Here, I think of Nick Timothy, the former chief of staff to Theresa May who resigned following her dreadful General Election result.

Timothy, whom I know and like, is a young, ordinary, decent man, an original thinker with long experience of the Home Office and No 10 whose weaknesses have been well enough gone over.

When it emerged recently that he had been asked to write a weekly newspaper column, the response – an outrageous reward for failure – was as hysterical as it was bizarre.

Shouldn’t the man be able to earn a living? Must he live in a remote cave, surviving on roots and berries, until the mob decides his penance is served? Aren’t his thoughts, now that he has popped out of the other side of the pipeline of power, of interest?

They are to me. And there are countless others like him, from many walks of life.

I’ve found – haven’t you? – that it’s often those who have been through the fire, who have screwed up, been brought low, and then found the strength to start again, who provide the most astute and rewarding reflections.

In these situations, the appropriate response isn’t usually “to hell with you”, but, rather, “there but for the grace of God … “, and to treat them as we at our most abject would hope to be treated.

And we should probably ask them how they found the strength to get through that long, dark night, because one day the knowledge could come in useful.