Gods and monsters, we do love to create both within the sports pages much evidence of the dangers of the extreme language that is used when venerating or declaiming those who excel in one particular aspect of their lives has been provided at these World Athletics Championships.

The sport’s authorities have not been slow to pat themselves on the back for their staging of events and to rhapsodise about those attending events in vast numbers, but the repeated booing and jeering of Justin Gatlin in the Olympic Stadium showed no-one in a good light last weekend. As Gatlin so rightly pointed out his demonisation has been the result of sustained and ill-informed commentary from people who have failed to place his ‘crimes’ in proper perspective.

“I wasn’t booed in 2010 (when he came back from his second ban), I wasn’t booed in 2011, or 2012 here, or 2013, 2014 and 2015. Now I’m booed,” he observed.

Some homework by his critics should have raised the sort of doubt over Gatlin’s second offence that many have eagerly grasped hold of when some weird and wonderful reasons have been offered for failed or missed doping tests by an array of British athletes when it was claimed that an embittered physio sabotaged him by applying a steroid infused cream after discovering that he was about to be sacked.

As to his first offence, it seems quite clear that a teenager suffering from attention deficit disorder and on medication for that condition, got his timing marginally wrong in terms of stopping taking it ahead of a competition. For those of us who believe in sport as an alternative for youngsters who are less academic and that it is vital for the good of all pupils that they are permitted to express physical excellence in our schools, just as their peers are allowed to demonstrate intellectual prowess, the new 100 metre world champion should, on that evidence, be something of a poster boy.

None of that matters to those who want us to believe, unconditionally, in the great Usain Bolt, who has come from Jamaica, a country blighted by doping issues, to be the man repeatedly described in the Olympic Stadium this week as ‘the saviour of our sport.’ There is no attempt here to cast any aspersion on the credentials of the mighty Bolt, but blind faith is deeply dangerous, encouraging extreme behaviour among followers of the one true light. Barring his strange blip when Bolt demonstrated that even the fastest feet man has ever seen contain some traces of clay by foolishly claiming that it was ‘disrespectful’ for a brave journalist to ask perfectly legitimate questions about comparative performances, he set a supreme example to those who would deify him in that room and beyond with the graceful way he acknowledged Gatlin’s win on the track and afterwards.

The matter was placed in proper context the next day by Toni Minichiello, coach of 2012 heroine Jessica Ennis-Hill, when noting that it is those who have been supposed to frame then apply the regulations that govern matters that athletics has been grappling with since the 1980s, who have let the sport down. As he rightly pointed out, it is not Gatlin, who is participating here wholly legitimately, or other doping offenders who should be under attack, but the federations that govern the sport and the anti-doping agencies. In that context the British athletics community would do much better to turn its attention to another who has been used to wallowing in adulation for most of the past four decades.

Sebastian Coe has had his setbacks since his days of winning medals and setting world records, to the extent that he was, before getting involved in the London Olympic bid, considered a failed politician, but the President of the IAAF clearly learned some of the tricks of that trade in terms of embracing populism. Perhaps we should be grateful that something can turn the stomach of one who has operated at the heart of Westminster politics, but rather than make statements such as the claim, a couple of years ago, that a Gatlin win over Bolt would make him queasy, the man who was, for several years, vice President of the IAAF when it was riddled with corrupt behaviour, would be far better served focusing on the right targets for any opprobrium.