Rio 2016: Lizzie Armitstead's plight is one of the saddest in British history but, win or lose, the damage is already done

Three missed drugs tests became two but it was too late to save Armitstead from being tainted forever

Win or lose in Rio, Lizzie Armitstead will be forever tainted in the minds of many (Getty)

What was once about dreams, the ambition of a lifetime, an achievement to saviour, Olympic gold, is now about character. Lizzie Armitstead is not racing to win but to win over a sceptical audience.

Armitstead’s plight is one of the saddest in British Olympic experience, a talented young woman, a cycling world champion no less, committed she tells us to clean sport, forced by circumstances of her own making into a very different space.

Her emotional interview given to the BBC laid bare an individual on the ragged edge, perspective lost in the molten swell of now.

Broken down, it comes down to a phone on silent, a tick in the wrong box, and a family crisis the details of which remain under lock and key. Three missed tests became two after the intervention of lawyers. All too late by then of course.

The idea that a world champion might not be savvy enough to work her way around a testing system of which she is more familiar than most plays against her in the minds of the doubters.

Those close to her have absolute belief in her explanations for the mess in which she is mired in Rio. Her account of the missed tests given in a detailed missive that was reaching out to the goodness in our hearts was plausible enough. It comes down to trust, which is the defining issue of the age. Do you believe her or not?

More than 100 Russian athletes will be absent from these games over the doping catastrophe that has corrupted athletic endeavour in the Mother Country.

Too few sports are free of the narcotic blight eating away not only at credibility but patience. Here we are at a global event that is supposed to celebrate athletic prowess and the agenda is once more set by the evils of cheating.

Rightly or wrongly Armitstead finds herself at the centre of the latest storm, as she correctly understands, tainted forever in the minds of some. The joy that brought her to cycling as a young girl has been sucked from the enterprise leaving her a ghost of the rider she used to be.

Technically she is cleared to race and is professional enough to turn those pedals with something like the ferocity required. But win or lose in Rio gold is neither here nor there, the very meaning of participation altered in a way she could never have imagined in her worst nightmares.