Remember, the best performances are the ones nobody cares about

We could return sport to its innocence and not have to look at Ronaldo in his diamond earrings and underpants

The world governing body of athletics has denied that it suppressed the publication of a report showing that a third of athletes at the 2011 World Championships had confessed to doping, following more alarming claims about drugs abuse in the sport (EPA)

Doping? Corruption? Let me tell you what I know. I was once a shot-putter. Or I could have been.

“You’ve got the brawn for it, Jacobson,” our sports teacher told me. “You’ve got the shoulders. You’ve got the swivel. You might even have the far-sightedness.” The clear implication was that I had every attribute of a successful shot-putter bar one. “Would that be height, sir?” I asked. He looked down at me, shook his head and walked away. Later, I learned he’d told my only serious shot-put rival that I would never be in contention for the medals because I was called Howard Jacobson.

My rival was called Odin Testostenhammur. You can see the advantage he enjoyed. Just to go out with Odin Testostenhammur written on your back was worth another metre.

I often wonder whether I’d have made it as a star of field and track had I changed my name. But had I made it as a shot‑putter, who’s to say I wouldn’t have ended up ruining my body with the steroids they’d have slipped into my Lucozade. I meet Odin occasionally when I’m back in Manchester. He represented England in the 1960 Olympics in Rome, unless it was the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. He’s on the bottle now, lives on his own in a cold-water flat in Droylsden, and throws squash balls at his cat for a hobby. He is flabby, gaunt-eyed and cries a lot. So does his cat. Whereas I – well, I don’t.

The conclusion is inescapable. If you want a good life, don’t succeed at anything too early or too well. And don’t choose a profession that attracts money or attention. The minute people want to see you doing what you do, you’re finished.

I must have grasped this truth instinctively at an early age, because after shot-putting I went into table tennis. The sports teacher who talked me out of shot‑putting thought I’d found my niche. “You’ve got the right build and temperament for ping-pong, Jacobson,” he told me. “Short arms, strong wrists, obsessive personality.” What he actually meant was that I had the right name.

He was not alone in deriding table tennis by calling it ping-pong. Table tennis, in the popular view, was a parlour game, not a sport. Some, who’d heard of my prowess, would challenge me to a match, convinced they were in with a shot because they’d scraped home against some five-year-old at Butlins. When I thrashed them to within an inch of their lives they’d laugh, not at their own ignominy, but because nothing in the world mattered less to them than being thrashed at ping-pong. A trouncing at tiddlywinks would have hurt them more. If anything, I was the real loser for being good at something no one minded being bad at.

Though I didn’t properly grasp it at the time, these were the tranquil years. Never again would I be so happy. No one envied me. No one burdened me with admiration. No one came to watch. When I won, no one congratulated me. When I lost, no one consoled me. No one bribed me to throw a match. No one offered me a backhander for inside information about other players on my team. And, most importantly of all, no one suggested doping. This, reader, I can swear with my hand on my heart: the game I played at the level I played it attracted not the slightest corruption. No sport was ever cleaner. And why? Because no one gave a damn.

Where there are no spectators, there is no sponsorship. Where there is no sponsorship, there is no money. Where there is no money, there are no officials with fingers in the pot. The lesson to be learnt from this is simple. If we want honest sport, we have to stop watching it. At a stroke we could clean up football, athletics, cricket and whatever else is bent. All we have to do is stay away – don’t go to the grounds and don’t watch it on television – and, hey presto, the money disappears; sport is returned to its innocence and we wouldn’t have to look at Ronaldo in his diamond earrings and underpants.

That still leaves the problem of national glory, I grant you. But if we didn’t overvalue sport to the degree we do, countries wouldn’t want to associate themselves with it and might look elsewhere to bolster patriotism.

To science, maybe. Or literature. There must be substances out there that improve the performances of poets. Let the Americans and Russians fight over that – who writes the more sonnets. And at least there’d be no point in cheating.

Poets are not meant to be in competition. We don’t question the value of “Kubla Khan” because of whatever it was that Coleridge took while he was writing it. We don’t say he unfairly beat Wordsworth and ask for his plaque to be removed from his cottage in Nether Stowey. Writers are pragmatic about this sort of thing: whatever it takes, take it.

Everything is susceptible to corruption of one sort or another – humanity is one big cheat – but it matters particularly with sport which ceases to be itself the minute the outcome’s rigged. It is sometimes said, and I sometimes agree, that one answer is to call open season on doping and make performance-enhancing drugs available to everybody. That way no athlete enjoys an unfair advantage over another, though what we would then call what they do is a question for philosophers, as is why we would care who does it better. I see a future in not caring.

If athletics were to enjoy one 10th the prestige table tennis enjoys – in the sense of being played for itself, for the beauty of the strokes and the silence of the arena, for what it is not for what it brings, for the freedom it enjoys from the world’s curiosity – the heat would all at once go out of it.

I don’t know what Lord Coe would do with himself, but I’m confident Nike would find him something.