ADAM BERGMAN? Of course you haven’t heard of him. Even in his sport of cycling, his name doesn’t trip off tongues. But last week Bergman made this old and bruised heart leap for joy.

He is an American road cyclist who tested positive for erythropoietin (EPO) at the Tour of Georgia two years ago. He claimed it was a faulty test. It is where cheating athletes go: contaminated supplements, cough medicines, spiked drink, whatever. Last week Bergman wrote a letter that he circulated to news agencies. “It is time to tell the truth,” he wrote. “I did it. I made a big mistake when I tried EPO and I made matters even worse by not having the courage to admit that mistake. My family raised me to be a better person than that.

“I know I can never restore my good name and maybe that’s how it should be. Though it may be hard, I hope one day people can forgive me. I don’t ask anybody to forget, because I never will.”

In the raging commercialism of professional sport, morality hasn’t had much of a look-in. Ethics rarely get in the way of a smart sponsorship deal, and the sponsor likes things to look clean. “Our athlete says he never knowingly took anything illegal. We believe him.” The usual spiel.

In Australia another courageous athlete was vindicated. Two years ago, Mark Fountain, a 1500m runner, wrote a letter to the Australian Sports Commission, alleging that the national athletics coach, Said Aouita, was encouraging runners to dope. An investigation cleared Aouita, but he left his post in mid-2004.

Last week the Australian runner Melissa Rollison, who also worked under Aouita, recalled the allegations and the subsequent inquiry. “Everything he (Fountain) wrote was true. Aouita talked about it (drugs) every day,” she claimed.

The heartening news didn’t just come from two athletes listening to their consciences. At the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italian police raided residences of staff of the Austrian team last night looking for blood-doping equipment and the IOC announced out-of- competition doping tests.

This comes after 12 cross- country skiers with uncommonly high haemoglobin levels were given five-day suspensions because of the health risk involved in competing with significantly elevated Hb. This may sound innocuous, but it is an important development and it could be key to dealing with doping in the future. Scientists involved in anti-doping see biological markers such as unnaturally raised haemoglobin all the time, but they can’t find evidence of what caused it. The effects of doping are written in the biological markers long after traces of doping agents have disappeared.

The sports community needs to find a way of using the biological markers in the fight against doping. Banning the athlete on health grounds, as the authorities in Turin did last week, is one way of using long-ignored evidence.

Dick Pound, head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, said: “Frankly, we think we are dealing with doping. It is too much of a coincidence to have 12 athletes with hugely high haemoglobin levels just before the Games.”

It was a good week for honesty in sport.