Sports must be at an all-time low of credibility now. No one believes what they see and hear is on the up-and-up, and those in charge of assuring they do believe instead give plenty of reasons for doubt.

In basketball, crooked referee Tim Donaghy awaits sentencing on gambling charges, while commissioner David Stern keeps trying to minimize it. A court filing contradicted his claims Donaghy only passed on information to gamblers. Fishy phone calls between Donaghy and another ref at least cast suspicion on Stern’s insistence Donaghy is a “rogue official.”

In football’s Spygate, the finest organization in today’s NFL broke the rules by secretly videotaping opponents’ signals. Then we watched commissioner Roger Goodell spend more effort trying to make it go away than bring the New England Patriots’ shenanigans to light.

In baseball, we saw indignant protests and finger-wagging denials from players suspected of juicing – and then they were fingered in court documents and the Mitchell Report. The commissioner and the owners were complicit with the players, all mostly concerned with making money off of baseball’s resurgence in the Steroids Era.

Those cases, where long-held suspicions simply were confirmed, are the easy ones, but it’s hard to believe even when we want to do it. We’ve been tricked so many times, fed so many lies, we are afraid to embrace the extraordinary or dismiss the conspiracies lest we be made to look like fools once again.

This is where Olympic swimmer Dara Torres is at now. She’s 41 with a young child yet swimming faster than she did as a 21-year old All-American at Florida. I want to embrace her story, but it’s impossible to silence that tiny voice conditioned by so much cheating and lying that says what she’s doing isn’t possible without a chemical boost.

Torres talks about never failing a test and volunteering for testing beyond what’s required. Then we think back to track star Marion Jones, baseball slugger Jason Giambi and so many others and realize passing tests can be a matter of knowing how to do it.

I assume there already is another “Cream” or “Clear”, something effective and undetectable, and there is so much money at stake that athletes are taking it. There must be enough people who agree to make it basically impossible for Torres to prove she’s clean, which is a real shame if she is clean.

Torres challenges the skeptics to watch her intense workouts, but that misses the point because no one suggests that those on something don’t work hard. Sure they do, but so does the competition, and if they don’t have some kind of edge in a bottle, then they are finished.

And then you find out that Torres is using banned medications with a therapeutic use exemption for an asthma condition reportedly diagnosed just before she began her latest comeback. That makes the drug legal within certain levels in her body yet it’s enough to raise an eyebrow or two.

Or maybe it’s legitimate – Torres has said asthma runs in the family. Perhaps Torres is a remarkable athlete achieving unprecedented feats with the help of nothing more than legal supplements and advanced training, in which case she should be celebrated for doing what seems impossible.