"When we look back 50 years from now at the state of governing bodies in the late 1990s and early 2000s, we are going to regard these practices as medieval,” he predicted.

A commenter on Twitter rather neatly summarised this as the “Miller’s Tale”. But I doubt even Geoffrey Chaucer’s famously debaucherous 14th century character in The Canterbury Tales would match the hive of skulduggery outlined in the International Association of Athletics Federation’s (IAAF) Ethics Commission’s report of the “blackmail” carried out since 2011 by a group allegedly including the world governing body’s former President Lamine Diack.

While the first part of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) Independent Commission report published in November was notable most of all for its broader revelations of a state-supported doping programme in Russia, it was the casual details hidden within the 119-pages of IAAF Ethics Commission findings published last week that most caught our attention.

My highlight was the riposte provide by Alexei Melnikov, the former coach who was one of three officials banned for life from the sport, when accused of involvement in a payment from Liliya Shobukhova, the marathon runner turned whistleblower at the centre of the allegations, on January 11, 2012.

Melnikov claimed he was in not in Moscow on the date of the alleged misdemeanour, but in Sochi, 1,622 kilometres to the south.

Unfortunately, he was unable to provide details of his journey, which he claims he made by car “for convenience” rather than plane. After a lengthy delay, he produced a letter of confirmation from the FGBU Sports South Complex and an invoice from the Hotel Parus which referred to his alleged presence in the coastal resort, as well as testimonies from two race walking coaches, a "Mr Nikitin and a Mr Nacharkin".

I will print the IAAF Ethics Commission’s dismissal of these alibis in full because of its damning nature: “Their statements are in all but identical language which somewhat damages their credibility, damage which is compounded by their denials (when questioned on the point) that they collaborated in their drafting and their unconvincing ascription of responsibility for this coincidence to the translator. Furthermore though both accept at the outset of their written statements that they were endeavouring to recollect events of more than three years ago, their statements contain some extraordinary details, for example precisely what articles AM [Melnikov] is said to have brought with him in his car, four specific items being listed in exactly the same order in both statements, which further undermines any confidence that the Panel might otherwise have in the truthfulness of their statements.”

Similar tales are littered throughout the report, and, the funny thing is, it may not even have been the worst allegations I read last week. That accolade could go to the tit-for-tat in the Antigua and Barbuda Olympic Association between President Paul "Chet" Greene - a longstanding ally of disgraced footballing official Jack Warner - and his first vice-president, Wilbur Harrigan.

In a row over an alleged Rio 2016 ticketing scandal, Greene is accused of submitting a false invoice when claiming for business class flights to attend the 2014 Association of National Olympic Committees General Assembly in Bangkok, only to cash the money and purchase much cheaper economy class tickets. Harrigan, meanwhile, stands accused an alleged failure to pay for his wife's accommodation at London 2012. This was a simple misunderstanding, he claims, over whether his wife's hotel room was a separate charge to his.

It got me thinking about the worst  - or best, according on your point of view - excuses in sport.

There have been many given in response to a defeat, with an England cricket captain turned selector Ted Dexter blaming a particularly embarrassing loss in India in 1993 on the players' stubble, the smog and the unfavourable alignment of the stars. But I am going to focus on those away from the action, particularly the many offered in response to failed doping tests.

The IAAF have dismissed out of hand the various excuses of Turkey’s Aslı Çakır Alptekin prior to being stripped of her London 2012 1500m title. She unsuccessfully blamed her dodgy athlete biological passport readings on, well, basically anything she could, including “medical conditions, altitude training and the use of a hypoxic device, use of medications and supplements, and potential analytical or pre-analytical issues”.

She simply wasn’t being inventive enough.

Try attributing a failure to a CIA conspiracy, like a Cuban newspaper did after high jump world record holder Javier Sotomayor tested positive for cocaine in 1999, or an unborn twin giving you a second type of blood, like cyclist Tyler Hamilton attempted to before eventually coming clean. Or splashing puddles during the 2012 Perpignan half marathon explaining a positive test for erythropoietin (EPO), a line offered by French runner Fatima Yvelain.

Sex has provided many attempted get-out clauses, from tennis player Richard Gasquet registering cocaine in a urine sample because he kissed a girl, identified only as “Pamela”, in a Miami nightclub to sprinter Lashawn Merritt “not reading the small print on my penis enlargement product” ahead of a failure for anabolic steroids.

Our all-time favourite was first reported by insidethegames editor Duncan Mackay when he worked on The Guardian, who spotted United States’ Barcelona 1992 gold medal winning sprinter Dennis Mitchell’s 1998 testimony that his illegal testosterone levels were due to "drinking five bottles of beer and having sex with his wife at least four times".

Then, for good effect, he added: “It was her birthday, the lady deserved a treat."

Amazingly, this washed with United States Track and Field, but not with the IAAF, who overruled the decision and handed him a two-year ban.

Away from doping, for a famous recent example we must return to Russia and the organisers of the successful bid for the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

They were unable to produce much evidence of their bid processes to the FIFA Ethics Committee, four years later, because the computers used at the time had been leased and returned to their owners after the tournament had been secured.

The owner, sadly, then confirmed the computers had been destroyed in the meantime.

“Whatever we could supply, everything we could supply to the investigation we did,” added Russia 2018 head, Alexey Sorokin. “But we have to bear in mind that four years have passed since then, so some of the information we could just forget, naturally.”

Naturally.

A final case is another first reported on insidethegames, by my colleague David Owen this time. He was told in 2009 by former British Olympic Association chief executive Andy Hunt - today unveiled as having been appointed to a similar post at World Sailing - that he was “horribly constrained” by the Joint Marketing Programme Agreement (JMPA) under which commercial sponsorship rights for the period up to and including the Games were sold to London 2012 before he took up his post.

"I describe it as my hands are handcuffed behind my back," he said. "They are then tied with baling twine over the top of my head. And then I’m bound in a straightjacket, put in a metal cage and it’s called the Joint Marketing Programme Agreement with LOCOG."

Some of these, including Hunt’s, are no doubt true, but they are all remarkable in different ways.

And, to return to Diack and his accomplices in the IAAF, it struck me when listening to David Bowie’s Heroes for the umpteenth time on the radio today following the singer’s sad death overnight that, while the song may be always synonymous with British sporting success at London 2012, it has never been less apt for the then boss of the most popular sport on the programme.

Maybe The Man Who Sold [out] The Sport would have been more apt.