What's worse: The act or the actions that follow?

In the early hours of Wednesday morning, those of us silly enough to be depriving ourselves of sleep watched a grown man bite another man on the shoulder at the 2014 FIFA World Cup.

I am of course talking about Luis Suarez leaving his tooth marks all over a Italian Giorgio Chiellini’s shoulder.

In any sport, biting is one of the most extraordinary, ridiculous, despicable acts for a professional athlete to commit.

There is an absurdity to biting someone that is difficult to fathom. While a punch can be attributed to a relatively logical impulse should the red mist descend, biting is so far down the list of potential reactions to frustration that it borders on macabre.

But what has become even more preposterous than Suarez biting Chiellini is the reaction from Uruguayan officials and Suarez supporters to the act itself.

Claims by the Uruguayan officials that the entire incident is some sort of media beat-up by first the British press, then the Italian media, and finally the Brazilians (who are apparently fearful of Uruguay as competitors) are so bizarrely outlandish it’s impossible to comprehend anyone actually coming up with them. Photoshopped images? A conspiracy to destroy Suarez? Are they serious?

Daniel Taylor’s recent article in The Guardian is a superb example of how far a nation is willing to go to delude itself for the opportunity to win. Uruguay won’t win the next game if Suarez doesn’t play. He is their most valuable player and any chance of success hinges on his availability.

The attitude of the Uruguayans is akin to some sort of self-imposed cultist group-think, where all members agree to deceive one another in order to keep the wheels turning and the chances of winning alive. And as the fallacies they have created fall apart around them, they come up with wilder and wilder claims to distract us, anything that could disrupt people from focussing on what actually occurred.

But Uruguayan officials aren’t alone in these endeavours of distraction.

The Essendon Football Club begins legal action tomorrow to halt the investigation into the club’s alleged systemic use of banned substances by proving that ASADA has acted unlawfully by sharing information and, potentially, that any evidence gathered via these channels is inadmissible.

Rather than trying to get to the bottom of what happened, and whether what occurred was right or wrong under the code that all Australian sports must abide by, the Essendon Football Club has hoisted the barricades and bunkered down. As caretaker coach Mark Thompson suggested, the collective attitude of the club is that “the world is against them”, and the tribe is galvanised by their own petulance.

Played out through the media and now the courts, the doping mess at the club isn’t going away, yet the Dons are putting in place more stopgaps to determining what actually occurred. They divert attention away from the alleged acts of doping and hide behind befuddling legalese.

As admirable as the Uruguayans and Essendon have been at diverting attention from the real issue, the king of the con is surely Lance Armstrong.

Driven by a desire to succeed and a mountain of lucrative sponsorship deals, his web of deceit, legal strong-arming, media manipulation, intimidation and message control were so absolute it is difficult not to be impressed with how Armstrong avoided facing up to his cheating for so long.

A Hollywood screenwriter couldn’t come up with the story of Lance. Despite admitting use of performance enhancing drugs, his ability to control the narrative means he we end up talking more about how the interview went (Oprah!) rather than his doping.

Nationalism, tribalism, capitalism. All good reasons to defend the indefensible, or at the very least distract curious eyes from the real issues with a smoke and mirror show David Copperfield would be jealous of.

Play your cards right and eventually the act itself is almost forgotten, lost in the muddied water of absurd one-eyed propaganda, mud-slinging and legal jargon.

Instead of talking about the incident we discuss the process around it, the ambiguities and the failings, and thus the blame more or less fades away into the ether.

The peripheral circus that exists around cheating and controversial incidents has become a sport of its own.