It's not cricket, you know. There's something fiendishly cruel about the monstering of 16-year-old Ye Shiwen, who won a swimming gold in Saturday's 400m individual medley. First she was labelled a cheat in front of a global audience and then refused an apology when repeated drugs tests show up clean as a whistle.

First off the block was the host nation's BBC commentator Clare Baldwin, who sprinted to the worst conclusion on zero evidence within seconds of Ye's record-breaking win with her loaded comment: "How many questions will there be, Mark, about somebody who can suddenly swim so much faster than she has ever swum before?"

With the starter pistol thus fired for the media witchhunt to find Ye guilty of winning while Chinese, in they all piled.

If sport is war by other means, then executive director of the American Swimming Coaches Association, John Leonard, is chief drone, still going on like a talent-seeking missile about how anomalies like Ye's record indicate drug use. He weaselled out of an outright accusation on the aforementioned zero evidence by saying, "we want to be very careful about calling it doping", but the word was out of his trap and primed for detonation.

Leonard brushed off reminders that Michael Phelps's haul of eight medals at the Beijing Olympics was also unprecedented, and yet no one had been rude enough to cast aspersions despite the US being no slouch themselves in the doping stakes; steroids and human growth hormone (HGH) being the chief culprits since the 50s and banned since 1975.

So while China shares a history of doping that lasted from the cold war until the 90s, it's wrong to single it out for suspicion whenever a Chinese athlete comes up with a terrific performance.

The fact that Ye's swim was 23 seconds slower than Ryan Lochte's 400m, and that she'd only sped up in the final 50m after pacing herself earlier while Lochte slowed down after sensing victory, has been largely ignored. As has the knowledge, supported by international swimmers, that it is common for young athletes to put on a spurt. Ian Thorpe says he took five seconds off his time in the 400m freestyle from aged 15 to 16, and Adrian Moorhouse was four seconds faster at 17 in the 200m breaststroke. The Lithuanian teenager who also knocked time off her swimming best has been allowed to enjoy her victory, so why can't Ye?

The argument slips around like a noose that keeps on missing. You can't get her on doping as she's clear so, in order to save face, it must be genetic engineering, the Chinese being so subhumanly clever and ruthless. (Let's remember that it's not Dr Fu Manchu who tried to copyright the human DNA sequence for profit, but Harvard biologist Walter Gilbert with his Genome Corporation.) TV and press have sniffed up this tree into the realms of science fiction, and found it wanting.

Elsewhere, the press has been sly in their dehumanising insinuations about Ye looking like a "killer whale", and the Chinese being selected to the point of being a "different species", with shades of Morrissey's infamous "subspecies" jibe.

Ye is accused of not looking properly feminine, unlike our own Rebecca Adlington. We had the same row over the runner Caster Semenya who made phenomenal improvements on her time at 800m and 1500m and had to undergo a humiliating gender test before being cleared by the IAAF in 2010. Bernard Manning's tormenting of British javelin champion Fatima Whitbread for being unbabe-like in his eyes seems to have rubbed off.

With accusations of drugs and sci-fi scenarios running out of steam, and the dawning realisation that it's hard work and training that's producing such stunning results, let's get them on child cruelty. While over-training of youngsters is wrong when it does occur, one British coach who's worked with the Chinese swimming team attests to their high motivation making the difference, and not the Dickensian nightmare as is being presented.

Luckily, this distracts from the real Dickensian nightmare going on right under our noses and barely reported – of the workers who run the day-to-day machinery of the Olympic Park living in flooded mixed dorms and paying £18 per night for the privilege, whether they are put on the work roster or not.

Cheating is cheating. To pick out one team is ludicrous. There's something else going on here. Is it the howl of big beasts who once defined human excellence and standards of beauty being knocked off their perch by the rising superpower?

The media heaved a sigh of relief when the badminton fiasco gave it something real to complain about, with competitors trying to get around the new round-robin rules by playing to lose. As China's not the monolithic entity some would have, there's been a row going on with claim and counter-claim. These are real people, not comic book villains. There's a real debate and everything! Champion Yu has quit and the media has a head on a stick.

We shouldn't be demonstrating such bad British sportsmanship to the world. Accusations are flying in both directions with the Brazil women's football team stranded at a roadside for five hours before their match with GB which they lost 1-0, meaning they now play world champions Japan.

As Bruce Lee said, when you point the finger, three fingers are pointing back at you. Whichever way this one pans out, at least we've all forgotten the scandal of the acres of empty seats at the fantabulous London Olympics.