Cheating is a contact sport

Discovery Channel Magazine, February 2013

No area of human life is more fertile ground for cheating than sport. First, there are clear things to be gained from cheating: prizes, money, acclaim, and the satisfaction of our own competitive instincts. Secondly, there are so many ways to do it, from a Maradona hand-of-God goal in football to a drug-enhanced performance on the racetrack or the bike.

Nobody old enough to have seen it can forget the men’s 100 metres sprinting final at the Seoul Olympic Games in 1988. The Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson won it in a world record time of 9.79 seconds. Three days later, he was disqualified after his urine samples were found to contain stanozolol. Carl Lewis, who came second, was elevated to the gold medal – without anyone realising that he had already tested positive three times for stimulants prior to the Olympics and should have been banned for the Games, only for the US Olympic Committee to overturn the decision. Third in the race was Linford Christie – who later received a two-year ban for using a performance enhancing substance. In fact, of the eight sprinters in the final that day, five would test positive for banned drugs or be implicated in a drug scandal at some point in their careers.

There are sports that are considered noble and honourable. If you’ve seen that scene in The Legend of Bagger Vance in which the golfer penalises himself for a slight movement in his golf ball, despite the fact that nobody else saw it and it conferred no advantage, you might be interested to know that it’s based on a real incident in the 1925 US Open, when Bobby Jones noticed his ball moved slightly as he prepared for his shot. He called a penalty upon himself and lost the match, and told reporters not to bother making a hero of him. “You might as well praise me for not robbing banks,” he said.

But in plenty of other instances, there is just too much to gain for people to avoid the temptation of cheating. A survey by a researcher called Dr Robert Goldman once claimed that over 50% of athletes would take a drug that guaranteed them unlimited, undetectable sporting victories for five years, even if it was followed by instant death.

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