There is No Sport Without Cheating

There is no sport without cheating

Throughout sports history, cheating has existed in every sport in some way, shape, or form, which has caused whatever sport it is to become damaged, sometimes permanently.

Cheating has taken place from as far back as the 1919 Chicago White Sox team who threw away the world series when bribed by gamblers, to Maradona’s hand of god in 1986, to Harlequins RFC ‘Bloodgate scandal’, Chelsea’s illegal transfer signings and most recently the dispute into Renaults Pique crashing on purpose, which have all been covering today’s sporting headlines.

Cheating is an act of lying, deception, trickery, imposture, or imposition in the act of creating an unfair advantage against the opposition. There are many different ways to cheat in sports, such as match fixing, placing bets on teams, lying about your age, and the biggest one of them all, taking performance enhancing substances.

         People cheat for a variety of different reasons whether it be pressure from others, sponsorship and contract deals, national glory, to break records, because of injury. Overall it is the willingness to win no matter what way, or how much it takes to be the best. Athletes will do anything to gain a competitive edge as they want to win, and will do anything in order to achieve this.

Sport governing bodies have introduced rules and punishments, such as bans, fines, medals and records being stripped. For example, Harlequins RFC ‘Bloodgate scandal’, the head coach Dean Richards was barred from coaching rugby in England for 3 years, the player Tom Williams banned from RFU competitions for four months and the physio Steph Brennan suspended from his role in the England team. Chelsea Football Club have been banned from registering any new players for both national and international competitions in the next two transfer windows. As well as the ban, the Stamford Bridge club also have to pay RC Lens £113,000 in training compensation and have been fined £680,000. And Renault have been given a two-year suspended ban from Formula 1 for their role in fixing last year’s Singapore Grand Prix, with former team boss Flavio Briator banned from FIA-sanctioned events for an unlimited period.

         All of these punishments have been made via the ERC, FIFA and FIA. The three sports governing bodies of European rugby, world football, and world formula 1. They were made to punish the offenders and show others that these consequences will take place if you cheat in sport.

In the modern day of sport, every big event is filmed, making it much easier for governing bodies to track down on offences as they can re-watch the recording many times over, catching people out. This has also introduced citing, whereby a player can be fined or banned after the recording has been viewed. Therefore being cited. There’s also been an increase in people being employed behind the scenes to monitor the way in which clubs and teams are working, and whether or not it’s being done in an illegal way.

Although we all know cheating in sport is morally wrong, we find ourselves interested when seeing it all over the media. Perhaps cheating actually adds a layer of interest to sport? Also, we love to applaud cheaters who have confessed their ways I even found myself thinking ‘good man’ when Bath and England prop Matt Stevens came confessed that he’d been taking cocaine, and had an interview on sky sports saying he was stupid, not recommending it, and is exactly the way sporting role models should not be acting.

There’s also an argument that without cheating, records wouldn’t be broken. just imagine if Usain Bolt was found guilty of anabolic steroids, and his records were stripped. Then no man could break Asafa Powell’s previous 100m record. The hype up to big track events such as the world championships and Olympics would be far less, if people thought that there was no way the record would be broken. Maybe cheating makes sport more entertaining?

Finally, the truth is that as long as their is competition in sports, cheating will always happen, and there is nothing that anyone can do to stop it, governing bodies can try and lower the number of cheats with harsher punishments and more detail into catching them out, but it will never be completely abolished.