We think cheating in sport is black and white. We say we are opposed to it. Or does that depend? Here are some questions: where does foul play end and cheating start? Where is the intersection between cynicism and cheating? How much are you prepared to tolerate?
Nobody has clear conscience on this matter. Everyone of us has cheered for cheating in particular circumstances of self-interest. In those cases, it is not about right and wrong, it is about winning and losing.
For example: did you ever want somebody brought down when they were clean through on goal? Did you characterise it as (a) foul play, (b) cynicism, (c) part of the game, (d) a relief or (e) cheating? You didn’t care as long as the threat was eliminated.
Did you feel like a hypocrite for being up-in-arms when the act was committed against your team? No?
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Outrage is subjective. If you’re an Irish football fan, your response to Thierry Henry’s handball in the 2009 World Cup play-off would have been diametrically different from your response to Diego Maradona’s “Hand of God” goal against England at the 1986 World Cup. In both cases it was a flagrant act of cheating. In one case, you were cheering.
Maradona later told the film-maker Asif Kapadia that it was “revenge” for Britain’s invasion of the Falklands. In his autobiography he said it was “like stealing the wallet of the English”. The gloating and mythmaking were irrelevant: it was all about the in-the-moment outcome. Cheating pays more often than we would like to think.

How long has this been going on? Since the beginning. At the 98th Olympiad in 338 BC, a boxer named Eupolos bribed his three opponents so that he would win the tournament. All four men were fined, and in the custom of the time, a statue was erected to each man, carrying an inscription about the scandal and etching their shame in stone. It was meant as a deterrent.
Through the ages, though, public shaming has never worked. Cheating was a strain of human nature that was impervious to correction.
Next year’s Enhanced Games, where athletes will be permitted to take performance enhancing drugs, is an abomination on every level, but it will be interesting to see where cheating fits in. The three sports rostered for the Grotesque Games all have a long history of doping in their regulated existence: track and field, swimming and weightlifting.
At every Olympics and major track and field event, there are performances that are hard to swallow or impossible to believe. The consistent likelihood, though, is that in-competition testing won’t reveal anything. For example, only nine adverse findings were recorded from 6,250 tests at the London Olympics in 2012. But in subsequent re-examination of samples over the following years more than 100 doping violations were detected, including among medal winners.
In 2011 the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) conducted a survey that illustrated starkly how deep-rooted doping had become. At the World Championships and the Pan-Arab Games they asked almost 2,200 athletes to complete an anonymous questionnaire. The conclusion was that 44 per cent of the athletes surveyed had taken part in doping over the previous year. None of those numbers were reflected in positive drugs tests. So, we watch the Olympics and the major track and field events instinctively trying to guess the cheats. Nobody believes they don’t exist.
We still watch.
The Grotesque Games are being staged in the United States where the event is bound to find an audience. American Football, the biggest sport in the States, has had an unresolved drugs problem for decades. The punters don’t care.
When the NFL started testing for steroids in the late 1980s it was estimated that half of the defensive linemen were using them. “There’s nothing quite as juicy as a good steroid scandal – unless, of course, it happens to take place in the National Football League,” wrote the New York Times. “Then it’s just business as usual.”
A study conducted by the Washington School of Medicine in 2011 concluded that 71 per cent of NFL players had misused drugs during their careers, often for pain management.

And yet, last year, the NFL came to an agreement with the NFL players association to more than double the threshold for a positive drugs test and to reduce the penalties. Under the new agreement, players won’t face a suspension until their third violation. The fines for their first two offences amount to pocket change. In this neighbourhood the Grotesque Games will do well.
Doping is at one extreme of the cheating spectrum. Other stuff is more nuanced. The horse racing authorities in Britain, for example, have taken an interesting stance on whip use. Jockeys were always liable to be suspended for overuse of the whip or misuse of the whip, but if they did so while winning a race it had no impact on the result.
It always seemed like an anomaly. If a jockey had broken the rules in order to win, did that not constitute cheating? In cheating terms, it was the perfect crime: the owner, the trainer, the jockey and the punters who had backed the horse all collected their winnings and the punishment was retrospective. Was a punter ever squeamish, though, about a jockey’s use of the whip when their wager was on the line? We tolerate that kind of cheating too.
The British Horse Racing Authority [BHA] have not gone the whole hog to address this issue, but if any jockey uses the whip more than four times above the permitted number the horse is automatically disqualified now.
And on it goes. In Gaelic football and hurling there is a certain permission to manhandle forwards off the ball. We have euphemisms for that kind of behaviour: blackguarding or skullduggery. Not cheating. In rugby illegal stuff goes on in the front row of the scrum and, just like the refs, we’re only guessing what it is. The props? They bend the rules like a bamboo. They might refer to it as “dark arts”. Not cheating. What do you care unless the ref penalises your team?
We don’t agonise about these things. We romanticise fair play and relentlessly badger referees to deliver it, until it suits our purpose for somebody on our side to cheat. We see this stuff as tax avoidance when really it is tax evasion.
We think cheating is black and white. We say we’re opposed to it.