I’ve always been a sport nut. I love playing it and watching it, although more watching than playing these days. I love the challenges, the personal and the competitive. The exhilaration when you win or when you achieve some personal milestone, overcoming the odds. And billions of others do too. We love to watch elite athletes compete and do extraordinary things. Men and women pushing themselves to the limit; raw, pulsating, and pure.

Growing Up

Hol’up dog. I was but a teen when Ben Johnson smashed the 100m world record in Seoul. His arm held aloft as he strode down the track, the look on Carl Lewis’ face as he did. I was happy, I liked Ben, in fact apart from Lewis I’m not sure anyone didn’t like him. He was also a cheat. My happiness dissipated pretty quickly when he was banned. It was at this moment I felt I really began to grow up. The world wasn’t black and white, good v evil, yin and yang. It was all some dirty grey mess.

It turned out that almost everyone in that race was dirty. All but two were either banned or heavily implicated in performance enhancing drug (PED) use. And to this day Johnson maintains he was set-up because the drug he tested positive for was not the drug he was taking! Perhaps Johnson really did win?

Cheating, cheating everywhere…

Of course, Johnson wasn’t the first to cheat. As long as there has been something worth winning people have cheated. And in the past decades since Seoul we’ve seen more than our share whether Lance Armstrong doping in cycling, Pakistani cricketers spot fixing, or South Africa’s cricket captain Hansie Cronje throwing matches, we’ve had some biggies.

In Armstrong’s case, the one nut wonder was also competing against other heavily doped cyclists. They were all dirty. I maintain that had he retired sooner than he did he might have got away with it. His problem was he took all the pie and others resented that.

Spot what?

So, there are a number of ways to cheat. It’s not always ‘roids or other PEDs. Let’s look at the most common types:

1. PEDs: steroids, beta blockers, blood doping etc. These are medical enhancements that improve individual performance. Greater strength, stamina, slowing of heart rates, or whatever edge an athlete is looking for. Look for any large increases in performances, individually or collectively, and the chances are PEDs are being used. Also sports where past performance exceeds current performance and the sport is now likely clean but was dirty. Also ‘system’ performance – when a specific sport in a specific country performs at levels out of whack with normal expectations e.g. East German female sprinters.

• Match fixing: this is simply a player or a team taking money to throw a match. It is what Cronje did. It is difficult to do. It requires key personnel, usually multiple (although not always), to throw a game. And it is often obvious. It is also difficult to get a team to throw a match because players often get paid win bonuses. Although referees and federations can also do it. This is easier to achieve as only one person might be needed. But again, really obvious.

• Spot fixing: Easy to do, hard to pick up. A spot fix is a product of modern betting. These days you can bet on anything. Corners in a football game, no-balls in a cricket match, red cards, beers drunk by a fat guy called Todd. If it is a thing you can bet on it. This means you only need someone to agree a certain event. .This might not even entail their team losing, which for most professionals is easier to accept.

Catching the cheats

Now the question is how to do we stop this? My initial comment would be that you don’t. There is just too much money to be made, too much fame to be had. But we can identify it and we can punish those that do it, just like any other crime. And it is a crime. Cheating is not only defrauding the paying public, but it defrauds sponsors and betting companies (although fuck them). Armstrong had to pay back more than $40 million in sponsorship money – corporations don’t want to be associated with cheats, ironic huh.

How do we do this? Well during the London 2012 Olympics there were virtually no doping allegations. Yet, since 2012 it has been established that London was the dirtiest Olympics in history. The reasoning for this is simple. The cheats are ahead of the game so we keep their blood samples until testing catches up, and we can identify the dodgy athletes.

In turn, they get stripped of medals and banned. Naturally, this is a bummer for the other athletes, who, while still getting their medal – eventually – don’t get to stand on the podium and cry. They might also miss out on lucrative sponsorships because they are not the winner – see now why people had a vendetta for Armstrong, $40 million is a lotta moola.

We also need to be vigilant. If a result or an action by an individual seems off, like really off, then maybe there is a fix going on. A dodgy red card, strange own goal, bizarre score line, these are all indicators of foul play. The issue is that we rarely see these on our TV screens.

It is easier to achieve at lower levels of competition, those without cameras and large crowds -although technology now means that everyone has a camera and more of these egregious examples of cheating are being exposed. Nevertheless, there are still people watching that can call it out. A referee, or a coach, someone that knows when something is out of place can still identify checking when it happens.

What about the Feds?

No not those feds, the federations feds. One big problem which is difficult to overcome are the sporting federations themselves. These ruling bodies of sport are often compromised. They might be outright corrupt – as one federation is – or there is too much money, and competition from other sports, for the federation to make too big a deal out of cheating.

In fact, it might even promote PED use because it means more spectacular results, more media, higher profile, more money. FINA – the world swimming federation – lifted a ban on Chinese swimmer Sun Yang following series of missed drug tests. This ban was reinstated by the Court for Arbitration for Sport (CAS) on appeal from the World Anti Doping Association (WADA). He was given an eight year ban! This was simply to do with China and money – nothing more.

What can we do?

Stop watching. Really. Seriously. Sport is corrupt. It always has been. Athletes dope, they throw matches, do stupid shit for a few extra bucks. The federations are corrupt. The officials are incompetent, and in some cases, corrupt. If you want to keep watching you just have to accept that the pure game that you played as child is dirty, it’s like that realisation that all our mothers had sex and weren’t pure bundles of motherly love – we still love them, but we need to put that thought out of our minds.

If you want to read a more in-depth piece on this subject click HERE and for reasons why click HERE