Is actually, probably an oxymoron, because there is no integrity in sport and here I will tell you why.

Myself, I quite like sport. Always have. I like playing it. I like watching it (well some of it). I used to play quite a lot myself and played pretty much anything I could, and I was reasonable at most of them, or at least could hold my own. I have played with and against current and former internationals although I myself was always just a casual player, something to do when I could, I was also fairly injury prone.

Nevertheless, I played when I could. My biggest regret about getting older is not being able to play sport the way I used to. I love the competition, the struggle within your own mind and body, between others, either as a team or individually. There is no better feeling than overcoming a challenge because you lifted yourself to a level you didn’t know you had.

It is the same with watching professionals. The level is higher, faster, stronger – hence the Olympic Games motto – but fundamentally, the same challenges apply. We cheer for the underdog as they overcome their own personal Goliath, we are in awe of the superstars as they sweep all before them, and occasionally we get two or more giants of a sport competing against each other at the same time, sometimes for years. Sugar Ray Leonard and Marvin Hagler, Borg and McEnroe, Carl Lewis and Ben Johnson.

Okay let’s just rewind a bit here. When I was a young man just becoming truly aware of the world around me, I became engrossed with the Lewis – Johnson rivalry. An arrogant superstar American versus a shy, stuttering Canadian of West Indian descent, and as a nominal Canadian, my side was obvious. When Johnson strode across the finish line in Seoul, arm aloft, finger pointing to the sky, it was a wonderful story. I cheered, I might have even cried, honestly, who the fuck knows it was 34 years ago, but I was happy.

Three days later I awoke to disastrous news; Johnson was a cheat. His use of anabolic steroids had helped him catch Lewis and destroyed multiple careers. The Canadian relay sprint team withdrew in protest, of course, they were all juiced to the max and would get busted too if they won a medal (which without Johnson was impossible in any case).

I think this was the moment I grew up. One of my sporting idols was a cheat and I didn’t want to believe it. I bought into the conspiracy theory. His sample was spiked. It seemed crazy at the time, but there was something in my gut that said, yes, maybe Ben was, for want of a better term, royally fucked over. And you know what? I was right.

Whether or not Johnson’s sample was tampered with as he claimed – he still does even after admitting his doping guilt – there is an interesting aside to that final. Subsequently, every member of that final, except the Brazilian Robson da Silva and American Calvin Smith, was eventually banned for doping, or at the least heavily implicated – Linford Christie, bronze medallist in Seoul and winner in 1992 was banned, although he kept his Olympic medals – and Carl Lewis has been subject to numerous allegations of doping some of which he admitted to despite never being banned. The race itself has since been dubbed the Dirtiest Race in History.

Finally, US Athletics were shown to have a systematic doping program for its sprinters. The list of which is considerable and lasted well into the 2000s; even as late as June 2020 it was announced that the current Men’s 100 metre World Champion Christian Coleman (of the US of A) had missed his third drug test in a year, oh and the runner up was the previously banned Justin Gatlin. Coleman was subsequently banned from the Tokyo 2020 Games.

And it’s not just the men. Florence Griffith-Joyner smashed the women’s record in Seoul, a record that no one has ever got close to since. Despite rumours of performance enhancing drug (PEDs) use – and accusations by other athletes, Flo-Jo was never found to have used PEDs by the authorities. Of course, that is bullshit. Let me tell you why.

Scandals

Over the years we’ve seen a number of large proven cheating scandals. Hansie Cronjie and the South African cricket team, numbers of Pakistani cricketers being banned for spot fixing (where bets are taken for particular events within a game, an issue where cricket is rife for exploitation), Lance Armstrong and his one ball, Chinese swimmers, and of course those dodgy American sprinters. There have been multiple other rumours none of which have yet to be proven beyond doubt.

What are we actually talking about?

During my career I learned an awful lot about just how much cheating goes on in all sports. And that is what it is: cheating. Cheating is a crime, punishable by law; do the crime, do the time. Not only are cheats conning the public they are deceiving all sorts of people out of money. Bookmakers, other professionals – including teammates, and sponsors. For instance, Armstrong has been ordered to pay back tens of millions of dollars to sponsors following his downfall.

So, what type of cheating are we talking about? There are a number of ways a competition may be corrupted and not all of it is individuals cheating:

Performance Enhancing Drugs

As already mentioned, PEDs are well known. When most of us think of cheating that is what pops into our minds: steroids and other related drugs. There are also more subtle ways such as blood doping, testosterone, and other natural hormone supplements. These give the athlete a boost during training and sometimes competition itself. And when you compete at world class professional level the difference between winning and coming tenth can be a performance boost of a little as 1%.

Match fixing

This is primarily an organised criminal activity designed to rig the betting markets. Teams or individuals can be approached by representatives of criminal organisations, or even family members, to throw a match. This can be individual sport or team sport. If a team sport, multiple players will be required – such as Cronje’s South Africans – or perhaps the officials.

In some cases, even the sport’s federation is corrupt, and they will appoint the ‘appropriate’ officiating team to the match. Match fixing can be difficult to achieve at the highest levels of sport because of the attention it receives and the general knowledge of the public towards well known teams and players, so it is often done at lower levels of sport where there are no cameras, no fans, and little interest outside of the betting markets. Additionally, lowly paid players and officials are more likely to be persuaded by a dodgy brown paper bag than will highly paid global superstars.

Spot Fixing

This is perhaps most common, at least from an organised team sport perspective. In many sports today an individual such as yourself can bet on a myriad of in game events. For example, how many corners will Manchester United have, how many no balls will India bowl, how many rackets will Nick Kyrgios smash. You get the picture. These make in game events highly lucrative to the sports betting companies and to those that wish to exploit them. Individuals in the Pakistani cricket team were found guilty of spot fixing during a match against England 2010 and subsequently received varying bans.

The main issue is this: you need relatively few people in on the fix, and it might not even need to alter the result. Don’t believe me? Read about Steve Smith and the 1994 Arizona State basketball team. This last point is important because throwing a match is a moral dilemma that many players wouldn’t accept.

And it isn’t just about the fans, players get win bonuses and throwing a match takes money out of their teammates’ pockets and their own. It is just financially nonviable.

How can we tell if someone is cheating?

It is not as hard as you might think. Let’s start firstly with spot fixing as it is the most difficult to prove. If we look at the Pakistani cricket example, we can see that it was the obvious no-ball bowled by bowler Mohammed Amir that led umpires to become suspicious.

A spot fix can usually be identified by something that appears out of the ordinary, in this case Amir overstepped his crease by a significant margin and it was an abnormal incident, that is he didn’t normally do that (there may also be other background events that officials pick up too such as timing, strange signals, overly suspicious conversations and so on).

Many spot fixes are picked up by the officials, although sometimes spectators can pick them up too. As a rule of thumb spot fixing should be suspected where a team or individual performs an action that is outside the norm of expected behaviour for a situation.

If you have ever watched a match and thought ‘what the fuck did he just do?’ or ‘why did he do that?’, then the chances are you may have just witnessed a spot fix. It might be an unnecessary yellow card, a stupid cricket shot when they are playing well, a bizarre dropped catch, horrendous goalkeeping error, and of course the list can go on and on.

Match fixing is far more difficult to determine because the chances are, you’ll never see a game that is! The reason why is that these are usually lower level games with next to no spectators. But it isn’t always the case. In the Calciopoli scandal of the mid 2000s Italian super club Juventus were found guilty of match fixing and suffered relegation from Serie A and stripping of their most recent championship titles.

In Spain, there have been various recent claims around the Spanish Second Division and investigations are ongoing. And anyone that watched the 2002 World Cup™ would attest that there was clear match fixing at play that helped the joint host South Koreans achieve a remarkable semi-final berth; especially if you are Spanish or Italian (oh the irony!).

Although, these scandals and the almost saturation coverage of most top level sporting events makes it very difficult for teams or individuals to throw matches at this level. Nevertheless, a team can get tonked and we’d be none the wiser, we may just put it down to a bad day at the office.

PEDs are a difficult one too although there are some clear and obvious signs. Let’s take Flo-Jo as an example. Her supporters would claim that she was a simply a freak, an unbelievable athlete, that dominated her sport. Her detractors might point to her incredible improvement between 1987 and 1988, and the fact that her record still stands after 33 years, actually no one has got close to it, not even the proven cheat Marion Jones.

Within that example there are two ways of how you can catch a PED cheat. The first is the obvious: performance improvement. If an athlete shows extraordinary performance improvement in a relatively short period of time, then that is almost certainly a case of some form of performance enhancement – claims can be made about equipment but that is also usually just bullshit.

The other way is kind of back to front. If you look at world records and see that most of them are in the past then that suggests two things, one good and one bad. The good is that the sport is almost certainly clean; the recent results in the 2016 Rio Olympics suggested that the 100 metre runners were clean, the reason being that times were the slowest in years and the runners themselves looked physically different, being leaner and less ‘enhanced’. The bad is that it indicates that the old results were almost certainly obtained under the influence of PEDs.

There are a number of rowing records which suggest that is the case. The most recent results at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics suggests that maybe something untoward was going on. British sprinter CJ Ujah has been suspended following a failed drug test and men’s 100 metre champion, the Italian Lamont Marcel Jacobs, has found himself embroiled in a controversial doping investigation, which naturally he denies. Clearly his marked personal improvement over the past twelve months had been down to hard work.

You see, we would expect to see slight improvements over the years as training methods, equipment, sports science, diet and a range of other factors improve the individual performance of athletes. Large improvements cannot be anything but enhancements or the occasional freak athlete like Usain Bolt – in Bolt’s case he was identified as such when he was a teen.

An athlete that appears out of nowhere to beat the world is almost always a cheat. This expected improvement would also lead us to see records continually being broken – albeit by small amounts – so if you have a 25 year world record then it is probably a record built upon PEDs (unless it is an environmental factor such as Bob Beamon’s 1968 long jump record, which was achieved at altitude).

The one caveat I would add to this is those sports where records are still being broken because the sport has always been enhanced and still is, the obvious one is cycling. Yes, Armstrong is a convicted cheat, but everyone before him was cheating too. In any case, I suspect it is still a problem for cycling; there is a lot of smoke around British cycling, if not a raging fire yet. A great list of cycling’s biggest dopes can be found here.

The final way of determining cheating, and much harder to categorically prove, is when a country has a ‘system’. Any time a country dominates a sport with multiple champions then there is usually some form of systemic cheating. The East Germans were the best at this. The Chinese, Soviets, and as we have seen, the American sprinters have all been system cheats. And as just mentioned above, claims have recently been made against British cycling given their extraordinary performances the past few years.

Why can’t a system produce multiple champions? It is good question; with I believe a fairly good answer. There will always be the occasional freak, a Michael Phelps, a Chris Hoy, an Usain Bolt, and these people will dominate their sport winning multiple medals. They are also likely to be distributed around the world, they will be born, raised, trained, and compete for a variety of different countries, because, well, that’s kind of what people are: diverse.

When these athletes are concentrated in one particular country then that’s when alarm bells should be ringing, and this is especially the case when it is a country with no particular history in the sport. If one country begins to dominate across all facets of a particular sport, or when only the women dominate (it is usually just the women because their physiology makes success through cheating more attainable), then that is most likely a case of a systemic program of cheating.

Therefore, it can be summarised as four ways of identifying cheats without physical proof:

1. Rapid improvement in performance over a relatively short period of time – this can, and often is the case with already elite athletes, those that previously always finished fourth now win everything.
2. The history – historic records still stand after decades indicate a now clean sport, but that previous champions were doped.
3. Egregious examples of specific in-game activity – strange own goals, bad fouls, dropped catches, outrageous refereeing decisions. If it makes you raise an eyebrow…
4. A single team or country that seems to do something remarkable – winning all the cycling medals at an Olympics, or a previously unremarkable team showing incredible stamina to win matches late on in the game.

Next time you watch your favourite sporting events use these guidelines and you might be surprised at how many suspicious incidents you see. Although be warned, once you’ve spotted the fix it makes it difficult to enjoy the sport ever again.

Of course, these days you just need to be born a man and decide you want to be called a woman and its completely legal….

In Part 2 I will explain why they all do it