In Part 1 I discussed the hows now it’s time for the whys.

It’s a pretty straightforward answer: money and glory, although there is one other that I will come to later. It must be added though that not all athletes over the years have willingly taken PEDs, some have been coerced, or some given PEDs based on a lie, many were told that they were being given vitamin injections.

From an individual perspective there is the chance to become rich and famous beyond their wildest dreams. If you told a 20 year old athlete that if they took a certain substance that they would be guaranteed wealth and fame they would take the chance, especially if you told them that you could make sure they wouldn’t get caught.

Even with the inherent physical risks, potentially fatal risks, they would still do it, and if those risks wouldn’t present themselves until they were 40? Well, to a 20 year old 40 is a lifetime away. And the money can be staggering, Lance Armstrong earned well over $40 million in sponsorships alone. For more popular sports such as tennis the rewards can be in the hundreds of millions – this is generational wealth and ensures that the athlete’s family and their descendants are financially secure, for ever, or at least until one of them blows it all on drugs and hookers.

One interesting aside to this though is the risk/reward factor. The more lucrative a sport is and the more opportunities it presents, the less likely it is for people to engage in cheating. For example, let’s take professional football (soccer) versus American Football (NFL).

There are a considerable number of professional football teams paying high salaries, therefore there are more opportunities for athletes to make a very good living out of that sport – unlike say the NFL which has a limited number of teams (32), employs limits on playing rosters (53 players), and has a salary cap.

Due to the highly competitive nature of the NFL, where a new batch of cheaper employees come into the league every year through the College draft system – a significant issue when you have a salary cap – players are always at risk of losing their career. The more money one makes the higher the risk, unless one is one of the few elite players earning tens of millions a year and with little risk of being cut from a team.

The incentive for PED use is high and a number of NFL players every year get suspensions for their use – the NFL, seemingly acknowledging its own PED incentivisation problems gives them relatively small punishments for initial offences, although there is always the risk in the NFL that you get cut for a cheaper, younger model.

The world of soccer (I hate the term but will use it to differentiate the two sports!) is different. There are many more teams that can afford to pay decent wages and with no salary cap some teams can afford to pay their entire playing squad multi-million [insert currency of choice] salaries.

They also don’t have squad restrictions so an older player can still pick up his salary without even playing, or worrying about being cut because they have a contract. The risk here is inverse to that of the NFL player. If a professional soccer player takes PEDs they will risk suspension and a loss of income and career, for what is likely a small increase in their performance.

Given the nature of the sport and its global structure that is a risk not worth taking, and unlike the NFL, most soccer players absolutely love playing football, it is a sport you need to play for decades to become proficient at it, unlike the more physical NFL, so a love of the sport is almost a necessity. It is just too much to risk.

The risk to integrity comes when players, and officials, don’t make much money, and the risk of them losing their career is not necessarily financially damaging. This is where spot fixing comes into play. A few thousand dollars here and there for a professional/semi-professional can make a world of difference to themselves and their family.

If there is no real harm to the integrity of the sport, after all they are not throwing the game, then where is the problem? In fact, the main casualty of such spot fixing are betting companies, and many people feeling they are immoral, or at least unethical, in any case. I leave that to your moral compass!

Match fixing is a different case. Yes, there have been cases of systemic match fixing for financial gain, but these are few and far between; the South African cricket team is perhaps the best known proven case. Although, clearly there have been others, mainly rigged by corrupt referees or federations.

There is one method that does appear to work in convincing athletes to throw a match: coercion. In less developed countries, or ones with significant corruption and rule of law issues, it is not unheard of for players’ families to be subject to kidnap or other threats of violence unless they agree to throw a match, sometimes the deal is sweetened with a payoff, although this is ostensibly to further implicate the player and ensure compliance.

Cover Up? Never….

So, if it is so rife why are there so few instances of proven cheating? Well, once again, there are a few factors at play. Let’s look at these one by one:

1) Actually, there are loads, you just don’t hear about them. One of the common methods for dealing with drug cheats is to take blood samples and store them for testing. The reason for this is that the cheating methods are more advanced than those screening tests to find the cheat.

As technology and knowledge advances the testing catches up. Subsequently, many athletes find that their samples test positive years after the event; they are then retrospectively banned and have their titles stripped. The London Olympics in 2012, has subsequently had 132 failed tests, making it, as far as confirmed cheating goes, the dirtiest Olympics of all time. Depending on the sport it might not be newsworthy. This is one reason why ‘missed’ drug tests are taken so seriously.

Secondly, a player may have a significant ‘injury’ and miss a large part of a season. If there is a fairly innocuous injury that seems to take forever to heal, or that a club or federation, keep giving strange answers to someone’s unavailability, then there is a possibility that the athlete is serving a drug ban. This is, of course, done to protect the image of the sport rather than the athlete, which leads us to the next reason.

2) Brand Protection: Federations and international organisations are paranoid about maintaining their reputations. The primary reason being money. Corporate sponsorship is crucial to these organisations and so is government funding. A sport that is seen to be corrupt is bad for business and the well paid leaders of these organisations don’t want to jeopardise their income stream.

For example, the UK system pays individual sports from a special government administered fund which focuses on the most successful sports, that is, those most likely to win the most medals at world championships and major events like the Olympics. On the surface this seems like effective targeting of finite funds. And on the whole, this appears to have been a successful strategy by UK Sport and Sport England. The downside of this though is that it greatly incentivises systemic cheating as even a small drop off in results can see the national sporting federation in question have its funding slashed or removed altogether.

The IOC and Sport Federations

A far as international governing bodies go it is also a mixed bag. The International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF) – the governing body of track and field sports – has been very slow in addressing corruption amongst its members and cheating amongst its athletes.

As has the international swimming federation (FINA). Their abject response to the Chinese swimmer Sun Yang – Sun was banned for 8 years on appeal for destroying a blood sample [see above for why this is a no, no]. Originally, he was given a suspended sentence, for what was a second offence, a bizarre punishment under the circumstances. Subsequently, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) appealed to the Court for Arbitration for Sport (CAS) and the 8 year sentence was applied. It is clear these federations were working to keep sponsors happy, and in Sun’s case the Chinese State.

Perhaps the largest example of such a case of ‘whitewashing’ is that of the International Olympic Committee – although it is one which I personally agree with. It is very rare that an athlete tests positive during an Olympic Games, and there is good reason for that: the IOC won’t allow it. The London example above is a case in point. If you look at my biography you’ll see that I have a personal connection to these Games [link] . I don’t recall seeing any positive tests announced on any day although there may have one or two in sports no one cared about.

Looking at this from an IOC perspective this is a completely rational response. The Olympics is big business. Sponsorship and TV rights contribute a huge amount of money to the coffers of the IOC and reputation matters. Scandals might be great fun for the watching world, but for the IOC it damages their brand and potentially costs them money.

The Ben Johnson saga in 1988, and the 2004 Athens scandal of Greek Olympic 200m sprint Champion Kostas Kederis and his partner Women’s 100m silver medallist Katerina Thanou, rocked the IOC. Both cases damaged the event and became the newsworthy story, completely overshadowing the entire Games on both occasions. To prevent future scandals destroying the credibility of the Olympic Games the IOC adopted a different approach to doping and cast the onus back onto international federations and competing nations.

To place this into context the Olympics is a major sporting event, but the IOC does not manage the different sports. For example, the Football World Cup™ is a FIFA run event, and FIFA, as the governing body for football is the ultimate arbiter during the tournament.

The Olympic Games, on the other hand, is an amalgamation of 26 different world championships of different sports. Each of these sports has its own governing body which runs its own individual cadre of sports, the IAAF runs all the track and field events, FINA the swimming, and so on across all the sports.

The IOC’s role is to put on the overarching event and each sport is effectively invited to compete, of course it is greatly beneficial for sports to be Olympic sports, it not only increases funding but ensures that the next generation of athletes are more likely to choose one of these Olympic sports rather than some other random pastime, therefore keeping, some mundane, bizarre (like who the fuck rides horses, shoots guns, fences, and then swims away?) and the less than popular sports alive.

So, what exactly does the IOC system look like? Pretty simply, it tests all medallists, and some random others (not all athletes – there are just too many). Given the advances in masking doping there are few cases where positive tests are made during the Games. And, any positive test needs to be followed up by another test, the so-called B-sample (the first being the A-sample funnily enough!).

Unless you compete on the first day or two of the Games it is unlikely that a positive B-sample will be completed before the end of the Games (it is only a two week event after all). If, sometime in the future an athlete tests positive – and this can be years after – they will be stripped of their medal and the federation will ban them according to their rules; increasingly, these judgements are made by WADA.

The athlete next in line then gets the medal and a note in the record books. Of course, this system sucks for the non-cheating athletes who don’t get to be patriotic and cry in front of millions of people on TV, but you know what maybe your federation shouldn’t tolerate so many fucking cheats? Just a thought. And that’s the crux of this problem. Athletes know who the cheats are, at least they are suspicious, Sun Yang’s career is testament to that, the federations must also know. The ball is in their court, do something about it, smash it back into their face.

FIFA

FIFA has taken an altogether different approach to its main threat: match fixing and spot fixing. Footballers dope, we know that, but the risk is great as I explained previously. In previous decades steroid use was common, Zdenak Zeman, the famed Czech born football manager, made claims that drug use was rampant in Italian football in the 1990s.

Legendary Brazilian footballer, and subsequently Brazilian National Sports Minister, Zico, has publicly admitted that during his formative years he was given anabolic steroids because he was too slight. Despite these instances, and many more like them, the main issue for football is throwing matches or spot fixing.

In a sport that, perhaps more than any other, is dictated by the subjective decisions of the referee and their assistants, football is ripe for unsavoury outcomes. The solution was a long time coming, but the answer was Video Assistant Referees (VAR). Naturally, FIFA will never admit that this was the reason, but I am adamant that it was the driving force behind the decision. No longer can a referee decide the outcome of a match or tournament by a subjectively wrong penalty decision, red card, or obviously wrong offside call. Although, English refs are doing their best to prove that VAR will still fail if the refs don’t know the rules or are just dickheads.

How do we fix it?

How do we fix the fix? Clean athletes can refuse to compete. Federations can clean up their sports. For example, world records in some sports still stand from decades ago, and it would be fair to assume these sports are now reasonably clean.

Some, like cycling, just continue to lurch from one controversy to another. Doping in the Tour de France goes back to the earliest events, and while Armstrong is an admitted cheat, during his record run of seven consecutive wins 87% of top ten finishers during that period were confirmed or suspected dopers! Like Johnson, the one nut wonder, might just have been the legitimate winner. Even today, cycling is facing claims its top riders are doped. Some sports never learn. The question is then, if the athletes won’t stop, and the federations won’t stop, who can stop it? The answer is those that provide the money; sponsors and spectators. The problem is do people really care if athletes dope?

It is an interesting question because throughout this article I have assumed that people care about fairness, that they want the most deserving person or team to win; nothing wrong with assuming that, right? Actually, evidence suggests the opposite, or at least something more muddied than straight-up fairness.

Fans don’t care about fairness. Fans want their team to win. Manchester City fans don’t care that their team is owned by a despotic Middle Eastern regime that has been found guilty of breaching financial fair play rules – financial doping by another name. No, in fact, they will defend the right of their club to do this because the rules were unfair, and that their ownership is no worse than all the other various ownership models. Newcastle United fans would rather the murderous, war mongering Saudi state own them than a fat cockney tracksuit salesman.

In my opinion, they are clearly wrong and deluded, they, in return, would call me all sorts of names I am sure. Russian sport fans don’t care that they have been running a state sponsored doping program. Nope, not one bit. Most are probably going to argue that it is not true and is just a Western conspiracy to tarnish Russia’s name – which to be fair the Russians are doing a pretty gpood job of without our help.

And most other enthusiasts want to see entertaining competition. If an enthralling contest is held between two competitors that are doped to the eyeballs most people won’t care. If the contest is one sided and boring, then they will call for the cheat to be banned – unless the cheat loses in which case they got what they deserved!

Cycling fans don’t care if the entire Tour de France field has overly oxygenated blood coming out of their orifices, a sort of Ebola on wheels, as long as it is an exciting race; had Armstrong walked away from the sport without breaking all the records, he would probably have got away with it, as it was it got boring and monotonous; and the other cheaters, oops sorry cyclists, wanted their piece of the pie too.

Perspective and relativity. The only time people care about cheating is when it directly affects them. Fans of other football teams highlight Manchester City’s model as cheating because their club can’t compete. A player dives in the box to win a penalty…well what side of the field are you sitting on?

If I bet on a match, or outcome, and I am cheated out of winnings because of an individual cheating then I will be angry and rage against them. If, per chance, I win because they cheated, I will presumably focus on how lucky I am rather than the cheating action which gave me my win. And let’s face it bookmakers are the same. If the outcome suits the money makers they won’t care, it will only be when they lose.

Sport is often cited as a microcosm of society and life. We value sport because of the values it teaches us. We encourage children to play sport because it teaches them hard work, determination, how to lose, resilience, teamwork, focus, and I am sure lots of other positive motivational bullshit.

Additionally, sporting teams, and individuals, can be seen to embody the characteristics of their own society. International sport isn’t just country versus country, it is system versus system, a national personality that infects each individual and team. It is a validation of nationality. That is why politicians flock to give their support to national sporting teams. And you know what? Sport is a microcosm of our modern world; and that is the problem. There is no true integrity of sport just as there is no true integrity in society. No one cares unless it directly affects them.

People look to nations, international organisations, sporting federations, and sporting teams as special entities. They believe that somehow, they sit above the petty, selfish, small mindedness of individuals. Nothing could be further from the truth. Each one of these was created by humans, is run by humans, and looks after the interests of those humans. Not you, not me. Them. And only them. They are a reflection of all of us; why be surprised when they lie and cheat for money and fame?

If someone offered you riches, fame, and glory in exchange for breaking a small law that no one really cared about anyway, would you do it? Look in the mirror, there you will find the answer.

So, what is the fix? Fix the world and maybe we fix the sport? Otherwise we just need to accept that it is tainted and dirty and just love it anyway. Or stop paying attention.