Do Cheats Prosper?

Professional sport is a highly competitive business - careers are often short, so pressure to make the most of things while you can is huge. Some people cheat to achieve this in a variety of ways. From match fixers like the convicted Pakistani cricketers, drug cheats like Lance Armstrong, and legal cheaters - ones who simply "bend the rules" - like footballers who dive. Here, I give an overview of these three types of cheats and what is being done to stop them.

Match fixing is a huge issue in sport, but the most noteable cases have been in cricket. Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir were found guilty of the lesser crime of spot fixing (fixing incidents within a match so still match fixing) after a sting caught them deliberately bowling no balls in a test match against England. This isn't in the same class as fixing a result, but, like addicts who started on "soft" drugs, you can see how it could progress. By starting someone with something like "it's just one no ball, no one will notice", young players like Amir get sucked in by men they respect. He should have known better, but I am not without sympathy. Following some county cricket court cases the ECB had an amnesty for information and are now providing more education for players, and the ICC have their anti-corruption unit. The bookies involved are mostly sub continent based with India and Pakistan the centre of it all. In these countries it is illegal to gamble, but there is a huge black market. Worse, you can bet on anything (a trend that is startiing over here) even something as small as who bats at number 7. Something like that could easily go unnoticed. On punishment, 2 years is laughable - if it is allowed to continue, how can you trust anything out of the ordinary? Surely a lifetime ban is in order.

Is Lance the biggest doping cheat in history?

Performance enhancing drugs have been in the news because of the USADA decision to strip Armstrong of his 7 tour titles. Cycling has had a real problem with this; perhaps the grueling nature of the big tours was the catalyst. Some people say that you should legalise drug use in sport - if everyone is doing it then it's a level playing field. This is nonsense, but those people should watch re-runs of the tour between 1980 and 2010 where more than half of the wins have been tainted by doping. And, in an era of mass doping, you have to doubt the other wins as well. This is a battle mainly being played out by scientists, with testing methods one side and new drugs on the other. Punishment doesn't go far enough in any sport. Watching the London Olympics I was pleased to hear the crowds boo competitors who had previously been caught taking performance enhancing drugs, it's what they deserve. Anyone caught should be banned for life, any team or support staff involved be banned from being involved with sports teams/people, and any doctors implicated be struck off the list.

Diving, or "simulation" to use it'e sanitised name, is a major problem in football. It's amusing that people blame the foreign players for introducing this to our game. Maybe that is true, but Halal meat was introuduced to the UK by immigrants, and doesn't mean you have to eat it. The best way to deal with this is retrospective action. Rugby does this best - they can review any incident from a game regardless of what has been done by the officials at the time. This is based on the fact that they can't see everything and even if they see something, the angle they are at may make it seem like something else has happened. In football, serial divers like Suarez get away lightly. Refs seem hesitant to book people for diving, and when they get a favourable decision it can change a game. Currently, football is doing nothing to change this. Adopting a rugby-style system would allow all the divers to be caught and punished along with those off the ball incidents and things the refs simply miss. Bans need to be harsh enough to deter people, so diving should get a match ban for the first offence in a season, two for the second, three for the third and so on.

Given the nuber of cheats out there, it would seem cheating is worth the risk. That needs to change.

Robert

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