Of course the biggest news is that seven time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong has chosen to stop fighting the United States Anti-Doping Agency. The USADA claims that they have indisputable evidence that Armstrong cheated and that he should be stripped of his Tour victories. Armstrong claims that the whole process has been a witch hunt, and that the allegations have never been proven and he is just tired of fighting. The truth may or may not come out, but few would dispute that Armstrong is one of the greatest athletes the USA has ever produced.
Hypothetically, if Armstrong was artificially enhancing his performance, there is a pretty good chance all of the other elite cyclists he was competing against were doing the same. I would take it one step further and suggest that the organizations that oversaw the sport domestically and globally also knew what was going on but turned a blind eye. So if everybody is doing it, and everybody knows that they are doing it, is it still cheating?
I often think back to the old All Steroid Olympics Saturday Night Live sketch where the weight lifter's arms rip off and wonder how far fetched it really was?
In reality, taking performance enhancing drugs and blood doping and all of the other insane stuff athletes do to themselves is only considered cheating because somebody made a rule that said it was.
Case in point:
Baseball player Melky Cabrerra was recently caught with an elevated testosterone level and admitted to taking a banned substance. Subsequently he was given a 50 game suspension and he will not play again this season. Cabrera is a lifetime .275 hitter, but happened to be hitting .346 at the time of the suspension. There is a very good chance that he will still win the National League batting title this year as defined by the rules of Major League Baseball. Never mind that he has admitted to cheating and is still eligible, he didn't actually even make the 500 required plate appearances to qualify(he had 499 at bats). However, if his .346 average is still highest when taking into account an additional 0-1 plate appearance he will be crowned as a result of Rule 10.22(a) (AKA the Tony Gwynn Rule).
Now let's juxtapose this with the plight of one of my heroes growing up, the great Pete Rose. Pete is the all time Major league leader in hits, games played and at bats. He won three World Series, three batting titles, an MVP award, Rookie of the Year, two gold gloves and he played in seventeen All Star games at five different positions(2B, LF, RF, 3B and 1B). A few years after his retirement from professional baseball, Rose admitted to betting on baseball games(including his own) while he was a player. He claims that he never bet against his team, and you would be hard pressed to make a case to the contrary. Regardless, he was caught, admitted to it and was punished. Rose's punishment was a lifetime banishment from baseball. This means that he can't have any involvement on any level with the sport he loves. It also means that he cannot be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame although he is one of the greatest players to ever play the game.
But rules are rules...
Our society places so much value on the importance of winning at any cost. This starts at a young age and I am witnessing it first hand as my children get involved in organized sport and in their educational pursuits and other extracurricular activities.
Those of us that don't go on to professional sports careers feel the pressure of succeeding in business at all costs. Again, society defines the rules, laws and general ethics of acceptable business practice yet it seems that often the most successful in business are also the cheaters by our own definition.
I am a competitive person. I really like to win and get upset when I don't. I think that competition and striving to be the best we can is healthy. Thankfully my parents did a good job of instilling in me the difference between right and wrong and I am trying to do the same for my children. But what is a parent to do in a world where the definition of right and wrong seems to keep changing, and cheaters are only cheaters if they get caught?
