Tipping Point: Fear of getting caught must deter potential cheats

I was asked recently if elite sport can be believed anymore. It’s a fundamental question and the straightforward answer is I don’t know. Anyone arguing it definitely can either has a stake in the game or has been living under a rock.

It’s actually much easier to dismiss it all as a meaningless cheating mess. But that feels too unpleasantly Dawkins: so welcome to sport’s agnostic reality –- hoping for the best.

Talking of stakes, this job requires taking a little, and not just because innocents assume some expertise on the subject. Scribbling about sport is a mostly trivial exercise but no one wants to believe what they do is totally irrelevant either.

There was an old American racing journo who famously once advised a young colleague that nothing he saw on their beat would ever justify a superlative: except sport without superlatives might be almost as meaningless as sport without sentiment. Sport’s increasingly pressing problem is deciding who to pin them on, and how credible it is to believe they’re legit.

The weird part is we do still watch. Billions of people spend billions worldwide doing so even though so many and so much has been discredited. Sport has never been more high-profile and profitable and it comes with a rote narrative, full of trite ad’ speak slogans about passion and belief which still gets lapped up by audiences which surely can’t not know how bogus some of it must be.

Of course that might no matter. It’s interesting to ponder for instance how track & field long since waved bye-bye to credibility and yet remains attractive enough to generate vast amounts in advertising. Watching much of what happened on the track in Rio defied belief. But it was fully sponsored which by definition means an audience, and an audience prepared to pay.

People cheat

Maybe the bells and whistles are enough. And maybe a willingness to indulge credulity and simply cheer along is a mature acknowledgement that waiting for perfection means being destined to wait forever. When money circulates, people cheat. But there’s a detachment in accepting that which is contrary to everything that makes sport special in the first place.

There has been some flak directed this way recently which, boiled down, basically asks why would someone who so often appears not to like sport write in the sports pages. The problem with that is that loving sport shouldn’t have to come with some stock prerequisite towards cheerleading. If it does, then we’re in real circus territory.

So no, for instance, I don’t believe that football is some oasis of propriety in terms of doping, no matter how deafening the silence continues to be in relation to use of performance enhancing drugs in particular.

It’s not so long since Arsène Wenger proclaimed the game to be full of ‘legends’ who are in fact cheats. Here was a major figure in the world game making deadly serious allegations about doping and match-fixing and the response has been so negligible as to be non-existent.

Does that mean Wenger’s wrong, or is it just more convenient for those involved, from terrace to boardroom, to look the other way, disengage the brain from making the sort of critical associations it would automatically make in just about every other facet of life?

Who’s fooling who here?

It takes a real effort of will to stay so fooled about so much. There’s no point reciting a long shameful litany of cheating and corruption which probably still only skims the surface of a squalid on-the-take, piss-tampering reality that works on the basis you have to be a moron to get caught.

There is one certainty we can cling on to though, and that is that 90 per cent of what’s said can be dismissed as Grade A horse manure. Whether it is outrageous porkies told with the straightest of role-model straight faces or those linguistic wriggles that shimmy their way around distinctions between legal and wrong, there is no escaping the overwhelming whiff of expedient bullshit.

Moral vacuum

If there’s enough money around people will cheat: that those who don’t get hoovered into the vast moral vacuum whereby no one really knows who or what to believe is a real tragedy.

But it doesn’t prevent the reality that people will cheat if they feel they can get away with it. And changing that requires administrative leadership of a sort that appears simply not to exist.

Administration by definition is about order. It’s about maintenance, keeping things ticking along; the last thing it incubates naturally is change. If it’s a choice between disruption or not, the instinctive administrative reaction is to hold the line. It’s even more pronounced in sport with so many at the top believing that theirs is the game that really counts.

The fingerprints of that urge to contain rather than confront are all over every doping, betting and financial scandal. And maybe that’s inevitable considering the amounts of ego and cash that are on the line. But it can make faith in anyone actually living up to their flowery official narrative seem very hollow indeed.

So it’s hard to watch and properly believe. There are genuine competitors but there are also cheats and I believe most of the powerbrokers within sport prefer to look away and pretend everything is okay rather than try to catch them out. I believe expecting competitors to be saintly is wishful thinking. And I believe the fear of getting caught has to outweigh potential reward.

Apart from that it’s a case of hoping for the best but fearing the worst: except it’s getting no easier to hope. And it’s getting even harder to justifiably employ those superlatives.