It’s rife in every sport and in every country. My colleague who lives in Nigeria and with his daughters, plays tennis at state level, says that one of the biggest frustrations for his daughters is that African parents commonly bribe the passport officer to under-declare their child’s age so that his daughter aged 14 ends up playing a girl aged 15 or 16. Remember those 50 African refugee children who were admitted to the UK and who looked surprisingly mature, beards and all? Then they come to England for the summer holidays, enter local competitions as mixed-race outsiders and find that the local public school tennis champions seem to benefit from an awful lot of the doubt when it comes to scoring and umpire judgements. Very frustrating.

Tampering is premeditated and has to be organised. Diving is premeditated in the sense that everybody knows it’s going to happen but not in an organised way like tampering.

What interests me is the psychology of cheating in professional sport. How do otherwise mainly decent people justify behaviour which deliberately breaks both the spirit but the laws of the game?

Clearly the high stakes are the prime motivation to push the limits of the laws of a game. But it strikes me that there is a conspiracy of hypocrisy and silence. The media contrives to pretend that sport, even football, maintain some sort of corinthian purity. Most participants know that this is crap as do the ex-players who make up much of the media. What is acceptable is what is deniable.

Australian cricketers…[Read more]

Football people treat cheating as “part and parcel”, whereas cricket sets itself higher standards.

I’m sure performance enhancing drugs are used routinely in professional football. Nobody gives a shit about that – they barely even get tested.

Once money enters the equation fair play and sportsmanship seem to take a back seat.

Cheating at sport really does seem strange – but then cheating at anything seems strange to me.

With regards to “cheating” at sport I do laugh when I’m at a kids cycle race, see all the kids (under 10’s) rolling around the course on top of the range bikes, light as a feather, yet all within the approved guidelines – I do then wonder where it will all stop, at what point will their parents stop encouraging them within the limits and start offering them PED’s to improve performance etc. (or perhaps even the kids will ask for it, to enable them to beat their mates etc.)

but then what is cheating? staying on one side of an arbitary drawn up code of rules?

Perhaps rugby might be a good sport to look at for this, rather than football.

I don’t think I can explain it very eloquently but I will try (probably because I am no longer familiar with the exact nuances of the rules).

In rugby, during the game, part of the ‘game’ is to try and take actions that are to your advantage (handling the ball during the breakdown, being slightly offside etc.) which will result in a penalty if caught. Rugby players don’t ‘not do these things’ (as the rules would try and impose) but try to ‘not get caught doing these things’.

Within the game of rugby this isn’t seen as ‘cheating’. Tampering with a ball in cricket is definitely seen as cheating. Both are technically against the rules.

This scandal and another one have had me thinking, a lot, about people and the nature of competition.

The “other one” erupted on Monday in the Go / Weiqi / Baduk community. In case you don’t know, Go is a mind-sport, an abstract board game, in which players take turns to place stones to surround the area of a square board. The player who surrounds more of the board wins the game but beware the inclination to greed lest you leave a weakness in your borders.

I have been playing it since 2007. It was the game that Google’s DeepMind Team conquered in March 2016 when their A.I., “AlphaGo”, became the first bot to defeat a professional at the very apex of the sport.

On Monday, this week, the first conviction for cheating using A.I. was handed down to a European amateur who had…[Read more]

I touchingly hope that diving in football may go out of fashion. Messi is a shining example of a player who tries to ride tackles and frequently scores by keeping going when everyone on the pitch stops because they expect him to go down. It was noticeable in the England- Italy match the other night that Sterling twice got back on his feet rather than doing a dying swan act and carried on after being chopped -‘playing his own advantage’ as the commentator put it – and it led to the England goal.

Of course Delle Alli wasn’t playing, a man who could give Tom Daley diving lessons

My 50p share has been well spent in keeping me entertained.

What is the ‘worth’ of success in international sport of any sort?

Isn’t it lottery funded? Therefore thanks to all the gullible fools that paid for lottery tickets, I really enjoyed the games and didn’t pay a penny.

Joking aside, we only complain that we’re rubbish at everything if we don’t win anything and that we should invest more. We’re not going to compete with serious nations on pluck and great British spirit.

I enjoyed the events where we weren’t really represented as well – I think the lack of representation in many events means you can enjoy the sport in its own right and not get hung up on unrealistic jingoistic expectation.

It seems much cheaper than many other sports e.g. premiership football (and more interesting), the people are not paid masses and inspire whole generations on occasions. If 12.5 million people watched it thats only £2 each. For me the summer olympics are more inspiring than winter, but I think definitely worth it.

That money goes into supporting winter sports at different levels. I imagine tens of thousands of people will have benefited from this funding to some extent.

Not really. Basketball is played by more people in inner city’s, the money would be better spent there than on middle class sports for the esoteric few..

If funding is there to ‘buy’ medals, the Norwegians are 16 times better at it than us …
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/winter-olympics/43167215

As rule the uk doesn’t have the climate so it has to spend money on it’s winter athletes. The Norwegian budget is half the uks for example. But then generally you can train on your own doorstep there.