thesis statement about cheating in sports

The Psychology of Cheating in Sports

Posted August 16, 2019 by admin-risepoint

There’s a long history of athletes who have cheated. The examples are so rampant that it’s difficult to even summarize the presence of cheating in sports.

Three of the major American professional sports have been impacted. Major League Baseball saw the Black Sox Scandal in the early part of the 20th century, and in the later part of the century, doping literally altered record books. National Basketball Association referee Tim Donaghy was investigated by the FBI for betting on games that he officiated. Perhaps most recognizable to sports fans may be the National Football League’s controversy “Deflategate,” in which quarterback Tom Brady allegedly ordered deflated footballs used in the 2014-15 playoffs.

Cheating also extends to other sports, of course. In an infamous example, Soviet athlete Boris Onishchenko was banned for life from sports after he was caught electrically wiring his fencing weapon to go off at will in the 1976 Summer Olympics. Even more infamous was Lance Armstrong’s doping scandal, which stripped the cyclist of multiple achievements, including seven Tour de France titles.

Few people question whether cheating has impacted sports. But why have there been so many examples? What exactly causes athletes to cheat? This article takes a brief look at the psychology of cheating in sports.

Key Factors in the Psychology of Cheating in Sports

Who do people cheat in sports? Psychological research has provided insight into the sheer competitive nature of sports and the ethical complications of cheating. Those two factors offer perspective into why athletes are willing to cheat.

Emphasis on Winning

It might be an understatement to say that sports can be “competitive.” In fact, sports can be an important part of culture, according to Howard Giles in “The International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication.” For instance, in the words of a cultural historian Jacques Barzun, which are inscribed in the Baseball Hall of Fame, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.”

Giles described how people “live in a globalized, sports-saturated world” that can put cultures and their values on display. Sports can also change the way that more specific groups interact and find their identity, including athletes, coaches, teams, and fans. Fans can be so involved that they have pregame anxiety and emotional experiences during games. They may even, without reason, blame losses on biased officiating (which can actually explain home field advantage ) or cheating.

The stakes are high, and that’s especially the case at professional levels of sport. Winning is a necessary ingredient in the pursuit of excellence, and, as a result, athletes can take that further than others might. It’s reminiscent of the cliché that “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

“Competitive sport often places individuals in conflicting situations that emphasize winning over sportsperson-ship and fair play,” according to the “Handbook of Sports Psychology.” “It would be wrong, however, to attribute this to the competitive nature of sport.” There are other factors at play. The next topic works hand-in-hand with the emphasis on winning to explain how athletes may turn to cheating.

The Ego and Moral Functioning

The concept of achievement goals is linked to potential cheating in sports. In task- and ego-oriented goals, there’s a fundamental difference in how athletes think of themselves and why they compete. Task-oriented athletes focus on hard work and self-development, while ego-oriented athletes are focused on being better than everyone else and believe skill to be a matter of innate ability.

According to the “Handbook of Sports Psychology,” studies have demonstrated relationships between task and ego orientations with sportsmanship and moral functioning. Compared to high task-oriented athletes, research points to how high ego-oriented athletes have lower sportsmanship, more self-reported cheating, and endorsement of cheating. Ego orientation can predict lower moral functioning.

Moral functioning can even take an unexpected turn with some sports cheaters. From research in Attitudes and Social Cognition , the notion that cheaters feel guilty after engaging in unethical behavior simply isn’t true. Over six experiments, unethical behaviors not only failed to trigger negative affect, but they triggered positive affect. Those types of behaviors can lead to a “cheater’s high.”

“These findings challenge existing models of ethical decision-making and offer cause for concern,” the study’s authors said. “Many ethical decisions are made privately and are difficult to monitor. Individuals who recognize, perhaps from experience, that they can derive both material and psychological rewards from engaging in unethical behavior may be powerfully motivated to behave unethically.”

Why Do People Cheat in Sports?

The psychology of cheating in sports is a complicated topic, and researchers are learning more about what drives people to violate the rules, use performance-enhancing drugs, or take part in some other method of cheating. However, the fundamental reason why people cheat in sports isn’t complex at all.

Athletes want to win. At the highest levels of sports, the difference between first and second place is often millions of dollars and a significant amount of fame. As a result, some athletes may believe winning really is the only thing. To them, the risk of getting caught and being labeled a cheater is worth the money and glory that being the best brings.

Ask Lance Armstrong. He lost everything, it may appear, after being stripped of his achievements and experiencing costly legal battles. Armstrong told USA Today that he had paid more than $100 million in legal costs, and that came before he settled a $100 million lawsuit with the federal government for just $5 million. However, even those numbers may be significantly lower than what cheating allowed him to win. According to Bloomberg in 2013, Armstrong’s riches totaled more than $218 million . At the peak of his career, he earned $28 million a year, Forbes estimated.

Was it worth it? In a BBC interview , Lance Armstrong said that if it was still 1995, he would “probably do it again.”

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The Future of Cheating in Sports

As technology advances, so will access to ingenious—and troubling—new techniques

Christie Aschwanden

One clue to where doping is headed is the case of Thomas Springstein, a German track coach notorious for trying to get his hands on an experimental gene therapy for anemia. “Repoxygen is hard to get,” he wrote to a Dutch doctor in an e-mail revealed at a criminal trial in 2006. “Please give me new instructions soon so that I can order the product before Christmas.”

Repoxygen never made it out of the lab, and Springstein doesn’t seem to have obtained any. Instead, he eventually received a 16-month suspended jail sentence for supplying doping products to a minor, and the athletes he supplied drugs to were banned from competition. But his effort to obtain Repoxygen made headlines during his trial, forever linking him with a new phrase in the cheater’s lexicon—gene doping.

The approach potentially does an end run around conventional tests for drugs or foreign products in the bloodstream; it alters an athlete’s own DNA to produce performance-enhancing substances. If effective, the experimental treatment would endow a patient—or athlete—with a gene that cranks out extra erythropoietin (EPO), a hormone that spurs the production of red blood cells. And athletes already have been known to abuse synthetic EPO to increase stamina. Sports officials say there’s no evidence that any athlete has undergone gene doping, but they also suggest it’s only a matter of time.

The high-tech arms race between cheaters and testers has pushed both sides to the cutting edge of science. When drugs under development for medical conditions turn out to enhance performance, rogue athletes and coaches are fast on the scene. For instance, myostatin inhibitors, which provoke muscle growth in lab animals, aren’t available for clinical use, but they are already for sale on the black market.

Embedded technologies, such as artificial muscles or hidden motors, could someday give athletes another way to cheat, assuming they could mask them in their bodies or equipment. Electroactive polymers (EAPs) bend and stretch like real muscle fiber in response to an electrical charge; clothing woven with EAPs might augment an athlete’s muscle power, says Yoseph Bar-Cohen, a physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.

It seems drawing the line between acceptable and unsporting training methods is only going to get harder. At least three companies offer DNA-based tests that claim to identify a person’s innate athletic abilities. The tests, which are legal, don’t reveal much more than standard performance tests do, but as researchers identify additional genes, the tests could become a potent tool in recruiting and scouting. Is such screening unethical, or is it just a molecular version of clocking a young sprinter in the 50-yard dash?

Some observers predict the pressure to perform at any cost may increasingly affect kids. In 2006, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency suspended a teenage in-line skater for doping; the boy’s father had been injecting him with growth hormone and steroids since he was 12. “It was one of the most sophisticated doping programs we’ve ever seen,” says USADA’s Travis Tygart.

Taken to an extreme, the search for talent might someday lead to efforts to breed superathletes, with embryos generated through in vitro fertilization subjected to genetic tests for athletic traits. The “best” embryos would then be brought to term. If such technologies mean that tomorrow’s competitors will be born and not made, we’ll need to radically redefine what it means to be an athlete.

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Why cheating in sports is prevalent -- and we can't stop it.

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Cheating in sports is now officially prevalent.  The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) January 14 issued its report, and confirmed that across the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) athletes were cheating . And very frequently doing so under the supervision of those who lead major sports operations at a national, and international, level.

Quite simply, those responsible for the future of various sports have been responsible for organizing and enabling the illegal doping of athletes. This behavior is now so commonplace that corruption is embedded in the IAAF, making cheating by far the norm rather than the exception.

Wow, we all thought that after Lance Armstrong was found guilty of doping this had passed. Sounds like, to the contrary, Lance was just the poor guy who got caught. Perhaps he was pilloried because he was an early doping innovator, at a time when few others lacked access. As a result of his very visible take-down for doping, today's competitors, their coaches and sponsors have clearly become a lot more sophisticated about implementation and cover-ups.

Accusations of steroid use for superior performance have been around a long time .  Major league baseball held hearings, and accused several players of doping. The long list of MLB players accused of cheating includes several thought destined for the Hall of Fame including Barry Bonds, Jose Conseco, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, Manny Ramirez, Alex Rodriguez and Sammy Sosa. Even golf has had its doping accusations , with at least one top player, Vijay Sing, locked in a multi-year legal battle because he admitted using deer antler spray to improve his performance.

The pay-off is so incredibly, magnificently, tremendously high.

The reason is, of course, obvious. If you are a top athlete rewards are in the hundreds of millions of dollars (or euros). Due to not only enormously high salaries, but also the incredible sums paid by manufacturers for product endorsements. Being at the top of any sport is worth 10 to 100 times as much as being second.

For example, name any other modern golfer besides Tiger Woods. Bet you even know his primary sponsor - Nike. Yet, he didn't even play much in 2015 and couldn't make the late-season cut. Name any other Tour de France rider other than Lance Armstrong. And he made the U.S. Postal Service recognizable as a brand. I travel the world and people ask me, often in their native language or broken English, where I live. When I say "Chicago" the no. 1 response - by a HUGE margin - is "Michael Jordan." And everyone knows Air Nike.

We know today that some competitors are blessed with enormous genetic gifts. Regardless of what you may have heard about practicing, in reality it is chromosomes that separate the natural athletes from those who are merely extremely good. Practicing does not hurt, but as the good doctor described to Lance Armstrong, if he wanted to be great he had to overcome mother nature. And that's where drugs come in.  Regardless of the sport in which an athlete competes, greatness simply requires very good genes.

If the payoff is so huge why wouldn't you cheat? If mother nature didn't give you the perfect genes, why not alter them? It is not hard to imagine anyone realizing that they are very, very, very good - after years of competing from childhood through their early 20s - but not quite as good as the other guy. The lifetime payoff between the other guy and you could be $1 billion. A billion dollars! If someone told you that they could help, and it might take a few years off your life sometime in the distant future, would you really hesitate? Would the daily pain of drugs be worse than the pain of constant training?

The real question is, should we call it cheating? 

If lots and lots of people are doing it, as the WADA report and multiple investigations tell us, is it really cheating?

After all, isn't this a personal decision? Why should some regulator draw the line? Where should they draw the line?

We allow athletes to drink sports drinks. Once there was only Gatorade, and it was only available to Florida athletes. Because they didn't dehydrate as quickly as other teams these athletes performed better. But obviously sports drinks were considered OK.

How many cups of coffee should be allowed? How about taking vitamins?

Exactly who should make these decisions? And why? Why "outlaw" some products, and not others?

After watching The Program  about Lance Armstrong's doping routine it was clear to me I would never do it, and I would hope those I love would never do it. But I also hope they don't smoke cigarettes, drink too much liquor or make a porno movie. Yet, those are all personal decisions we allow. And the first two can certainly lead to an early grave. As painful as doping was to biker Armstrong and his team, it was their decision to do it. As bad as it was, why isn't it their decision? Why is someone given the role of calling it cheating?

We love winners. No matter how they become winners.

When Lance was winning the Tour de France he was very, very popular. Even as allegations swirled around him fans, and sponsors, pretty much ignored them. Even the reporter who chased the story was shunned by his colleagues, and degraded by his publisher, as he systematically built the undeniable case that Armstrong was cheating. Nobody wanted to hear that Lance was cheating - even if he was.

Fans and sponsors really don't care how athletes win, just that they win. If athletes do something wrong fans pretty much just hope they don't get caught. Just look at how fans overwhelmingly supported Armstrong for years. Or how football fans have overwhelming supported Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, and ridiculed the NFL's commissioner Roger Goodall, over the Deflategate cheating charges and investigation. Fans support a winner, regardless how they win.

So, now we know performance enhancing drugs are endemic in professional sports. Why do we still make them against the rules?

Should we be trying to change behavior, or change the rules?

Go back 150 years in sports and frequently the best were those born to upper middle class families. They had the luck to receive good, healthy food. They had time to actually practice. So when these athletes were paid for their play, we called them professionals. As professionals we would not allow them to compete with the local amateurs. Nor could they compete in international competitions, such as the Olympics.

Jim Thorpe won two Olympic gold medals in 1912, received a ticker-tape Broadway parade for his performance and was considered "the greatest athlete of all time." He was also stripped years later of his medals because it was determined he had been paid to play in a couple of professional baseball games.  He was considered a cheater because he had the luxury of practicing, as a professional, while other Olympic athletes did not.  Today we consider this preposterous, because professional athletes compete regularly in the Olympics. But what really changed? Primarily the rules.

It is impossible to think that we will ever roll back the great rewards given to modern athletes. Too many people love their top athletes, and relish in seeing them earn superstar incomes. Too many people love buying products these athletes endorse, and too many companies obtain brand advantage with those highly paid endorsements. In other words, the huge prize will never go away.

What is next? Genetic engineering, of course. The good geneticists will continue to figure out how to build stronger bodies, and their results will be out there for athletes to use. Splice a gorilla gene into a wrestler, or a gazelle gene into a long-distance runner?  It's not pure fantasy . This will likely be illegal.  But, over time, won't those gene-altering programs become as common to professional athletes as steroids and human growth hormone are today? Exactly when does anyone think performance enhancement will stop?

And if the drugs keep becoming better, and athletes have such a huge incentive to use them, how are we ever to think a line can be drawn -- or ever enforced?

The effort to stop doping would appear, at best, Quixotic

Instead, why not simply say that at the professional level, anything goes? No more testing. If you are a pro, you can do whatever you want to win. "It's your life brother and sister," the decision is up to you.

If you are an amateur then you will be subjected to intense testing, and you will be caught. Testing will go up dramatically, and you will be caught if you cross any line we draw. And banned from competition for life. If you want to go that extra mile, just go pro.

Of course, one could imagine that there could be two pro circuits. One that allows all performance enhancing drugs, and one that does not. But we all know that will fail. Like minor league competition, nobody really cares about the second stringers. Fans want to see real amateurs, often competing locally and reinforcing pride. And they like to see pros -- the very best of the very best. And in this latter category, the fans consistently tell us via their support and dollars, they don't really care how those folks made it to the top.

So a difficult ethical dilemma now confronts sports fans - and those who monitor athletics:

1 - Do we pretend doping doesn't exist and keep lying about it, but realize what we're doing is a sham and waste of time?

2 - Do we spend millions of dollars in an upgraded "war on drugs" that is surely going to fail (and who will pay for this increased vigilance, by the way?)

3 - Do we realize that with the incentives that exist today, we need to change the rules on doping?  Allow it, educate about its use, but give up trying to stop it.  Just like pros now compete in the Olympics, enhancement drugs would no longer be banned.

This one's above my pay grade.  What do you readers think?

Learn more about my public speaking, board involvement and growth consulting at www.AdamHartung.com , or connect with me on LinkedIn , Facebook  and Twitter .

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Cheating and sports: history, diagnosis and treatment

Affiliations.

• 1 a Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences , Stanford University School of Medicine , Stanford , CA , USA.
• 2 b Department of Psychiatry, Rowan School of Osteopathic Medicine , NJ , USA.
• 3 c International Society for Sport Psychiatry , USA.
• 4 d Private Practice , Los Angeles , CA , USA.
• PMID: 27471817
• DOI: 10.1080/09540261.2016.1208162

This paper focuses on "cheating" in modern day athletics from youth through professional sports. We briefly summarize a history of cheating in the sports world. We examine the current role cheating plays in sports as well as its causes including, psychodynamic issues, the development of personality disorders and how personality traits become pathological resulting in deception, dishonesty, and underhandedness. We describe management and treatment including psychotherapeutic intervention as well as medication. Finally we discuss a systems approach involving outreach to coaches, families, and related sports organizations (like FIFA, WADA, etc) or the professional leagues which have institutional control and partial influence on the athlete.

Keywords: Athletes; cheating; coach; gamesmanship; mastery climate; sports psychiatry.

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• Acceptance of gamesmanship and cheating in young competitive athletes in relation to the motivational climate generated by parents and coaches. Palou P, Ponseti FJ, Cruz J, Vidal J, Cantallops J, Borràs PA, Garcia-Mas A. Palou P, et al. Percept Mot Skills. 2013 Aug;117(1):1332-45. doi: 10.2466/10.30.pms.117x14z9. Percept Mot Skills. 2013. PMID: 24422357
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7 Surprising Reasons People Cheat at Sports

While sports fans debate the fairness of Tom Brady's punishment for " deflategate " and whether Manny Pacquiao really would have kept his shoulder injury a secret to stay in the multimillion-dollar Mayweather matchup (and take second-place purse), these events underscore an issue that erupts from time to time: Athletes cheat. Often brazenly. (Just consider that three pro cyclists and 9 pro track and field athletes were sanctioned by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency last year.)

Dishonest behavior might be understandable, if not justifiable, when large sums of money and high-profile reputations are at stake. But it isn't just limited to the pros. Last month, 26-year-old runner Kendall Schler allegedly waited on the sidelines of the GO! St. Louis Marathon course and jumped ahead of the pack after the last course checkpoint. She was the first woman to cross the finish line–and was celebrated as the winner who she wasn't. Race officials soon disqualified Schler after they couldn't find any of her chip-recorded splits or photos of her running the course. Oddly, such an event isn't anomalous: In recent years, marathoners Cristina Noble and Tabatha Hamilton were also stripped of their race titles for taking shortcuts. (At the time of their races Noble and Hamilton maintained they had run full marathons, but the DQs still stand. Attempts to reach all three women for comment were unsuccessful.)

What might drive an athlete to dishonesty? According to Maurice Schweitzer, Ph.D., professor at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of Friend and Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both , a combination of personality traits particular to high-achievers and external pressures can lead to unscrupulous behavior. In fact, the same factors may be at play on a smaller scale when a weekend athlete calls an opponent's ball out in tennis, nudges a golf ball forward or fakes a foul in basketball. Here are a few explanations for why cheaters do what they do.

Cheating is usually situational, says Jack J. Lesyk, Ph.D., CC-AASP, director of the Ohio Center for Sports Psychology. One person might not feel bad about fibbing on their taxes, but would never consider taking a shortcut in a race. Others might be law-abiding, but view recreational sports as silly games where cheating would have little impact. This mindset is about how much they can justify, Lesyk says. If a runner has been training for 10 years to make a Boston Marathon qualifying time, and knows they're going to be just over the cutoff unless they take a barely noticeable shortcut, they're facing a lot of temptation, he says, and could make the choice seem "right" in their head.

If you're not super competitive, you're unlikely to take the risks that come with cheating. But "if part of your identity is expecting to win, then winning is way more important to you than to the average person," says Schweitzer. In other words, if you believe you're a better basketball player than your opponent, but the game isn't going your way, you might be more vulnerable to cheat to maintain that personal identity. Schweitzer says if people perceive a sport as a game or as challenge to outsmart, rather than as a true measure of ability, they'll look to cheating as the smart, winning tactic.

Strange as it may sound, cheaters are often the first to justify their actions as a matter of fairness. Here's the logic: They believe they have some natural disadvantage or deficit, and by cheating, they're simply leveling the playing field. "If we believe, in extreme cases, that other people are taking steroids or, in amateur cases, that the other person called my ball out, that justifies my behavior," Schweitzer says. "If we even believe [the other person] might cheat, we're more likely to cheat. We get this 'everybody else is doing it' mentality, and think 'this gives me the recourse to sort of balance things.'"

Women who thrive on measurable achievements and the reactions of others—racking up titles, medals and accolades in the hopes of impressing friends and family—are more likely to cheat, Lesyk says. (Relatedly, a 2001 study of college students linked higher extrinsic motivation to courses in which they cheated.) Intrinsically motivated people, though, would be less likely to cheat, since their sense of accomplishment comes from reaching their personal goal. So taking the easy way out would undermine that.

Cheaters typically aren't concerned with the long-term consequences of their actions–if they were, they'd be deterred by the potential humiliation of being caught. Instead, the short-term benefits blind their long-term sight, Lesyk says. "It's the same thing as speeding. When you go a little over, you think you'll get away with it, and then you're surprised when a cop pulls up." Adds Schweitzer, "We get started in something and before we know it we've escalated into much bigger trouble. Some people will take one step, and then another, and then they've dug themselves into a hole."

During a big race or other physically taxing exercise, our physical and mental capacity starts to diminish. "Research has looked at depletion and cheating, and when we feel depleted mentally, we're more likely to do what we want," Schweitzer says. "There's constant tension between what we want to do and what we ought to do; we might think 'I'd like to win with lower effort,' and if we're tempted to do those things and depleted at the same time, we're more likely to do it."

Social media means there's more pressure on women than ever to perform well, even in recreational sports. You've likely posted about your race or competition, and fantasized about the Instagram shot with your finisher's medal. Not finishing doesn't even seem like an option. "Broadcasting our success makes the psychological benefits of winning even greater," Schweitzer says. "And the constant comparison pressure we face makes us more likely to cheat."

Cheating can be a slippery slope, but there are ways you can rein yourself in before it's too late, Lesyk says. "Ask yourself, 'How am I going to feel about this tomorrow? At the moment this feels good and I could get more recognition, but how will I feel about it later?' You have to transcend the moment and ask what the long-term consequences are," says Lesyk, noting, "the majority of us wouldn't dream of doing this."

Still, it happens. And for every athlete who is caught, we can only guess how many more there are who get away with it.

Photo Credit: Black 100 / Getty Images

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