Our Cheating Culture

Our Cheating Culture

Jamison L. Clark

Lynn University

Our Cheating Culture

Cheating in sports has been around for as long as I can remember watching sports as a little child. In my personal opinion, cheating in any form is wrong. Cheating is a common practice in schools, businesses, sports, relationships, and so forth. Although cheating happens to others, the cheaters are also cheating themselves as well. I believe cheating in sports are common due to the pressure athletes feel to succeed. Professional sports set high economic standards in which players are expected to live up to a God-like stature that I feel they cannot obtain. Coaches and owners of teams also expect to bring in money and selling power to grow the brand of the sports as well. Professional players and student athletes at universities across the company feel they must do well in order to impress and do whatever it takes, including cheating, to get the best contract they can get or in students’ case, good grades. In this composition, I will discuss numerous ethical violations involving sports that caught my attention and hope to bring awareness to this situation more with this passage.

Often in sports, the players are taught to be bigger than the game so that they can appeal to the masses. Everybody likes a winner and when you are winning, the world is at your feet, per say. When the Olympian Ben Johnson, a Canadian sprinter, was brought down by his doping scandal in the 1988 Olympics, he was on top of the world. By cheating, he destroyed his sporting career and image in one day. Ben Johnson was always a great sprinter, in one article it said that, he made $480, 000 USD in endorsements, as he was named Associated Press Athlete of the Year, the year before he was caught cheating at the Olympics (Pugmire, 2006). So essentially, he really did not have to cheat to stay on top it was just that he wanted to be above the competition. His competition at the time was Carl Lewis, a great sprinter from the USA, which was one of the best sport, had ever seen. He did numerous events at the Olympics but his main event was the 100 meters, which is what Johnson wanted badly. Therefore, in 1988, Johnson actually beat Lewis in the 100-meter dash with a world record at the time of 9.79 seconds. It was an astounding moment for Johnson and was easily what he had been working for this long up until this point in his life. However, three days later, it was found that Johnson had been doping before the Olympics and was subsequently disqualified. Park Jong-sei of the Olympic Doping Control Center found that Johnson’s bold and urine samples contained stanozolol (Johnson, 1988), which is an anabolic steroid that it actually used on horses to make them faster. Imagine that? In the end, Johnson was expelled from the sport for life and was never able to compete competitively again. The damage it was did to his image was more impactful for years to come. I think his punishment was made a little bit of the top because it was more than 20 other athletes at the time that tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs but was never punished, according to Jong-sei (1988). How is that fair to Mr. Johnson? I think the overall impact of the his actions really didn’t change anything with the sport because numerous other track stars, like Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery, continue the trend of cheating to gain an edge to be the star of their sport. I think the people in position can do a better job of making sure that the doping and cheating will stop. However, we will see in the future.

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