It’s only September but with the football codes drawing to a close for another season and most international events done and dusted for another year, it is timely to look back on a year where cheating has reached new heights.
Just as importantly, we have seen many sports governing bodies turn a blind eye with weak or no action at all.
This week has seen the fallout of what many are describing as the worst act of cheating in sporting history.
To inject EPO or steroids no doubt gives unfair advantage to a competitor and, once caught, brings shame and disrepute to both the athlete and the sport in question. But for a Formula One team, in this case Renault, to order driver Nelson Piquet Jr to deliberately crash at high speed to gain position for team-mate Fernando Alonso, takes the stakes to a whole new level.
It bordered on life threatening for Piquet, his fellow drivers and potentially race stewards and the crowd. The stakes were so much higher than performance enhancing drug use.
Team principle Flavio Briatore and engineering director Pat Symonds have been given the flick for their role in the events at last year’s Singapore GP, leaving the FIA with only one viable course of action – to suspend Renault for at least one season, preferably many.
Such a decision would be significantly more than the lily livered efforts of UEFA this week in their lifting of a two match suspension on Arsenal striker Eduardo, originally banned for a blatant and goal winning dive in last month’s Champions League qualifier against Glasgow Celtic.
Simulation is pure cheating.
FIFA and UEFA do themselves and the game a disservice by even calling it simulation. Label it cheating, with defined penalties on field and via video review.
The IAAF was also in a generous mood this week, endorsing the decision by the Jamaican Anti Doping Appeals Tribunal to hand out just 3 month suspensions to four Jamaican sprinters who failed drug tests before the World Athletics Championships in Berlin in August.
The incredibly lenient suspensions will run to December 14, meaning the four relay runners will not miss a single athletics meet.
In the year Fine Cotton passed away peacefully at age 31, utterly unaware of his place in racing history and Australian sporting scandal, several horses failed drug tests.
Failed equine drug tests do not always indicate deliberate cheating as it does in humans, however it casts considerable doubt on trainer and beast.
Pacer Em Maguane was found chock full of EPO in May and thoroughbreds War Dancer and Benelli have also tested positive, with the penalty for those failed tests still to be decided.
Em Maguane trainer Jeremy Quinlan was banned for six years.
Then there was the just plain strange ‘Bloodgate’ where the Harlequins were exposed as serial cheats by inventing fake injuries to make otherwise illegal substitutions during matches.
The scam went to such lengths as the club physio deliberately cut the mouth of winger Tom Williams after the match in an attempt to legitimise the injury.
Harlequins have now been found guilty of the scam on at least four occasions with penalties including a four month ban for Williams, a two year ban for physio Steph Brennan and a three year suspension for club director Dean Richards, while the club has been fined more than $500,000.
Add the comparatively small sporting crime of ‘time wasting by sending the physio out after every over at Cardiff fiasco’, those butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths Swiss and their formally ineligible America’s Cup catamaran, complete with motorised sail trims and electronic steering and the soon to be outlawed polyurethane swim suits that saw 43 world records fall in eight days, wiping the names of the true greats from the books forever, and it hasn’t been a great year for fairness in sport.
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