Every year brings its sporting scandals, cheating is as old as sport itself so nothing new there. What made 2009 stand out was the scale and effort of some of these schemes, and the fact that there were so many in one year.
The most alarming side of the Harlequins fake blood affair was the premeditation. Rugby players have always set out to see what they can get away with, nothing new there to a veteran of the amateur era like Dean Richards. What has changed is the media coverage and the money. When Richards devised his scheme, it was not just a match he was trying to fiddle, but the biggest club rugby competition in the world, and the huge financial rewards associated with it. Had Leinster not made it to the semi-final, they would have been robbed of their classic encounter with rivals Munster, followed by a win in the final, but also a significant payout. This is part of an ongoing growing process for rugby union, still in its professional infancy. Hopefully these are nothing more than growing pains, and a new moral code will emerge at the top. Then again, looking at the rest of the professional sporting world, that might be too much to ask for.
Premeditation was not surprising in Formula 1, a sport where everything is planned and ruthlessly evaluated. The decision of Flavio Briatore and Renault to order Nelson Piquet Jr. to crash deliberately during the Singapore Grand Prix took place in 2008, but was uncovered in 2009, and was only shocking because of the risks involved in crashing a car at high speed. It would not be surprising however, if it were discovered that other teams had done this before. That is the sad reality that F1 faces at the moment, especially when the efforts of McLaren and Hamilton to swindle their way to another driver’s points at the start of the 2009 season are taken into consideration.
At least Thierry Henry’s handball was a heat of the moment decision, the kind of spontaneous cheating that is no less immoral, but says less about the state of a sport than that resulting from planning. Football has seen this kind of thing before, as England fans know well.
It is hard to know what to make of all this organised cheating in 2009, if anything. There is a suggestion that as the stakes in sport rise higher and higher, because the money has got bigger and bigger, this sort of thing will happen more often. Whilst the economy has squeezed some sports, cutbacks have largely come around the fringes, leaving the big-earners untouched, and conversely, raising the stakes even higher for those fringe performers who had livelihoods on the line.
Meanwhile the attitude to this sort of cheating seems to be that it is up to the authorities to police it, rather than to the cheats to put morals and the wellbeing of their sport ahead of their own success. This is a demoralising and cynical view, but perhaps a realistic one. Simon Barnes for one, takes it very seriously.
Then again, perhaps it means nothing. Maybe 2009 was just one of those years when a number of bizarre episodes coincided, and the elaborate deceptions should just be laughed at, comical as they are. Formula 1 has problems, that is clear (especially in light of today’s ruling lifting Briatore’s lifetime ban), as do the other sports. Whether there is a pattern is hard to say at the moment. Maybe fans should be reassured that the cheats are being caught, after all, cycling has been through the wringer in recent years, with positive drugs tests hitting its credibility, but at least that showed that the cheats were being caught. This year’s Tour de France featured not one failed test, perhaps the cheats have evolved again, or perhaps, just for now, the authorities have caught up and cleaned their sport up.
If (and it is a big if), sportsmen and women, coaches and administrators think twice about cheating after last year’s scandals, then the cathartic pain of 2009 will have been worth it for sports fans. Nothing stands still in sport though, and it is only a matter of when, not if, there will be another elaborate cheat exposed in the media.
