Titus OReily - Cheat: The not-so-subtle art of conning your way to sporting glory

Cheating comes in so many wonderful forms. Theres opportunistic rule bending, petty rule breaking, premeditated plans of great ingenuity, tampering with equipment, spying, doping and my favourite idiotic harebrained schemes.

WHERE THERES SPORT, THERES CHEATING.

From the fiendishly clever to the outright absurd, Titus OReily takes us through the many and varied ways athletes, teams and nations have cheated since time began.

No sport is immune: athletics, AFL, rugby, American football, cricket, baseball, badminton, soccer, curling. Yes, they even cheat in that winter sport with the brooms.

Theres the table tennis player who put so much superglue on his paddle that his opponent passed out, the male basketballer whose drug test revealed he was pregnant, the Tour de France stage where a pack of riders took the train, and the Spanish Paralympic basketball team who faked intellectual impairment to win gold at the 2000 Paralympics. OReily unveils schemes involving dodgy equipment, bribes, doping, intimidation, faking injuries, ball tampering, itching powder and licking your opponent.

CHEAT: The not-so-subtle art of conning your way to sporting glory is a hilarious trip through the archives of both bending and breaking the rules to win and a handy how-to guide for the professional athlete in your family.

THE CONDITIONS FOR CHEATING

For life to exist, its assumed you need water, an energy source like the sun, and carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. This doesnt mean life will exist, but the requisite conditions are there.

The conditions for cheating to occur are far simpler. You only need two ingredients: something to compete over and humans. Thats it.

The sport doesnt matter, the country is irrelevant, glory or money arent needed, the gender of the participants makes no difference. Humans and a chance to win its that simple.

So it follows that wherever theres sport, theres cheating. Attempting to gain an unfair advantage is as much a part of sport as the heroics, the sweat, the tears, the sacrifices and the triumphs.

There will always be people who will do pretty much anything to win, cooking up schemes that are sinister, comical, ill-conceived or fiendishly clever. Yet, time and again, we are shocked when the latest cheating scandal breaks.

Lance Armstrong, for example, is held up as a sort of super-villain an outlier. But as well see, in the history of the Tour de France, he is just the continuation of a long tradition. A tradition that goes right back to the second ever Tour, when a large number of the riders caught the train for part of a stage.

Its a worry when you realise Armstrong is not an outlier at all, but rather the norm. Lance Armstrongs cheating isnt even that hard to explain. If you win the Tour de France, theres fame, money and you get to date Sheryl Crow. With rewards like that on offer, its understandable that someone would decide to game the system.

Plus, if your job involved being constantly surrounded by men who love cycling, you would probably take copious amounts of drugs too. Blokes who love cycling are like vegans: they cannot go five minutes without telling you about it.

I worked with a guy once who every single painful Monday morning insisted on telling me about his Saturday morning ride. Hed tell me in great detail how hed beaten some personal best time and, much like I imagine Lance Armstrong did, Id think, Man, I wish I was on some powerful drugs right now. As he droned on my dead eyes would have been a clue to my level of interest, but apparently that was too subtle for him.

But humans dont even need powerful incentives to cheat. Being social creatures, we crave the approval of our peers; we want to be seen by others as being good at something. Because of that, cheating is human. Its in our nature.

This desire for a higher standing in the group means that, at our core, we are all competitive people. Some a little more than others, though. If youve ever had the misfortune of being friends with people who play board games, you understand how someone can take a game way too seriously even when the stakes mean nothing.

People who desperately want to win regardless of the rewards are like silverback gorillas, fighting for dominance in the group. Unfortunately, unlike silverbacks, theyre not endangered.

I knew a couple who insisted on playing Trivial Pursuit if you made the mistake of accepting an invitation to their place. It was patently obvious that the husband had gone to the trouble of memorising the entire set of questions and answers.

I remember there was a question, Who was Ross Perots running mate in the 1992 presidential election? And he said, This is just a guess, but was it... and I dont know why I think this... but is it, by any chance, Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale?

Then hed act shocked hed got it right. It is! Oh my god, Im as surprised as you are. I must have read it somewhere.

And I wanted to say, Yeah, you read it on the card earlier. Because youre just the worst person ever. You are worse than Stalin.

I guess his desire for winning just made him human. We have always cheated, and well cheat at anything. Sport is just an area where our competitive nature is brought to the fore, and professional sports are the pinnacle of this. Its a space dominated by alpha types whose whole identity is based on beating others.

This is no new phenomenon. At the AD 67 Olympic Games, no less a person than the Roman Emperor Nero cheated. And he was super subtle about it.

Given the Roman Empire had controlled Greece for a few centuries, Nero had a fair bit of influence. For a start, he had the Olympics delayed by a year, presumably to fit it into his busy schedule of killing his mother and fiddling while Rome burned.

As the games were limited to Greeks, he also had to bribe his way into being allowed to compete, giving the organisers a lot of money. We all know Olympic officials over the years have shown a fondness for bribes.

Nero wasnt there to make up the numbers, he was there to win, and he was happy to brazenly cheat to do it. In the chariot race, where all competitors chariots were drawn by four horses, Nero had ten. He literally had more horsepower than anyone else. This turned out to be a rather dangerous move. That many horses were difficult to control and, turning a corner, he crashed out of the race, seriously injuring himself.

But not finishing the race didnt hurt his chances. The Hellenic judges in charge of the games granted him the wreath of victory. Nero rewarded these unpaid officials with one million sesterces.

The tradition of powerful men wanting to be seen as good at sport has continued; Rick Reillys 2019 book Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump detailed all the ways Donald Trump cheats at golf.

Buying your way into the Olympics hasnt gone away either. At the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Dominica fielded a team, which is odd for a country based in the Caribbean whose biggest claim to fame is having the worlds second-largest hot spring.

This wasnt a Cool Runnings type of thing; it wasnt a couple of locals learning to ski in a series of comedic episodes where John Candy stole the scenes.