What qualifies as cheating?

In recent years, we have heard a lot of complaining about cheating in sports. After all of this, I decided to ask a simple question. What is cheating? In short, I believe that cheating is any unethical attempt to tilt things unfairly in your favor.


I have heard numerous people defend athletes against allegations of cheating on the grounds that they are playing within the rules. I'm sorry, but the rules don't define cheating. If you find loopholes or come up with an innovative way to cheat that a league had not yet thought to prohibit, that is still cheating.

Another argument that I have heard relates to performance-enhancing drugs. Some people insist that this is not a form of cheating because they aren't satisfied with the evidence that they do indeed improve an athlete's performance. Even if you could surprise the world with hard evidence that so many people are wrong, that wouldn't disprove a key component. Why are athletes taking these drugs? It's because they think drugs work, and they are trying for an unfair competitive advantage.

I know that I have brought up Pedro Martinez's comments about Viagra before, but I need to bring it up again. Pedro Martinez has stated that when the Red Sox won the World Series, Manny Ramirez gave his team shots that included Viagra. The hope was that Viagra would have performance-enhancing capabilities. Whether or not he was right is not my primary concern. The Red Sox won a World Series when they took drugs in hopes that those drugs would tilt things in their favor. They clearly did not care about having to prove themselves the best based off of their baseball skills.

Pedro Martinez tried to sell his story as an amusing anecdote. In reality, it was something worse. He essentially admitted to the world that his team cheated their way to victory. Personally, I was in no way surprised to find evidence that the Red Sox have no honor (although I was not expecting the Viagra twist).