Given the scale of Manchester City’s deception, it’s hardly surprising that the Premier League club has dominated the headlines for the entirety of this week.
After the Premier League club was found guilty of over one hundred charges of breaching financial rules, there has been a constant stream of analysis about the extent of the cheating, the impact their financial irregularities had on the club across the nine years in which they took place, and the potential punishments.
So, taking into consideration quite how widespread Manchester City's financial breaches have been, and quite how long they continued for, it’s hardly surprising that people both within the UK and abroad have been shocked by it.
What has absolutely baffled me, though, is that anyone is surprised by the fact that Manchester City cheated. And while I acknowledge the scale of the dishonesty in Manchester City’s case is extreme, it’s hardly unique.
Cheating within sport, both elite and amateur, is widespread.
And neither the manner nor the scale of Manchester City’s cheating surprised me all that much.
If no sport is immune to cheating - and absolutely no sport is immune - then why would football ever think it could get away with being cleaner than any other sport?
Perhaps the most stunning element of the Manchester City story is quite how long the club’s financial deception went unnoticed. But even this is hardly surprising. Most of sport’s most biggest cheating stories continued for months or even years at a time before they were uncovered.
Take Lance Armstrong, who is perhaps sport’s most notorious cheat. For nearly a decade, he was the world’s best road cyclist and, as it turned out, also a rabid cheat who was doping for much of his elite career.
And look at the Russian doping scandal at the 2014 Winter Olympics, which saw dozens upon dozens of Russian athletes embroiled in, arguably, the biggest state-sponsored doping scandal that sport has ever seen. Indeed, the Russian doping scandal was not dissimilar to the one which operated in East Germany from the 1960s to the 1990s whereby many of the country’s athletes were enrolled in a state-sponsored doping programme which, it has since transpired, caused significant harm to many of those athletes later in life.
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There’s many, many more. Remember Ben Johnson winning 100m gold at the 1988 Olympics before, just days later, being stripped of his title having failed a drugs test? And five-times Olympic champion, Marion Jones, who was also found to have been a doping cheat? Or the 2006 Italian football scandal which found that several clubs, most notably Juventus, had been manipulating and pressurising referees, and the Festina scandal in cycling, which uncovered widespread doping throughout the sport? I could go on - the list of individuals and clubs which have cheated within sport is astonishingly long. And amateur sport has its fair share of cheating going on, too.
The reason for such brazen and widespread cheating is simple; winning matters so, so much. Too much, many would argue.
Winning by any means has clearly been Manchester City’s motivation for these financial breaches, as was the case for Armstrong, the Russians, the East Germans and every other person and club which has decided to bend the rules or, in some cases, bulldoze through the rules.
Cheating is not a new phenomenon; you can go back as far as the Ancient Greeks and you'll find individuals cheating to win in sport. There’s the tale from 322 BC, when Athenian Kallipos bribed his opponents to secure victory in the pentathlon, proving that cheating has been around for as long as competition has.
At some point, though, there needs to be a realisation that winning is really not worth it, if the win only comes as the results of rampant cheating. Except, unfortunately, I suspect we’ll never reach a stage where fair sport is more important than winning, particularly when the sums of money at stake are as significant as they are in the Premier League.
We tell our kids that taking part is far more important than winning but Manchester City and Lance Armstrong and the Russians and all the others prove, definitively, that this isn’t true.
This Manchester City story will, in all likelihood, continue to dominate the headlines for days or even weeks but, eventually, it’ll end up as yet another entry on the list of sport’s greatest cheating scandals.
AND ANOTHER THING…
We already knew that elite marathon runners are a different breed to the rest of us. That they’re able to complete 26.2 miles in the remarkable times they do is proof that they’re made of different stuff from most “normal” runners.
But the most concrete proof of quite how tough marathon runners can be came last weekend, when Tigst Assefa won the Berlin Marathon despite having “completely destroyed” her Achilles tendon during the race. The Ethiopian was on course to beat the current world women’s record of 2 hours 9 minutes 56 seconds set by the (now banned for doping) Ruth Chepngetich. But having begun limping with around 2km to go, Assefa’s pace dropped and she missed out on the world record, ultimately finishing in 2 hours 11 minutes 4 seconds.
This finishing time in itself is astonishing - it’s the third-fastest time ever by a woman - but what makes it even more remarkable is that she finished the race basically without an Achilles.
“She completely destroyed the tendon at the end, because running without the tendon — I mean the last 500 meters maybe she ran without the tendon, only with the heel, so that was a disaster,” explained Assefa’s representative earlier this week, before it was then confirmed that the 29-year-old had undergone surgery on her Achilles and is expected to be out of competitive action for six months or perhaps more.
Assefa’s injury is devastating for her personally, and for the sport given she’s one of the very best female distance runners in the world, but what her Berlin Marathon victory shows, for good or for bad, is quite how powerful mental strength can be.
Physically, Assefa had no right to cross the line in Berlin, never mind finish with such an impressive time. And it’s a safe bet that there’s only a very select group of runners on the planet who would even have considered continuing to race with a ruptured Achilles tendon.
That Assefa was able to push through the pain barrier in the way she did highlights that mind over matter is, indeed, a very real thing. Whether her decision to continue to run after rupturing her Achilles will have caused her long-term damage, we still don’t know. But her victory in Berlin is proof of just how tough elite athletes can be.
