The concept of cheating in sports had been around since ancient Greece, where people would use unfair methods such as bribery to win competitions such as the Olympic games. People's cheating reasons are varied from simply wanting fame and glory, earning prizes, or fear of losing and humiliating oneself. Often when there is fierce competition, there will be those who will try any means to achieve victory. The intense competition in events like the Olympics results in athletes' need to gain every edge to secure victory as their family's honour depended on their success. The methods that cheaters use in the Olympics are the old methods of merely bribing the judges in the Olympics to newer techniques such as steroid use to increase athletics performance. In this podcast, I will explore some ancient examples of cheating in the Olympics and modern examples such as the Seoul Olympic games of 1988.
Lee, in his analysis, explains the origins of the Olympics at Olympia. Olympia did not start as a major athletic centre and was not associated with sports in the earliest period. In the beginning, Olympia was a remote rural location in western Peloponnese and was an important religious shrine dedicated to Zeus. The Olympic games first began with religious festivals. They sacrificed cows and sheep in honour of the gods, at Olympia, with the ashes of the sacrificial offerings, reaching over twenty feet high. The ashes were used to create the conical altar to Zeus. During the festivals after Zeus's sacrifice, the social events included the celebrants' participation in dance, song, and sports performances with the chance of the winners have won prizes. These sports events would eventually lead to the first Olympic games in 776 BCE to honour the god Zeus. They would centuries later become a world-wide national sporting event for all elite athletics. (1)
During the Olympic games, the Greek athletes made an oath to Zeus that they would play fair; this, however, did not stop the emergence of cheaters. Abbink provides us with examples of notable cheaters. The first recorded cheating incident was during the 98th Olympic games when three opponents of Thessaly's boxer Eupolous were bribed by him, granting him victory. Then there was the most famous cheater of the Olympic games, Emperor Nero of Rome, who bribed the judges during the A.D. 67 games to add in Nero's activities, such as poetry and music, as he excelled in these activities. He also won a four-horse chariot race with a team of ten; even though he never finished the race due to him falling out of the chariot, he was still made the winner as he was Emperor. (2) In the modern Olympics, people still use bribes. However, the primary cheating method relies on chemical assistance from drugs to increase their bodies' performance rather than through training or natural means, as Abbott described in his "What Price the Olympian Ideal?" article. (3) A famous modern example of drug use noted in Coopers "Drug Cheating at the Olympics: Who, what, and Why?" article would be during the Seoul Olympics, on Sept 24, 1988, where a Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson who won in the 100 m final at the Seoul Olympics, was stripped of his gold medal. After three days, he was found to have used anabolic steroid stanozolol during the 100 m finale and was forced to hand back this gold medal. (4) The use of drugs does not mean bribes have declined, as we in Hamilton's article of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games at Salt Lake City. Before starting the games, the Salt Lake Bid Committee's President Thomas Welch and Vice President were caught with offering bribes to members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and were later charged with fraud and bribery. This scandal was not the only incident. Later, during the pairs' figure skating competition, dual medals were awarded to the Russian team of Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze and not to the Canadian team of Jamie Sale and David Pelletier. Their win was due to the French figuring skating judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne's who give a favourable score to the Russian pair. However, later, a vote swapping agreement between the French and Russian skating federations was discovered. (5) These events cheating at the Olympics has been an ongoing problem from ancient Greece to the modern era. The issue of cheating has only gotten worse with developing drugs like steroids that actively harm both the Olympics' reputation and the athlete's body.
The use of performance-enhancing drugs has long since been a problem for the modern Olympics. In his article, Cooper mentions the types of drugs athletes use and the benefits they receive by using these drugs. The types of drugs can vary from the morphine, heroine, strychnine, and cocaine used by athletes in Athens in 1896 to the current day use of steroids, erythropoietin, amphetamines. The continued use of these drugs is due to the misconception that taking these drugs will lead to higher athletic performance that athletes believe goes along with the Olympic motto of "faster, higher, stronger," even through fair play integral to the Olympic Games. There are three main areas that athletes hope to overcome with the use of drugs. These areas are fatigue, explosive strength and aerobic endurance. In the case of fatigue, they use stimulants to overcome the limitations that fatigue does to impede an athlete's top performance. One such drug would be caffeine, which is not banned but noted to be as effective as ephedrine, amphetamines, and pseudoephedrine. These stimulants do not benefit athletes who compete in one-off events, but they are beneficial to athletes who compete in a sport that take the course of a few days in which they need to perform at their optimum every day. (6) Coppers articles show us the physical benefits athletes receive through drugs, inciting them to use drugs to gain an edge over their opponents in competitions like the Olympics. Examples of cheating are often seen in ancient Greece, where the Greeks honour-shame culture pressured athletes to cheat to avoid embarrassing their families.
People's reasons for cheating in the Olympic games have not changed since the first incident during the 98th Olympic game. The most obvious reason is to gain the monetary rewards and prestige promised to the victor of the Olympic games. This was the case for the ancient Olympics in where the victor could expect on statue erected of them in a public square or a victor parade in their honour when they returned to their native cities. They also might be given lifetime support at the state's expense and further monetary rewards. These rewards were so generous that Athenian lawgiver Solon in the early sixth-century BCE had the emoluments for Athenian victors at the Isthmian and Olympic games reduced. The monetary rewards were not the only gains for an Olympic victor as the athletic fame acquired from victory could make a person's public life more comfortable to navigate. For example, the success of a chariot team would help advance their owners' political position. Some of the athletics own fathers would encourage their sons to cheat if they won, the victor could be awarded a pension in their native city that could have amounted to 200 drachmas/month for life. However, cheating was not solely done for monetary or political reasons. Because of the Greek honour-shame culture, victories in competitions brought honour and glory to the winner and their city and family. But the opposite was also true in that losing would bring dishonour and shame to oneself, family and native city. The fear of this dishonour was external one brought about by what other people thought, like how modern-day social media has the same effect when it displays a person's failures to a wide range of people. The honour and shaming concepts remain a manipulative force that causes an athlete to do anything to secure victory. Another problem was that cheating was encouraged by the athlete's family or native city. Even if they were caught cheating, their native city would sometimes not punish the athlete but reward them instead. One example would be when an athlete from Athens, Callippus, was discovered by the judges to have bribed his competitors during the Olympic games and was fined. Still, Athens, his native city, protected him and refused to pay the fine and threatened to boycott the games entirely. (7) These actions show us that athletes were influenced by their families or native city cheat, which only further encouraged cheating in the Olympics. In modern times this has changed as athletes who cheat often face public humiliation and scorn using social media and the internet.
The history of cheating has plagued the Olympic games for centuries. We can see the parallels behind the reasons and actions that ancient and modern athletes drive modern athletes to cheat in the Olympic games. The pressure of failure was shared between modern and ancient athletes' ether by fear of dishonouring one's family during ancient times or the spread of embarrassment through social media. The cheating methods are also evolving in the present day; the emergence of drugs is also changing the playing field and more traditional methods such as bribery. The prestige and monetary rewards still drive many athletes to cheat in the modern era, just like it did in the ancient period. The only difference is that cheaters were openly encouraged during ancient times, while in the modern period, cheaters are publicly scorned and ridiculed. The reasons behind cheating have not changed since the first Olympic games, as the ever-high stakes continue to push athletes to use deplorable means to secure the victory themselves and achieve fame and fortune.
Notes
[1] Hugh M, Lee, "The Ancient Olympic Games: Origin, Evolution, Revolution." The Classical Bulletin 74, no. 2 (1998): 129-141.
[2] Emily, Abbikin, "Super athletes." Dig into History, July-August 2016, 22+. Gale in Context: Elementary (accessed October 11, 2020).
[3] Alison, Abbott, "What Price the Olympian Ideal?" Nature 407, no. 6801 (Sep 14, 2000): 124-127.
[4] Chris, Cooper, “Drug Cheating at the Olympics: Who, What, and Why?” The Lancet 380, no. 9836 (July 7, 2012): 21.
[5] Thomas A, Hamilton, "The Long Hard Fall from Mount Olympus: The 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Games Bribery Scandal," Marquette Sports Law Review 21, no. 1 (Fall 2010): 219-240.
[6] Cooper, 21.
[7] Susan, Stephens, "Cheating and Gaming the System in Ancient Athletics." Null (2020): 1-12.
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