Sports Ethics: Lying & Deception in Athletic Competition

Juke  Feint   Misdirect   Fake     Disguise  Sneak   

We know all these words and expect them from good athletes. Everyone depends upon deception and lying in sports. How do we square this with the centrality of sportsmanship to defending the worth of athletics? And somehow by teaching deception and lying as a normal part of the game are we undermining the ethics of both players and fans?

Everyone defends sportsmanship. Ethically it is  fundamental to the moral worth of sports. We speak of how athletics teaches loyalty, self-discipline, sacrifice, overcoming odds and working with others to achieve excellence. At the core all these attributes depend upon integrity and the ability to make and keep commitments to oneself and to others. This argument lies at the center of aligning sports with schooling and making it a widespread adjunct to parenting in our society.

Yet at the center of  athletic competition lies practiced strategy of deception. Every competitive sport where athletes play against each other has built in imperatives to deceive the other side. The speed and power of modern elite athletics requires successful athletes to anticipate and act, not just react. If you react to a serve in tennis or volleyball or a feint in basketball or soccer you are too late. So the dynamic of success requires a trained ability to predict an opponent's response to a perceived action. If a player or team can feign or fake that action to get the opponent to commit and then act in a different way, they use deception and misdirection to achieve their goals. Athletic competitive success requires a mastery of deception.

Because success depends upon anticipation, much of sport relies upon disguising actions so that the other side anticipates incorrectly. If I want to succeed in an action, I need to convince my opponent that I am not going to do what they think I am. I try to disguise, deceive or intentionally lie about what I plan to do. If the opponent takes the bait of my fake, then they move out of position. They are not prepared for the action I actually take and  and are caught lunging for a volley or kick. They are out of position on a run or suddenly face a mismatch between one defender and offense player. We spend hours teaching athletes how to fake and feint and create mismatches. We teach athletes to project false intent in their interactions.

Elite athletes watch immense amounts of tape to understand their own tendencies, learn their weaknesses and practice to suppress them. Unless an athlete literally is one of the greatest, they cannot afford to have the other side anticipate and predict what they will be doing. Every athlete facing an opponent tries to avoid predictability and throw the opponent off track of what the athlete may do. The better an opponent can anticipate my action, the lower the probability of my succeeding.

Athletes also  watch tape to anticipate their opponent's best moves. Athletes watching tape seek out the quirks, tells, and ticks that give away an opponent's next move. If you are one move, one split second, one half step ahead, you can win. 

Both sides know they study each other and both sides prepare to deceive the other and project a lie for their actions. Deception and anticipation enable teams with superior game knowledge to overcome superior talent.

We worship sportsmanship but teach deception? We honor effort but play to win?

The only way to make sense of this is to remember sport competition involves a GAME. Games have closed rules. The rules define what constitutes winning and losing. They encompass the range of actions and skills needed to perform well. Athletes must master the physical, cognitive and emotional skills needed to excel within the games rule bound universe of behavior.

To excel good athletes must master pattern recognition of all the players around them. They learn to read other player's signals; they learn to control their own signals and read opponents. The skills of pattern recognition unfold during competition. Deception and feints occur within this world of recognition and competition and rules. The misdirection occurs within the bounded relation of competition. Misdirection, misreading, sneaks and feints, intentionally projected lies, become part of the game. Good athletes even learn to read the signs of feints and you get feints within feints within disguise.

The rule bound world of athletic competition thrives upon deception and anticipation. Any good negotiator or litigator or politician will practice the same strategies within the rules of their own professional practices. This is good competition and strong development of an athlete's cognitive and emotional capacities. But the real boundary world for deception in sports is CHEATING.

Athletes and coaches cheat when they consciously violate the rules of the game and try to disguise it. You see it in coaching when a coach moves beyond mastering the art of deceiving with feints, fakes and misdirection. Instead coaches or team cultures teach athletes to violate rules and get away with it. It falls apart when athletes use PEDs and hide and lie about it. It falls apart when coaches and athletes intentionally violate rules to win.  It falls apart when coaches teach and reward  athletes to intentionally injure opponents.

One is good athletic competition, the other is degradation of the person and sport.

Sports Ethics: Sportsmanship versus Taunting

A new NCAA rule this year continues the ongoing effort to assert the primacy of sportsmanship over moral ugliness of taunting that stains sport. The new rule makes taunting on a touchdown a live ball foul that will lead to the recall of the play and touchdown. It has ignited a firestorm of controversy over how it will lead to awful decisions and stolen losses, but the rule makes good sense and draws the line exactly where it should be.

As the football seasons start I think we should remember why sportsmanship matters and why taunting deserves this type of treatment.

Taunting is morally ugly. To taunt other human is in the same class of actions as sneering, jeering and tormenting them. All these actions demean and insult. They derive from a person asserting superiority and using strength to bully and inflict hurt on another. Taunting people deliberately seeks to provoke a fight. It focuses upon failure or weakness, real or imagined, and is the tool of bullies who taunt people weaker then they are.

The actions of taunting make it clear: simulating a fired gun, slashing a hand, pointing fingers, altering a stride all are designed to intimidate, demean and emphasize arrogant power. This is not about swagger or confidence, but insult and embarrassment. Taunting revels in weakness and assaulting the esteem and dignity of the other person.

Taunting grows from a fractured individual or collective ego that can only prove itself by dominating others in an oppressive and emotionally degrading manner. Sport teams can legitimately seek to break a team’ cohesion and focus, but this occurs through skilled success in play not emotionally dishonoring others. Taunting persons and teams take their pleasure not in achievement and victory but in putting down and subjection.

Sportsmanship is the sworn enemy of sportsmanship. Taunting defiles the game and opponents and sadly diminishes the players who must gain satisfaction by degrading others.

Sportsmanship begins with respect for oneself as a human being and as a player. It grows into respect for teammates and the game itself, for the excellence, rules and forms of the game. Finally, it plays out on the field as competition where players battle opponents, not enemies. Sportsmanship does not preclude dominating victory or asserting effective superiority, but it prohibits emotional flagellation of the person or teams that do not succeed on that day.

The essence of sportsmanship anchors one aspect of the moral defense of sport and games. It helps defend sports games as reflections of the many games of life and presents a way of being in competition that offers people a way to harness competition, drive, and skill in engagement with others. The collapse of sportsmanship not only lowers the quality of the game and people, but the quality of aspiration that athletic competition can convey to those who follow it.

The moral ugliness comes from both the harm and insult aimed at others but also the nasty sense of self that it carves out in the taunting players. Taunting is NOT CELEBRATION. More than a few commentators have complained that the rules against taunting get in the way of natural and high-spirited celebration. But taunting insults demeans and provokes the other side. It does not celebrate a success so much as celebrate an ego’s need for dominance. It transmutes success into humiliation and legitimate victory on the field into mean spirited denigration of the others.

Sportsmanship depends upon respect for the game, its rules and beauty and form and for the other team and players. Taunting disrespects the opponent and the game because it asserts a person’s need to shore up their own ego over respect for the game and the effort and skill of their opponents. Worse, taunting dares the other team to respond in kind. A culture of taunting and the inflated ego centric superiority it engenders slowly drives out the sportsmanship in the game and undermines teams that try to win right.

The new NCAA rules along with the NFL’s ongoing battle against taunting is the right thing. There will be controversies, but these are boundaries that need to be patrolled for the good of the game and the good of the players.

Why Steroids Suck

Steroid users lie and cheat. They lie by claiming to others that they do not use steroids. They cheat by claiming to competitors that they are competing on the same ground rules.  They cheat by the unequal playing field effect. Their actions degrade the sport into an activity no longer connected to being human but to being augmented humans.

The deepest moral problem with using performance enhancing drugs extends the lying to stealing and betraying. Human sport as a practice grows from the drive to achieve excellence. In every society we know of the perfection and display of physical excellence in war and play exists. Play teaches humans to refine physical and mental skills through joyful repetitive actions. Play grows into sport and athletes develop what Aristotle would call virtue. They integrate mind, body and will to practice and through thoughtful repetition become better and more skilled at their fields.

The worth of athletics, the reason to admire it as a human endeavor lies in appreciating human possibility, human achievement. Real athletics is not scripted, it is not entertainment but carries a thrill and challenge of watching individuals and teams push themselves and others to excel and win. Athletics depends upon the attribute of its humanness and the uncertainties of being mortal.

This drive to develop our capacities and skills through games explains why we play and enjoy sports. We connect to the drive for distinction and the expansion of human potential in the best athletes. Beneath it all lies the sheer joy at play and skill cultivated from practice.

Performance enhancing drugs have three moral problems in how they impact competition. The first, we might call the equal playing field problem. This means that using them gives a player a special advantage over everyone else. Secretly using them gives you an immoral competitive advantage because everyone else is playing by regular rules. Part of the issue is fairness, but the deeper issue is that the player is living a lie. He or she is pretending that they are playing by the same rules. They pretend to practice, condition, work just like that other players and they win because their work ethics and refined skill surpasses other players. They live a lie, even worse, they deny and lie about it as did the three baseball players and Marion Jones and the whole crop of cyclists who perpetuate the frauds on the cycle tours.

The second moral problems is one I've often talked about, the Achilles Choice problem. Once the fair and straight players discover others are cheating and not only not getting caught, but getting rewarded, they start to use them. The prisoner's dilemma, if I don't cheat, I won't win or stay on the team, pushes many players to use them who normally would not. They do so because of fear of losing and outrage over the cheaters winning. This corruption seeps down into high schools and club ball where young athletes emulate the stars and come to believe they can only win by using drugs, drugs that will undermine their minds and bodies in the long run.

Third, it degrades the sport into a charade. Athletic competition no longer drives outcomes, chemical cheating does. Baseball, cycling, or football reduce to World Wrestling steroidal enhanced entertainment rather than real human sports. This rush to performance enhancers leads to human loss and cost. As we continue to discover from the awful fate of East German and Russian swimmers and track and field athletes, long term damage is done to the body and even to the children of athletes who use the drugs. Short terms damage distorts the mind and judgment.

I have mentioned the tendency in humans to cheat in order to win and excel. This is not unusual, it exists as a temptation and reality in all domains of life. It is why the role of referees is so vital. What matters with athletes and steroids is that the athletes deny the premise of acting on the basis of their body and effort. They augment their body and betray themselves, the sport and their achievements.

The issue comes up often in battles over technologies whether new softball bats, swimming suits, tennis rackets or golf balls change performance of similar athletes by virtue of the technology alone. Most of these are solved by equalizing the technology used across competitors so that the game remains a human contest. To the extent technology affects it, it does so equally. The circus that passes for the American cup racing now has no relation to sports but has become a mere technological arms race.

Some suggest just letting everyone use performance enhancing drugs and pretend it is still a human sport. But this misses the point that it not only means the quality of the human beings changes chemically, and  the sport moves to technology and arms races much like what happened with the East Germans who created an entire pharmaceutical industry to support their Olympic achievements.

Steroid using athletes steal false gain. Just as Prometheus stole fire from the gods, athletes steal  performance enhancers to make themselves more than human. This disqualifies them as honest human athletes.

The most common steroids and human growth enhancers have two related impacts. First, they help generate human protein and muscle faster from the same amount of effort. They permit this through enhancing the efficiency of protein production and utilization but also promoting recover time. You can get bulked up monsters like Barry Bonds or smooth toned muscles like Alex Rodriquez depending upon the sophistication of the applications. Second, the steroids enable faster recovery time from effort. This helps with conditioning, but more important and the reason so many aging or borderline pitchers use them is that they enable a much faster recovery time. So age impact can be staved off, and work loads can go up with less cost.

The key here is that an individual human could achieve a certain degree of excellence upon the basis of his or her own work, talent, skill. They can push to their boundaries by their work ethics, which really separates those of roughly equal talent form each other.

But a Mark McGwire on steroids is not longer an honest human competitor; he is an augmented human. His muscles build faster, larger and stronger. He recovers quicker than a non-using human being because of his  drug use. Given the same effort and same talent, he will succeed more than an equal by virtue of his chemical use, no other reason. This makes it unfair and inhuman.

Steroids and human growth enhancers can help people recover from illness or  hold off debilitations of aging and chronic illness. These protect against conditions and illness, but steroid using athletes use drugs to enhance their performance beyond what their own body and efforts would achieve.

Steroids users betray their humanity. They betray themselves. The early Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds or Alex Rodriquez were great athletes as human athletes;  the later ones sacrificed their integrity. None of them was the same physical being after they used steroids. In fact none of them was the same psychological being given what we know about the impact upon judgment and emotions. They literally are not longer the person they were before they ingest the drug.

These athletes steal from science to become more than themselves. They betray themselves. Finally they betray the game by pretending that they achieve  by honest means. They lie to everyone and claim records, victories and championships based on the false premises that their human bodies achieved them, not their scientifically altered bodies and minds. This is the moral failure of  performance enhancers.