The War Against Cheating and Corruption: Introducing The Edge
The first Sporting Intelligence book club brings you a work on the blurred line between elite athletes' search for competitive advantages and the rules designed to govern them
Controversies abound where science, technology and politics intersect, whether that’s around COVID-19, energy policies, and yes, in elite sport.
Whether it is organised doping, gender eligibility regulations, paying athletes in American college football, new technologies for refereeing (VAR anyone?), or countless other issues, science and technology are central to many of today’s most discussed issues in sport.
The latest big doping case in sport is Paul Pogba’s four-year ban, a story that has callbacks to the 1990s doping scandal at Juventus, the club where Pogba tested positive.
As the new Formula One season began in recent days, controversy circled Christian Horner, the team principal at Red Bull. And staying with F1, the former head of its governing body, the FIA, Mohammed Ben Sulayem, is under investigation for allegedly interfering in the outcome of last year’s Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.
Saudi involvement in sport throws up talking points on a weekly if not daily basis, of course, whether that’s because of the sheer scale of Saudi investment in global sport, which is often opaque; or because Saudi Arabia will host the 2034 men’s World Cup unopposed. The reasons why are also opaque.
Saudi Arabia formally - and bizarrely - launched a 2034 bid campaign this month, knowing they are ‘campaigning’ against … no other nation at all.
I find these issues and many others endlessly fascinating as well as important, so much so that that I wrote a book about them.
‘The Edge: The War Against Cheating and Corruption in the Cutthroat World of Elite Sports’ was published in 2016 and many of the subjects it covered are as relevant today as they were back then.
Starting today, I’m happy to share it in full over the coming months with paid subscribers of Sporting Intelligence. Here is how the book club will work: every few weeks we will publish an excerpt from each chapter of The Edge, and paying subscribers will be able to download a complete PDF of each chapter.
I'll be active in the comments and am happy to discuss, debate, agree, agree to disagree, and we can all learn from each other.
Today we start with the preface (by Simon Kuper) and Chapter 1, titled ‘A Little Edge can Make a Big Difference’.
Chapter 1 starts out by asking: What do Nellie Kim, Yohan Blake and László Cseh have in common? If you know the answer, then you also know why athletes go right up to the edge, and sometimes past it, in an effort to win.
In seeking an edge, athletes and administrators sometimes go too far. What might be done in response? Welcome to The Edge book club at Sporting Intelligence, where we will explore these issues together over the next few months. I hope you enjoy it.
Prologue to The Edge
This book is about a war — a war for the soul of sport. Sport depends for its very existence on rules; take the rules away, and what you have left might be a fistfight or a workout, but it won’t be sport. Today, however, the edge between what is acceptable in sport and what is not has become blurred, and this blurred edge threatens the soul of sport itself.
The search for a sporting edge brings many to the brink, both the men and women who play sports and the administrators, business people, and politicians who regulate it. And once they are at the brink, the temptation to jump to the other side, to cross the line, can be hard to resist.
Sport has never been immune from corruption, cheating, or greed, but these days it seems to be riddled with these vices. Just take a look at the headlines.
The media are abuzz with disturbing reports about the world’s elite athletes and the governing sports bodies, which have been investigated repeatedly about the rampant use of prohibited performance-enhancing drugs. The National Football League (NFL) has been embroiled in the so-called Deflategate scandal over cheating by Tom Brady and the New England Patriots.
Tennis authorities have suspended players for fixing matches and using performance-enhancing drugs. Victor Conte, who founded a performance-drug company called BALCO (for Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative), went to jail for supplying Olympic sprinter Marion Jones, baseball superstar Barry Bonds, and others with illegal drugs. Conte alleges that the “majority of track and field world records” were set by athletes taking such prohibited substances. The list goes on and on.
I haven’t yet mentioned soccer’s governing body FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) and its longtime president Sepp Blatter, who stepped down amid a series of scandals and arrests connected to a culture of corruption at the very heart of international soccer.
The various allegations that sport is dealing with are explosive. For instance, a 2015 German TV series claims that pervasive doping took place at the Olympics over the past decade and that, remarkably, the organisations that are supposed to police such cheating turned a blind eye. The series alleges that one-third of all medals won at the Olympics (and the track and field World Championships) from 2001 to 2012 were awarded to athletes who subsequently had suspicious blood results. Russia and Kenya were identified as having an especially large number of athletes with suspicious test results, but the shadow of suspicion falls on athletes around the globe.
In the meantime, two athletes who experienced incredible performances during the summer of 2015 were Alex Rodriguez, a baseball player for the New York Yankees, and Justin Gatlin, an American sprinter. The good news was that both athletes were performing better than they ever had, and at ages well past the point when such performances might be expected. The bad news was that both had previously served suspensions for doping offences. Their stellar accomplishments had people wondering about what, exactly, they were seeing. Were these rousing stories of athletic triumph or sordid tales of undeserved benefits collected by those who had gone over the edge?
Other debates are under way as well. Just one week before the broadcast of the German doping series, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Switzerland issued a landmark ruling on “sex testing” by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), which oversees track and field.
For more than half a century, athletics organisations have tried — and consistently failed — to figure out how to determine eligibility for participation in women’s events in athletics. It turns out that biological sex is not a simple binary set of categories, but is far more complex and better depicted in shades of grey than in black and white. Since 2011, the IAAF had used a policy based on female testosterone levels. The arbitration court struck that policy down in 2015, leaving the sport in limbo.
In short, the sports world of today is characterised by battles on multiple fronts, each characterised by a need for rules and regulations to govern what happens when the quest for a performance edge meets the boundary of what is allowed or acceptable.
This book is designed to help people make sense of these battlegrounds. There are a number of excellent books about athletic performance and doping. And there are plenty of narratives written about colourful but flawed characters in sport, such as Lance Armstrong and Marion Jones. But there is no book that looks at the edge, the place where the quest for athletic advantage runs into the rules governing what is allowed, what is fair, what isn’t, and what is really behind the “spirit of sport”.
The fact that there just isn’t a book like this is pretty exciting for an author. Over the past decade, I have moved the focus of my research on science, policy, and decision making away from space exploration and climate change and toward issues related to sport. Policy researchers are like sharks in the sense that if we are not moving forward, we can’t thrive. We are also like sharks in the sense that we are attracted to blood in the water, something (metaphorically speaking) that sport has plenty of these days.
But it’s not just the blood that appeals – it’s also the sweat and the tears that sport produces.
Paid subscribers will now receive a full PDF of the Preface (by Simon Kuper), the prologue and Chapter 1 of The Edge - and over the course of the Book Club series, will receive the entire book in full.
 | A guest post by
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Which individual, team, nation and governing body are the biggest cheats / most corrupt in the history of sport. Would welcome your view on this, Roger. I think Lance Armstrong has to be up there in the individual category, for the sheer magnitude of his TDF successes as he brazenly denied doping and also bullied and intimidated those around him. Mitigating factors would include pretty much everyone else in the peleton doing the same as him at the same time. Team: I'll take a rain check while I consider further. Nation: that would be a two-way race between modern Russia and the old East Germany. Governing body: where to start? Blatter's FIFA has to be a contender but the IOC in different eras will be up there, as will FINA, and AIBA (now the IBA) has been an outstanding candidate. Intrigued to know people's thoughts and nominations.