Warren Gatland admitted today he thought about cheating when it came to saturday’s disappointing loss, by faking an injury to one of the other props so Wales could achieve uncontested scrums. This would give a big advantage to wales, especially when it comes to the fact that they were already playing 14 versus fifteen, and the game would end up more evenly balanced, instead of being under constant pressure in the scrum!
For the sake of the spirit of the game, he didn’t resort to that but that are plenty of teams who would, without naming individual countries, but cheating has been a part of professional sport since the year dot!!
Drugs are the most well known form of cheating, and there are numerous sports such as athletics, cycling, american football, baseball etc that are rife with widespread drug taking unfortunately.
You may know yourself someone who takes drugs in order to get ahead in whatever field they are in. It could be recreationally taken steroids, it could ephedrine type products for sport, whatever it is, it comes down to one thing-CHEATING!!!
Performance enhancing drugs are not only illegal, but like the gatland comments, they are totally against the spirit of the game and sport in general.
Once you have resorted to them, you have given up your right to offer advice to others on performance, because you will not have played on a level playing field. You won’t know the hard work it takes to do it naturally, to suffer more, to recover more, to hit the sack earlier to recover, to have greater attention to detail in your food, to make every training session count etc etc.
To aspire to get to the top of any sport naturally is a very noble thing, and unfortunately becoming more and more difficult.
The good news is that it is possible to do it, as long as you make the use of the latest science and have a monumental work ethic.
The other route is cheating, plain old fashioned cheating and that doesn’t impress anyone, and when you take the longer term health side effects into consideration, it can’t be worth it surely?!!!
