Paul Hopkins: The Olympic runner who drove to victory

Competition has long been a part of our culture. From a simple game of bowls to an All Ireland or FA Cup Final and everywhere in between, there is competition. It's part of what we are, the need to be top dog. The prize for the winner of such competition can be anything from just being called the winner, to much money and endorsement deals, to the title of World or Olympic Champion.

Since the Greeks first hit on the idea of an Olympiad, through the growth of sports, the prize has become much more desirable. To be the winner has become such a priority that some will do anything to get it, whether playing by the rules or not. Down the years in the Olympics there have been cheats caught red-handed — whether using performance-enhancing drugs, betting, or pulling back to be the losers as with China. Even Paris, before it began, had participants sent home.

One thinks of allegations against Irish competitors. Michelle Smith's rise to dominance at the Olympics in Atlanta at a relatively advanced age for swimmers were marked by allegations of doping, which were never proven. Smith was later banned for four years by the International Swimming Federation for contamination of an anti-doping sample. Showjumper Cian O'Connor was stripped of his Gold at the 2004 Games when his horse was found to have digested a banned substance. O'Connor returned in 2012, receiving a Bronze medal.

We humans may well be invested in seeing ourselves as ethical creatures. To believe in the rightness of our own conduct, to see our lives as a series of mostly ‘well-intentioned' decisions. But it is not always so.

The Greeks back in the day devised a way of dealing with cheats: they were fined. The sting in the tail was that the fine was used to commission a statue of the cheat, which was displayed, with an inscription of his name, father's name and city. What you might call a veritable roll of dishonour.

Some remember the ’80s and Ben Johnson being stripped of the Gold Medal he won in the 100m sprint, the glamour event of track and field. The scandal was particularly devastating for Canada, who latched onto Johnson with a great deal of national pride, only to be gutted two days later when it was revealed that Johnson had been using steroids.

Among the funnier — if cheating can be considered such — Olympic cheats was American Fred Lorz who in the 1904 Marathon was the first to cross the line. It was then discovered he had stopped running after nine miles, and then taken a car ride for 11 miles before resuming running the remaining distance. Then there was Dora Ratjen, a German athlete who competed in the 1936 Olympics in the High Jump. Dora, however, was actually Hermann, a man coerced by the Hitler Youth into tightly binding his genitals and competing against women.

The late Canadian psychologist Albert Bandura, the originator of ‘social learning theory', coined the term ‘moral disengagement' to describe the process by which we pervert our sense of right and wrong in order to give into a questionable temptation. Moral disengagement allows us to behave in ways that, at another moment, we would never consider. Moral disengagement, argued Bandura, influences how people would behave in a given situation — as in desperation to bring home an Olympic medal.

In the book The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty [Harper], Dan Ariely describes himself as a ‘behavioural economist' (don't ask), and says every one of us cheats but “usually only a little''.

For most of us it is nicking the office stationery or moving the chess piece when our opponent's not looking. On a much grander scale, as we now know, there are the politicians and the bankers — and we seem to have little problem, in the main, with letting them away with gross and abusive cheating.

Ariely argues that all of us can cheat a little and still keep that ‘good person' identity. Most people won’t cheat so much that it makes it harder to feel good about themselves.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that most of us may avoid cheating for ‘utilitarian reasons' — which means the happiness of the greatest number of people in society is considered the greatest good. This is fine, but Kant would say this is a ‘non-moral reason' for not cheating and that the only proper moral motivation for not cheating is that, plain and simple, it is wrong to cheat.