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The football World Cup in France this summer provided not only some great goals and a rare moment of national celebration in Paris but also insight into the ethics of modern professional sport. One T-shirt slogan summed it up : "I came to win, not to be here". There, expressed in a single phrase, is all the mean-spirited, xenophobic "me-first" attitude of those who are destroying the ethics of sport. Of course, there is nothing wrong with wanting to win. But not at any price. And not to the exclusion of enjoying "being there" - simply participating and meeting people from many lands. Bill Shankly, a British football manager, once said (ironically in all probability) : "Football is not a matter of life and death…. It is much more important than that!" When the irony is removed from statements like that, and people start really believing that sport, and winning, are matters of overwhelming importance, we are on a slippery slope. And the slope leads in one direction : to CHEATING. If the stakes are so high (in financial or moral terms) that you cannot afford to lose, then you will do whatever is necessary to win. In the World Cup, cheating generally took the form of deceit : players feigning injury after harmless body contacts to obtain penalties against their opponents; players diving to the ground to convince the referee they had been tripped up; blatant obstruction of opponents (eg. grabbing shirts on the referee's blind side). Referees found it impossible to deal with this kind of cheating, not least because public tolerance of it now seems to be quite high. More recently, in the cycling Tour de France, cheating has taken the form of doping. From press reports, it seems that not only the cyclists themselves are involved in this, but also team officials and doctors. If the reports are substantiated, the whole professional machine seems to be shot through with the perverted ethic of "Win at any price" - even if this means risking grave physical damage to the athletes. Where do we stand in air sports? Happily, the situation here is nowhere near as bad. The atmosphere at international air sport events is generally friendly. People enjoy participating even if they don't achieve their ambition to win. So far, no major doping scandals. But we would be unwise to be complacent. Every sport has people who are prepared to cheat. As the prize-money and prestige get higher with more TV exposure of our sports, we can expect the incidence of cheating to increase - to everybody's disadvantage. The best defence against cheating is for everyone, at all levels in air sports, to proclaim the ethics of fair competition, to avoid legalistic protests and appeals and to rely solely on talent and training to win. As the T-shirt should say : "I came to be there (and to win fairly)".
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