No Cheating!

Does cheating in sport matter? It depends on what you consider to be cheating.

Athletes swore oaths to Zeus that they would play fair and not bribe the judges. Anyone caught cheating or bribing was fined and the money was spent on a bronze statuette of the god, placed on a pedestal inscribed with the name of the cheater.

In the case of mediums, clairvoyants and other psychic operators, there’s a fine line between cheating and self-delusion, and it is worrying that people who claim to expose hoaxes are often no more scrupulous in their conduct than the people they are pursuing.

Why would super-fit athletes take such insane risks with their health? Part of the answer, as Hamilton explains, is that professional cycling is an inherently unhealthy sport. It is, to start with, extremely dangerous: cyclists crash all the time, breaking bones and risking permanent injury. Then there is the need to eat the bare minimum consistent with surviving the demands of a long race.

It isn’t hard to see how the idea of an invisible spirit realm, dark and irrational, could be associated with familiar types of womanhood. The idea of a spiritual existence, offering a shadowy, exalted or threatening commentary on the daylight bustle of common sense, easily slides into a version of the universal ‘other’ which underwrites our existence, and with which the feminine has always been readily identified.

When I think about, say, 1995, or whenever the last moment was before most of us were on the internet and had mobile phones, it seems like a hundred years ago. Letters came once a day, predictably, in the hands of the postal carrier. News came in three flavours – radio, television, print – and at appointed hours. Some of us even had a newspaper delivered every morning.

Pencil is less ambiguous than paint,/incising hard lines round the genitals./I’ve seen art-students, broad-minded enough/to talk naturally to naked models/in their breaks from posing, become furtive/as they draw a penis – men too. Often,/like children cheating in exams, one hand/shielded the other’s workings from all view.