Our Cheating Culture
This assignment is about the cheating culture in professional sports. Soaring paychecks for top professional athletes and pharmacological advances have conspired to increase the prevalence of performance-enhancing drugs in professional sports in recent years. Individual athletes face tough ethical choices about how to get ahead amid systematic cheating and gross pay inequities among athletes — with cheaters often getting the biggest rewards.
Your paper may address any sport at any level. Your focus is to: identify the ethical violations that are taking place within sport.
Examples may range from, “Deflate-Gate” where you could examine how the NFL operates, or you could ask why a Little League team who illegally recruited players, had vacated their national title. The IOC has done its best to test athletes for PEDs during the summer and winter Olympics, while professional cycling has battled a culture of cheating for decades.
What area of sports are you interested in? What are the major ethical violations taking place within that sport? Think globally, and take a look at sports from around the world; PEDs are only the surface of the violations taking place. Referees and players have been caught fixing matches or tanking on purpose. Is winning, while consciously covering the spread cheating?
Topic Content:
1. Start by identifying at least 4 ethical violations in 4 different sports. Craft an introduction to frame your paper’s configuration.
2. Identify how each of your examples cheated, what their punishment was, and was the punishment enough?
3. Is this a trend in the chosen sport, or is their behavior systemic in their field? Are there behavioral parallels in the world of business?
4. Discuss how their actions overall have affected the sport, what were the legal ramifications.
5. How did this infraction impact the sports property and key stakeholders?
6. What if anything they can do to regain the trust of the public eye?
