Why athletes cheat

The good ole boys of NASCAR used to have a saying, "our job is to cheat; their job is to catch us."

That's a philosophy that seems to have been adopted wholesale by the professional bicycle racing establishment beginning in the 1980's. There's a difference, of course. The NASCAR boys were tweaking their machinery.

The cyclists were chemically tweaking their bodies.

And it's all about winning. The first cheaters presumably had an advantage. Once cheating gains a certain level of ubiquity, it becomes a requirement just to get into the game. If you can't get into the game without cheating, how can you possibly win?

Contrary to what the fair-play crowd wants us to believe, winning continues to be everything in professional sport. The top athletes in any field, a Tiger Woods or a Lance Armstrong, achieve a celebrity status that makes them bigger than the sport that made them big.

They become icons in popular culture. They also become fabulously wealthy.

As long as winning is everything, look for the athletes and their management teams to seek out whatever advantage they can, legal or not.

Behind the scenes in the world of high-performance athletes is a well-established network of medical professionals ready and willing to compromise the ethical standards of their craft in order to give their clients an advantage.

Dr. Michele Ferrari, Armstrong's former team doctor who was handed a life-time ban by the USADA yesterday, apprenticed with the legendary Dr. Fransesco Conconi, considered the Godfather of blood-doping.

Conconi was hired by European sports authorities to catch cheaters. His insider status and intimate familiarity with drug-testing procedures gave him the perfect platform from which to create doping strategies that could beat the testing strategies.

Dr. Luis Garcia del Moral, the other former Armstrong doctor to be handed a life-time ban yesterday, has branched out from cycling and runs a sports medicine clinic in Spain. His association with a number of professional tennis players has led to speculation that the elite ranks of pro tennis are as riddled with cheaters as cycling.

Dr. Anthony Galea is another sports medicine guru whose brush with the law last year didn't get enough attention. Like Conconi, Galea spent years on the enforcement and detection side of sports doping.

His "it's legal in Canada" defense worked, at least enough to draw the eye away from the fact that his "sports medicine" practice seems to be very similar to what was going on in cycling, and in fact, many of the actual "medicines" are identical to what so many of Armstong's peers have admitted taking. Galea's clients included Tiger Woods and an A-list of NFL and MLB stars.

Being on the A-list is the objective. The top names in the NFL and MLB now routinely sign contracts worth over 100 million dollars. Armstrong's net worth is rumored to be well north of that, and Tiger Woods is widely considered the wealthiest athlete of all time.

As long as society rewards our sporting idols with that kind of wealth and fame, the pressure will remain on aspiring athletes to do everything possible, legal or not, to get to the top and stay there.