Читать книгу The Edge - Roger Pielke - Страница 12

Chapter 3

Cheating, Gamesmanship, and Going over the Edge

In discussions of sport, the word cheating is used in blunt fashion to refer to a wide range of actions. For instance, in 2016, tennis star Maria Sharapova failed a drug test at the Australian Open for taking a substance called meldonium, which had been added to the list of prohibited substances just a couple of weeks earlier. Sharapova revealed that she had been taking meldonium for a decade, leading former top-ten professional tennis player Jennifer Capriati to label Sharapova a cheater over those ten years: “I didn’t have the high priced team of drs [sic] that found a way for me to cheat and get around the system and wait for science to catch up.”¹ In stark contrast, another former professional, John McEnroe, said that Sharapova’s use of the drug before it was added to the prohibited list was fair game: “If a drug is legal? That is like a no-brainer. I mean, are you kidding? People have been looking since the beginning of time for an edge, and you’re constantly looking for these things in any way, shape or form.”²

To productively debate the point of contention between Capriati and McEnroe, we need a clear conception of what it means to cheat in sport, as well as a clear idea of those other activities that might go right up to the edge but don’t quite make it to the other side. In other words, we need a palette of shades of gray rather than black and white. This chapter develops a vocabulary for discussions about the edge. It offers a definition of cheating and related behaviors, and thus it sets the stage for consideration of the five battlegrounds in the next part of this book.

Rules and Norms

In the semifinals of the 2013 Australian Open, Belarusian tennis star Victoria Azarenka’s game was falling apart. Playing against American Sloane Stephens, Azarenka was winning in the final set by five games to three, and she was about to start serving what could have been the final game. She lost five match points and eventually the game.³ She was on the verge of a complete breakdown. Azarenka then caused a stir when she then took a ten-minute injury timeout to regain her composure. Her composure regained, Azarenka returned from the “injury timeout” and promptly won the match.

Afterwards, David Nainkin, Stephens’s coach said, “I thought it was very unfair—cheating within the rules. It was unsportsmanlike. . . . I think there’s a gray area in the rule book that shouldn’t be allowed. End of story.”⁴ Chris Fowler, a tennis commentator for ESPN, tweeted about the episode: “Ever heard a player basically admit she/he was nervous and thus invented 2 injuries to get a 10 minute timeout? Rule change needed.”⁵ Cheating or not? McEnroe and Capriati raised the same question about Sharapova and meldonium.

We can start to make some sense of this debate by asking what, if anything, did Azarenka do wrong?

According to the Australian Open tournament director, nothing: “Everything was within the rules of the game.” Azarenka’s behavior provides an opportunity to make an important distinction when it comes to rules. There are rules of the game and rules for the game. This is a fundamental distinction, not just for sport, but also for society as a whole.

For instance, the US Constitution sets forth rules of the political “game” in the United States; the Constitution lays down how the United States is to be governed, including defining the branches of government, their respective powers, how they can use those powers, what rights ordinary citizens have, what rights individual states have, and so forth. With these rules in place, the US Congress, the president, and the court system can make and enforce the rules for the political game; these three branches of government create the rules that govern the nation from day to day, such as how fast you can drive on a federal highway, how much tax you must pay to the federal government, how much pollution power plants can emit, and so forth. Changing laws happens all the time, but changing the US Constitution happens only rarely because it is a big deal to change the rules of the political system.

In more formal terms, the distinction is between constitutive and regulatory rules. Constitutive rules refer to the establishment of fundamental rules of making decisions; they are rules about the rules. This distinction has been around since at least the eighteenth century, when it was explained by the very clever but often hard to understand philosopher Immanuel Kant.⁶ Mercifully, John Searle, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, explains the concept more clearly: “Constitutive rules do not merely regulate playing football or chess, but, as it were, they create the very possibility of playing such games.”⁷ Searle continues: “Regulative rules regulate a pre-existing activity.” In other words, you can’t apply the rules of tennis until you first figure out what those rules are.

Like most sporting bodies, the International Tennis Federation (ITF) has a constitution, a 138-page document that explains how decisions about tennis, including the rules of the game, are to be made and who is to make them.⁸ The ITF constitution also explains the rules that tennis is to follow for antidoping and anticorruption, in both of these cases referring to other institutions (and even more constitutive rules). It is often the case that the constitutive rules for a particular sport require far more pages to explain than the rules of that sport.

For instance, under the provisions of the ITF constitution, the regulatory rules of tennis are codified in a comparatively pithy forty-three-page document.⁹ The regulatory rules include such things as the dimensions of the court, how scoring is to take place, and when to change sides. When players compete together in an annual set of competitions, more regulatory rules are needed, such as how rankings are determined, how seedings are organized, what tournaments players must play, and so on. Constitutive rules set the stage for creating and managing competition; once these rules are in place, regulatory rules created under them define a particular game.

Regulatory rules govern what happens in the playing of a game. When the rules of the game are violated, then there typically is some sanction for the offender or a reward for his or her opponent. For instance, if Azarenka hits the ball out, Stephens gets a point. If players or officials want to change the rules of tennis, such as by allowing instant replay, then they have to follow the guidelines of the ITF constitution, which explains how those rules are to be changed.

In principle, the rules that govern play within a sport are designed to create a closed system, meaning that every possible contingency is expected to be covered by the rules of the game—no one wants referees (or players) making up rules as a game is being played. In practice, this is not always the case; people are clever and the world is complicated, even in sports. Sometimes in sports we find a “rules hole” that needs fixing, just as Congress may find a loophole in the laws that needs plugging.¹⁰ We will return to these concepts later in this chapter.

Victoria Azarenka’s injury timeout during the 2013 Australian Open semifinals.

Now back to Azarenka and her injury timeout. According to the Australian Open tournament director, “Everything was within the rules of the game.” Azarenka’s behavior was within the boundaries of the regulatory rules of tennis, but Fowler (and others) suggested that changes to those rules are needed, which requires making changes as allowed under the constitution of tennis. Sometimes, the changes that are deemed necessary go beyond making changes to the rules of the game and involve changing the constitution itself, such as when tennis (like most other international sports) agreed to follow the provisions of the WADA after its creation in 1999.

This brings us to another distinction—that between rules and norms. Regulatory rules are formal guidelines for play. Norms are expectations for what constitutes appropriate behavior in play.¹¹ Rules are written down; norms generally are not. Some norms are specific to a sport, but others involve more general considerations reflecting broader social and cultural factors. As you might guess, because rules are written down, they are easier to reach agreement on than are norms. Making such a distinction helps us understand why people such as Capriati and McEnroe can see the same behavior and come to diametrically opposed views on whether that behavior is cheating. McEnroe and Capriati are reflecting different norms for what constitutes appropriate behavior.

So when Sloane Stephens’s coach accused Azarenka of “cheating within the rules,” he meant that although her behavior was not formally illegal under the rules, it violated the generally held expectations of the tennis community for what constitutes appropriate behavior. Azarenka, he claimed, had violated the tennis community’s norms.

If the tennis community feels strongly enough, as indicated by Fowler’s tweet, then it can engage the constitutive rule-making process to change the rules of play to address violations of what are held as norms. Alternatively, it can hope that the social pressure associated with violating a community norm is sufficient to compel the desired behavior. Think about the practice of “flopping” in the NBA—the simulation of contact between players in order to sway the referee into calling a foul. Once upon a time, social pressure was strong enough to encourage players not to flop—or at least not often and not flagrantly. Times change, however, and when social pressure was deemed insufficient to stop players from trying to trick referees by simulating fouls, the rules of basketball were changed to try to reduce the incidence of such simulation through postgame video review and the levying of sanctions on players who were judged to have broken the new rule.¹²

Rules can be enforced by governing bodies using penalties for on-the-field violations and sanctions for breaking constitutive rules beyond the field of play.¹³ If a National Football League (NFL) player is caught illegally holding another player in a game, the referee will throw a yellow flag and enforce a ten-yard penalty. But if an NFL player is taking human growth hormone—which is prohibited—he will not be caught by a referee in a striped shirt. Officials who govern what happens off the field of play determine whether a constitutive rule has been violated. Norms are typically enforced by player conduct or in the court of public opinion. If a baseball pitcher hits a batter with a pitch, you can expect the pitcher from the hit batter’s team to throw some inside pitches in retaliation. That is norm enforcement in action. There is a fine line between a pitcher throwing some “chin music” designed to secure tactical advantage in the encounter with a batter, and a pitcher throwing at the batter with intent to cause bodily harm. A “brush back” pitch is well within the rules and norms of Major League Baseball (MLB), but throwing at a batter violates the rules and can be cause for the pitcher to be ejected from the game by the umpire. Throwing at a batter is a fine edge between following an accepted norm and violating formal rules.

Norms can be turned into formal rules. Consider a 2012 suspension that the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA, soccer’s governing body in Europe) gave to Luiz Adriano of the Ukrainian soccer team Shakhtar Donetsk.¹⁴ In soccer, the game clock runs continuously. There are no timeouts, no injury stoppages, and (thankfully) no commercial breaks. But play does occasionally stop, such as when a player is down on the field and the referee decides that the player may need some medical attention. The referee has discretion to add on a bit of time at the end of each half to compensate for such stoppages.

When a player is down on the soccer field, a team customarily kicks the ball out of bounds or the referee stops play.^a There is no rule saying that this is so, but that is how the game is played. After the injured player recovers or hobbles off the field, play is restarted by returning the ball to the team that had the ball when play was stopped. This usually occurs in the form of a kick back to the goalie, so that play can restart without either team gaining any advantage from the stoppage.

This exact situation developed midway through the first half of Shakhtar’s 2012 European Champions League match with Danish club Nordsjaelland. A Nordsjaelland player was injured and play was halted so that he could be tended to by a trainer. He quickly recovered and the referee restarted play with a drop ball in Shakhtar’s end of the field. As is customary, Nordsjaelland did not contest the drop ball, and allowed the Shakhtar player to kick it toward the Nordsjaelland goalie, where play would restart from a neutral position.

Then things took a strange turn. Luiz Adriano sprinted after the back pass from his position at forward, easily catching up to the ball. He was uncontested—everyone expected the ball to make its way to the Nordsjaelland goalie for play to restart. Adriano easily went around the baffled goalie and put the ball into the net for a goal to tie the match. The Fox Sports announcers were flabbergasted: “That is not in the spirit of the game . . . Shame on you Luiz Adriano . . . You do not do that!”¹⁵

But he did. And the goal stood. Of course it did; there is no rule in soccer about playing the ball back to an opponent after a stoppage of play. Once the referee conducted the uncontested drop kick, the game was on.

In this instance, although no formal rule was broken, a strongly held norm was violated. UEFA sanctioned Adriano, under the organization’s general conduct policy, suspending him for one game and requiring that he perform one day of football-related community service.¹⁶ In doing so, UEFA created a new rule from a norm. It established a precedent under which future violators of the pass-back-to-restart norm would be expected to be sanctioned in exactly the same way.

Norm violations need not become formal rules. A violation of a norm might be responded to with another norm. In 1999, a similar pass-back-to-the-goalie situation occurred in the English FA Cup when Arsenal, accidently it seems, scored off a back pass in a match against Sheffield United, which ultimately helped Arsenal to a 2–1 victory. The Arsenal manager, Arsene Wenger, realized the error and offered to replay the match ten days later. This gentleman’s agreement, well outside any formal rules, was allowed by the English Football Association. Wenger’s offer helped to solidify the norm, but it did not elevate it to a formal rule.^b

The relationship between rules and norms is highly contextual, varying according to sport, league, and even nation, and developing an appreciation for the subtleties of behavior in different contexts can be challenging. The degree of enforcement of rules can be shaped by norms; some rules will be strongly enforced (e.g., offside in soccer), others less so (e.g., traveling in the NBA). That makes understanding the application of rules in sport a complicated, nuanced, and contextual affair. No one will get a sophisticated understanding of baseball or cricket solely by reading rule books.

Rules for sports can also interact with norms from outside sport, as in the case of Wyoming and BYU football. Here is a more recent example: In 2012, the Miami Marlin’s baseball manager Ozzie Guillen was suspended for five games. What was his offense? He publicly expressed admiration for Cuban leader Fidel Castro. The Marlin’s organization explained the suspension: “The pain and suffering caused by Fidel Castro cannot be minimized, especially in a community filled with victims of the dictatorship.”¹⁷

What does baseball have to do with Fidel Castro? In South Florida, apparently a lot. Of course, similar questions could be asked about the relationship of domestic violence and players in the NFL, about the relationship between tax fraud by FC Barcelona’s superstar Lionel Messi and Spanish soccer, and about the arrest of USA goalie Hope Solo on charges (later dismissed) of assault and US women’s soccer. Although rules can be created to oversee what happens in competition, sport and the world outside sport tend to intermix when it comes to the enforcement of broadly held social norms.

These examples highlight why it is so important to establish some intellectual and linguistic order when we discuss cheating in sport. As sport becomes more complex, so too must our ability to discuss and debate what happens at the edge. We are free to shape sports rules however we’d like, but to reach agreement on satisfactory rules, we need a language suitable to the task.

Let’s find a language we can use.

What Is Cheating?

The concepts of rules and norms give us tools with which to create a framework for discussing what happens in sporting competition. To put it in fewer words, let’s use rules and norms to create a simple taxonomy of cheating. Figure 3.1 depicts some things that can happen during a game or match—three of which involve combinations of rules and norm violations:

 Ordinary play occurs when no rules and no norms are violated. Ordinary play is what happens most of the time during a match or game.

 A penalty occurs when a rule is broken and a sanction is imposed, but no norm is violated. Penalties for rule breaking are part of the essential fabric of games. The offender pays some sort of cost when a rule is broken. For instance, a tennis player loses a point or a football team has to move back ten yards. When a penalty occurs but is not seen or called by the officials, it is a “blown call.”c

 Gamesmanship occurs when a rule is not broken but a norm is violated. For instance, a tennis player takes an injury timeout even though she is not injured.

 Cynical play occurs when a rule is broken and a norm is violated. For instance, a soccer player deliberately kicks another player but then screams and falls to the ground, pretending that he is the victim. When an official misses the call, it compounds the cynicism, because the player may be seen as getting away with something that fellow competitors or fans will view to be unfair. Cynical play is the closest thing to cheating within game play, and an area in which much debate over cheating occurs.

Figure 3.1. A Taxonomy of Cheating

“Cheating” is used a lot in discussions of sport, but it is rarely defined precisely. We’ll need a precise definition of cheating in sport in order to explain why I’ve chosen to focus on the five battlefields that take up the next section of the book.

In sport, some rules are meant to be broken. Breaking rules is in fact often part of the game. Athletes calculate costs and benefits of breaking rules and the chance that a penalty will be enforced. Should a cornerback on a football field commit pass interference on a long pass down the field? Should a centerback on a soccer field foul a striker heading toward her team’s goal? Should a basketball team start fouling at the end of a game to try to catch up? The breaking of rules is an essential part of the fabric of sport norms and rules. So the act of breaking the rules, even intentionally, is not by itself enough to qualify as “cheating.”

To understand what cheating is, we need to recall the difference between regulative rules and constitutive rules, because that difference provides a clear basis for defining cheating. Here I define cheating to be the violation of the constitutive rules of a game. Cheating thus threatens the possibility of sport itself. It is far more serious than breaking the regulatory rules of a game, even intentionally or cynically, and more serious than violating widely held norms. Cheating strikes at the “very possibility” of sport, at the very legitimacy of the games that we play. That is why cheating is so important.

Fifty Shades of Gamesmanship

This simple five-part categorization (cheating, cynical play, gamesmanship, penalty, and ordinary play) gives us some conceptual clarity and a language for discussing efforts by athletes, coaches, and others to secure an edge in competitive sport. Because the issues that arise are colored in shades of gray rather than in sharp back and whites, having a language can help clarify the issues and identify where people may agree and where they may disagree. In sport, the rules are what we make them, and interpretations as to what is over the edge will always be based on subjective human judgment. Thus, it is crucial to be able to communicate with one another, even if we may disagree with one another.

Using this five-part vocabulary, Azarenka was guilty of gamesmanship. She broke no rule of tennis, but her use of the injury timeout for competitive advantage violated some strongly held norms. Is the strongly voiced disapproval of fellow players and sports commentators a sufficient penalty for gamesmanship? Or are rule changes needed, as suggested by Chris Fowler? Because the spirit of sport is about adherence to rules, and rules are our inventions, the only way to resolve such issues is to discuss them, debate them, negotiate them (if things get that far), and come to some practical agreement on how to change them if they can be changed. In the Azarenka case, the tennis world moved on after many people expressed their outrage, and rule changes were not made. Azarenka’s gamesmanship (and that of others using the same strategy) was apparently not enough of a motivation to change the rules.

Gamesmanship is complex because it encompasses a spectrum from the accepted (and expected) to the offensive. And what constitutes gamesmanship is not universally shared—far from it. Local context matters enormously.

Consider a 2013 soccer match in the Copa Libertadores (the South American version of the UEFA Champions League) between Atlético Mineiro and São Paolo. During a pause in play, as a result of the ball being kicked out of bounds near midfield, Atlético’s star player, Ronaldinho, wandered over to the opposing goalie to ask for a swig from his water bottle. The goalie obliged. Ronaldinho took a long sip, spat it out, and wandered over to the sideline, where he was wide open as play restarted. He received the throw-in, made a quick pass, and a goal resulted. Ricardo, a former student of mine and a Brazilian, e-mailed me to ask, “Genius or morally reprehensible?”^d

Ricardo noted that Brazilian Portuguese has a phrase to describe such behavior—jetinho brasileiro,¹⁸ which he describes as “both a reproach and praise, nuanced and complex.” South American Spanish has a similar phrase—viveza criolla. Daniel Rosa, a journalist, explains: “There’s an expression in Uruguay about how you want to win. If it’s in the last minute and with a moment that enrages your opponent, all the better. That is viveza: knowing how to gain any advantage.”¹⁹

Gamesmanship is contextual. What is acceptable in Brazil might not be acceptable in Denmark, and vice versa. In the Brazilian league match, Ronaldinho’s ploy was viewed by many as clever gamesmanship. Yet, Adriano’s similar behavior in the Champions League match was formally sanctioned. Both actions were well within the formal rules. But only one violated a well-established, local norm.^e

Debates about gamesmanship and where lines governing behavior might be drawn are thus as much about the context of a culture as they are about the game itself. We can start to get a sense of this contextuality by creating a spectrum of acceptability in sports gamesmanship. I’ll start by suggesting two end points, which I suspect very few people will find controversial. One end point is behavior that I’d guess is universally deemed acceptable; at the other end is behavior that I’d guess is universally deplorable.

At the acceptable end of the spectrum let’s place the practice of framing a pitch by a catcher in baseball. Balls and strikes are called by a human umpire, and catchers often try to catch the ball in such a way as to suggest that the pitch was in the strike zone rather than just outside.^f The catcher might limit movement or pause ever so slightly after catching the ball. The catcher is trying to influence the umpire’s call of ball or strike through his behavior, not unlike diving in soccer or flopping in the NBA.

The framing of a pitch is not just an aesthetic matter. It can affect outcomes. Steve Yeager, who played MLB for fifteen years and coaches catching for the Los Angeles Dodgers, explained to Grantland, “If a catcher can perfect a great way of receiving the ball, and he gets the ball maybe a half a ball outside—or even a ball outside—off the corners consistently, I think he’s worth his weight in gold.” Numbers back this up. Take Jose Molina, who catches for the Tampa Bay Rays. After taking into account various confounding factors, one model of the impact of pitch framing finds that Molina “saved his teams 111 runs—or, using the standard 10-runs-to-a-win conversion, about 11 wins—because of framing from 2008 to 2013.”²⁰ Grantland concluded, based on these numbers, that Molina’s value to the Rays was actually worth well in excess of his actual weight in 24-karat gold.

Pitch framing is gamesmanship. But it is also an accepted and meaningful part of the game of baseball.

At the other end of the gamesmanship spectrum—the deplorable end—we can place the Harlequins rugby club. In April 2009, the Harlequins faced Leinster in a quarterfinal playoff match. Late in the match, a wing, Tom Williams, had to be substituted because blood was pouring from his mouth. Poor guy. The substitution was fortuitous, because it would not have been allowed except for the apparent injury, and Williams was replaced by a goal-kicker, Nick Evans, who would be more likely than Williams to score, and Harlequins needed points. Unfortunately for the Harlequins, the substitution did not work out in their favor, as Evans missed a late kick and Leinster held on for a close 6-5 victory.²¹

It was soon revealed that Williams had manufactured the supposed injury by biting into a “blood capsule” in his mouth to release fake blood and earn the substitution. Sky News had captured Williams winking to teammates as he was being substituted. An inquiry followed. The affair became known as “Bloodgate” and resulted in numerous penalties and suspensions.²²

The behavior in Bloodgate shares a few similarities with efforts to frame pitches (in baseball) and to simulate tackles (soccer) and charges (basketball). Players use the means at their disposal to convince a game official that what he or she is seeing is actually something else. A ball is a strike. A healthy player is injured. The similarities don’t go much further, however. The use of blood capsules was universally viewed as a form of gamesmanship that went too far, way too far. In fact, it went so far that it was no longer appropriate to call it gamesmanship. Instead, it was a clear-cut case of cheating. It was a violation of the constitutive rules of rugby, because it was judged to be “misconduct,” defined as “prejudicial to the interests of the Union or the Game.” The committee that reviewed the case concluded that “just like taking a banned substance to enhance one’s performance, fabricating a blood injury to alter the course of the game was also cheating.”^g

Even though the sport of rugby had no specific rules against the use of blood capsules, gamesmanship deemed sufficiently unacceptable can be defined as cheating under the constitutive laws of the game. But a large gray area exists between pitch framing and blood capsules.

Ultimately, the decision to define an activity as against the rules of a game versus the rules for a game is the result of a negotiation among those who have a stake in the game, along with those with authority to make changes. Sport is a constant negotiation between fans, administrators, athletes, and others. We change rules all the time, both rules for sport and rules of sport. Sometimes we even move rules from one category to the other. Cheating is thus a moving target rather than something to be defined once and for all.

Rule Making and Its Limits

If rules are indeed the defining feature of sport and central to what it means to cheat or not, then there is nothing more important to the integrity of sport than the making and enforcing of rules. If you think about it, most discussion and debate over sports is about exactly these topics. Was the soccer player really offside? Did the football player really catch the ball? How should we deal with blood capsules? How should we deal with the player who scores on a soccer restart? If cheating is defined as a violation of the constitutive rules of sport, then it is important to understand how rules for the game and of the game change over time.

Rules are not fixed. We can change them. And we often do. For instance, the offside rule in soccer has been changed many times since the laws of “association football” were first drawn up in 1863.²³ The offside rule was changed as recently as 2015.²⁴ Changes have been introduced to clarify rules and to improve the perceived quality of the game, such as by giving a greater advantage to offenses rather than defenses. Changes in rules often face opposition from those who value the norms of consistency and tradition.

Sometimes, factors external to the game forces rules changes. The NFL has changed its definition of what it means to catch a ball multiple times in recent years. These changes have been motivated by the widespread availability of televised high-definition replays, which allow an unprecedented look at game play that far exceeds the ability of referees in real time. Instant replay was introduced to assist referees, but as the clarity of the replays has improved, the meaning of “catch the ball” has grown murkier, and the NFL has struggled to cope with this muddiness in its rule making, arguably making the job of referees much more difficult.

The scholarly literature on rules and norms is vast and spans many disciplines. In this section, I highlight three overarching lessons that will be helpful in thinking about rule making in sport (and indeed more broadly) when we turn to the five battlefields in the war against cheating in sports.

Lesson 1: People Respond to Incentives

In February 1994, two Caribbean nations were facing off in the preliminary group stages of the Caribbean Cup soccer tournament.²⁵ The rules of the tournament meant that, based on the matches played previously, Barbados needed to defeat Grenada by at least two goals to advance to the final stage of the tournament.²⁶ Otherwise Grenada would advance. Deep into the second half, Barbados was leading by 2–0 and looking set to advance.

But then Grenada scored in the eighty-third minute, making it 2–1 in favor of Barbados. Had the match ended with this score, Grenada would have advanced despite losing the match. Here is where things got tricky. The tournament rules specified that if a match were tied at the end of regular time, then the teams would play a sudden-death extra time, with the first team to score not just winning, but recorded as a two-goal winner. These rules created some unique incentives within the game.

Under these rules and with this score line, Barbados now had two chances to advance to the final. It could score another goal in regulation and win 3–1, restoring that necessary two-goal advantage, or it could score a single goal in an overtime period and secure a two-goal victory. Ian Preston and Stefan Szymanski explain what happened next: “The Barbados players realized with 3 minutes to play that they were unlikely to score again in the time remaining and deliberately kicked the ball into their own goal to tie the match at 2–2 and force an overtime period.”²⁷ The thinking was that if they needed one goal to advance, they’d have better chances during extra time. But to get to overtime, they needed to score on themselves. So they did.

Under these tournament rules, Grenada would advance with a one-goal loss, so after Barbados tied up the match by scoring on themselves, the Grenada players immediately tried to do the same. For Grenada, losing by one goal meant winning. Preston and Szy-manski described the farcical results: “The two teams then spent the remaining few minutes with Barbados defending both ends of the field as Grenada tried to put the ball into either goal, but time expired with the score still tied.”^h In the end, Barbados scored in extra time and advanced to the finals of the tournament, where perhaps Karma proved the ultimate winner. Barbados did not win any of their three games in the final group stage.²⁸

After losing to Barbados, the Granada manager complained: “I feel cheated. The person who came up with these rules must be a candidate for a madhouse. . . . Our players did not even know which direction to attack: our goal or their goal. I have never seen this happen before. In football, you are supposed to score against the opponents to win, not for them.”²⁹ The consequence of the scoring rules and tournament design changed the incentive structure for the players in the tournament and fundamentally changed the nature of the game.

The lesson here is that players will respond to incentives. Expecting athletes and others in sport not to respond to the incentives created for them goes against both human instinct and common sense. Tournament design is a particularly vexing problem in terms of aligning incentives with outcomes in a way that preserves the integrity of competition. For instance, in the 2012 London Olympics, eight badminton players were sent home for intentionally losing matches in order to be better positioned in later rounds. At the time, Andreas Selliaas observed that Usain Bolt rarely gave his best effort in early rounds of qualifying, much like the badminton players, yet he went unsanctioned: “Is this okay? Yes, because he wants to win and save his strength for when it really counts.”³⁰

As the following chapters make abundantly clear, rules create incentives, and people respond to incentives. We need to think very carefully about situations where players respond to the incentives provided by rules. How can it be cheating when a player follows the rules of a game?

Lesson 2: Rules Have Unintended Consequences

One of the enduring realties of making decisions is the so-called law of unintended consequences.³¹ No matter how many experts we consult or how much analysis we devote to making decisions, the outcomes of those decisions often turn out to be unexpected, and sometimes undesired. Thus, how we respond to unintended consequences is just as important as what rules we established in the first place.

It is not clear how much thinking went into the design of the 1994 Caribbean Cup soccer tournament, but the spectacle of one team trying to score on both goals and the other defending both was probably not considered when the rules were put together. By contrast, strategic positioning in an Olympic badminton tournament was surely foreseeable based on experience.

The unintended consequences of rule making can occur far from the field of play. Women’s elite gymnastics provides an example of how rules for the sport create incentives leading to undesired outcomes, necessitating further constitutive rule making and opening the door to cheating.

When Michael Phelps, the decorated American swimmer, earned his fourth medal (of a total of seven medals) at the 2012 London Olympics, he raised his lifetime tally of Olympic medals to twenty-two and moved into first place among Olympic medal winners. The person he passed on the medals table was Larisa Latynina, a Soviet gymnast who had won eighteen medals in the years from 1956 to 1964.³²

Latynina’s medal haul is not the only thing that captures our attention today. She won her first Olympic medal when she was twenty-one years old and her final one when she was twenty-nine. Remarkably, she won gold in every individual event (save one) at the 1957 European and World Championships at age twenty-two while pregnant.³³ Today, most gymnasts are out of the sport by the time they reach their twenties. No Olympic all-around gold medalist has been older than Latynina since Vera Čáslavská of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Woman gymnasts have become significantly younger over the past fifty years because of scoring rules that have increasingly rewarded the skills of younger, more flexible athletes. Yet, over the same time, the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique (FIG) has steadily increased the minimum age requirement — from fourteen to fifteen years old in 1981, and then to sixteen years old in 1997.³⁴ Under today’s rules, Nadia Comăneci, who dazzled the world in the 1976 Olympic Games, would be too young to participate.

Jackie Fie, who worked for almost thirty years on the FIG Women’s Technical Committee and is a member of the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame, explained that increasing the minimum age was “prompted by many concerns, including the musculoskeletal development of young competitors, lengthening gymnastics careers, preventing burnout, and in order to redirect the image of the sport positively for the public, spectators and media.”³⁵

Yet, coincident with the changes to the minimum age have been changes to the FIG “code of points” (which sets rules for the scoring of routines) that prioritize the kinds of physical capabilities more likely to be found among younger athletes.³⁶ The Economist observes that “these changes have rewarded acrobatics more highly. So what was a common tumbling pass on the floor forty years ago would today be expected of a gymnast at a more junior level. At the top of the sport, gymnasts perform routines made up almost exclusively of combinations of intricate full body rotations in order to maximise their score.”³⁷ In other words, women’s gymnastics has become more about acrobatics than about ballet.

These rule changes favor younger athletes. A 2003 study of the biomechanics of young elite gymnasts found that “the smaller gymnast, with a high strength to mass ratio, has greater potential for performing skills involving whole-body rotations.”³⁸ A 2014 review of changes to the FIG code of points found “the tendency of using more gymnastic and choreography elements is obvious, mainly to the leading athletes who are adequately prepared to execute faultlessly both, high-risk acrobatic skills and difficult gymnastics elements.”³⁹

Rules that emphasize younger athletes and rules regulating age create differing incentives: “Women’s gymnastics thus point in two directions at once.”⁴⁰ Hindsight is always 20/20, but one unanticipated consequence of the incentive structure was that at least one nation sought to evade the minimum age rules of the FIG. The New York Times observed that at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China’s gold medal winning women’s gymnastics team “didn’t just look young. They looked childlike.” One member of the team was even missing a baby tooth.⁴¹

Two years later, following an investigation by the FIG, one Chinese gymnast was stripped of her medal from Sydney 2000 for violating the minimum-age requirement. The 2008 results were allowed to stand, despite much skepticism. Steve Penny, the president of USA Gymnastics observed: “There still is what I believe to be unanswered questions about this issue, but there is only so much you can prove when it comes to falsified documents.”⁴²

One consequence of the controversy was the creation of new rules for how the ages of gymnasts are validated. Beginning in 2009, FIG no longer relies solely on state documents, such as birth certificates or even passports, both of which can be forged, especially if state officials are involved. Instead, FIG initiated an internal licensing system that is detailed in a 213-page rule book.ⁱ

For gymnastics, the unintended consequence of changes to rules governing minimum age and criteria for scoring within competitions was a new opportunity for cheating. That unanticipated opportunity was apparently taken, necessitating the creation of an entirely new framework of constitutive rules to oversee the regulation of age among competitors.

What else might FIG have done? Logically the possibilities are limited. FIG could have relaxed the minimum-age requirement, or it could have changed the scoring rules to reflect the skill sets of older athletes. The trade-offs between simplicity and a perceived need for more constitutive rules usually involves a tolerance for unintended consequences, as more rules almost always mean more unintended consequences. But unintended consequences can, in turn, mean more rules. Here is yet another example of a wicked problem in action.

Lesson 3: Rules Are Always Imperfect

Rules can never cover every possible contingency. Thus, how we set up rules and regulations has profound significance for the outcomes that we observe. Sometimes the consequences are to the game—such as the farcical Caribbean soccer game—and sometimes to athletes themselves—such as young girls pressed into elite competitions.

One of the distinctive features of sport is that action on the field is governed by a set of laws or rules that are expected to cover every contingency. This is certainly not the case for the governance of sport off the field, nor in broader society. In both sport governance and society, we create systems of jurisprudence to judge how rules should be applied. In society, these are typically judicial systems of courts; in sport governance, this often takes the form of arbitration. But even on the field of play, rules have to be interpreted and applied. What about when something happens in competition that is not covered by the rules?

In June 2012, a “rules hole” was revealed in the procedures of USA Track & Field (USATF), the national governing body that has responsibility for overseeing the track and field athletes who represent the United States in the Olympics. In the finals of the 100 meters, Allyson Felix and Jeneba Tarmoh tied for third place.^j A photo of their finish couldn’t settle who had finished ahead of the other. With the top three finishers advancing to the Olympics, a third place tie is problematic. The USATF had no procedure for resolving a third place tie, and needed to come up with one quickly.⁴³

The day after the race, officials closed the rules hole by implementing a new rule.⁴⁴ The new rule allows the athletes to settle the race by a coin toss or by a second race a week later. Tarmoh eventually dropped out, while Felix finished in fifth place at London 2012.⁴⁵ The fact that the rule had to be made after the fact, leading one runner to walk away from the event, led some observers to complain. One lamented that “the only amateurs left in Olympic sports are the officials running them.”⁴⁶ As we all learned in the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, creating rules (in that case for counting Florida ballots) after a race is likely to make no one happy other than the beneficiaries of the ad hoc rule making.

There are many other examples of rules holes and subsequent decisions to fill those holes. In 1999, the NFL implemented a new rule that said that once a quarterback started throwing a pass by moving his arm forward, the pass would be ruled incomplete even if the quarterback changed his mind midthrow and tried to “tuck” the ball “back towards his body.”⁴⁷ This so-called tuck rule caused more problems than it solved.

During a playoff game in 2002 between the New England Patriots and the Oakland Raiders, in a snowstorm, with less than two minutes left on the clock, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady started a motion to pass the ball, decided not to, and apparently fumbled the ball as he tried to tuck it away. Oakland recovered the ball, but after consulting instant replay and conferring with other officials, the referee gave the ball back to the Patriots.⁴⁸ The call not only decided the game but also sparked controversy, as it depended not on the video evidence but on what it meant to throw or fumble a football. The rule survived for fourteen years. In 2013, the NFL voted to get rid of the tuck rule, eliminating uncertainty in referee judgments not via technology but via procedure.⁴⁹

Rules holes show us that even in the most highly regulated situations, unforeseen contingencies arise. If rules cannot be created to cover every possible occurrence in a sporting context, then there is no hope for comprehensive rule making in broader society. Science, technology, and changing values all contribute to a perceived need for rules to change. How we deal with rules holes is a hallmark of good governance in sport, because rule making is always going to be imperfect, always subject to revision, and always in need of close attention.

We now have a vocabulary that can help us understand what’s at stake in the war against cheating and how that war is being fought. To summarize, here are the key terms:

 Constitutive rules: Rules about rules

 Regulatory rules: Rules that govern game play

 Norms: Broadly held societal expectations for behavior

 Cheating: The violation of constitutive rules

 Ordinary play: A competition in practice

 Penalty: A sanction imposed for the violation of regulatory rules

 Cynical play: A violation of both regulatory rules and norms

 Gamesmanship: A violation of norms but not of regulatory rules

 Rules hole: A contingency not covered by existing rules

The next part of this book takes a close look at five battlegrounds in that war: amateurism in college sports, doping, match fixing, technology in sport, and sex testing. On each battleground, constitutive rules are being violated—or, to put it bluntly, people are accused of cheating. And their cheating doesn’t just affect the outcome of a particular game or match; it could also strike at the very existence of sport as we know it. These battlegrounds are where going over the edge can threaten the possibility of sport itself.

a Even this norm may be changing. Today, it seems that players often are skeptical of their peers, and sometimes continue play, rather than kicking the ball out of bounds, when they are in a good offensive position or the down player is away from the action.

b As the favorite, Arsenal may have found it easy to act so magnanimously. Arsenal won the replay as well. See “Arsenal 2-1 Sheffield United (1998–99) FA Cup—Result Void,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=71&v=whO5GAFBp30.

c Of course, such calls often require a degree of judgment, so there is inevitably a gray area between a penalty and a blown call.

d See Ronaldinho’s trickery here: Chilean Football League, “Controversial Goal Because of Ronaldinho the Liberators,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7daGFe8Q3kc.

e For a case of a restart in a soccer match between Liverpool and Sunderland where the proper application of a norm was contested because of the ambiguity of its status as a norm rather than a formal rule: Steve Busfield, see “Should Liverpool’s Goal against Sunderland Have Stood?” Guardian, September 27, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2010/sep/27/liverpool-sunderland-stuart-attwell.

f Chapter 7 discusses human versus nonhuman baseball umpires.

g It was misconduct as defined under the regulations of the International Rugby Boards (IRB), as explained here: http://www.epcrugby.com/images/content/Tom_Williams_and_Harlequins_Independent_Disciplinary_Committee_Decision.PDF. The most recent version of the regulations governing rugby can be found at http://www.englandrugby.com/governance/regulations/#.

h Watch a video showing a bit of this farce here: Barbados vs. Grenada (Shell Caribbean Cup, 1994), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThpYsN-4p7w.

i You can see the rule book at http://www.fig-gymnastics.com/site/rules/main.

j This was not the first instance of a tie in Olympics track and field qualification; it happened in 1984; see Julie Cart, “Play It Again: Turner, Fitzgerald-Brown, Page and Hightower to Have Rematch Saturday,” Los Angeles Times, June 7, 1985, http://articles.latimes.com/1985-06-07/sports/sp-16199_1_stephanie-hightower.