After Atalanta

OK. OK. I lied. I bullied you into reading this post and expressed a mistruth. This post is indeed about Lance Armstrong. Judge me as you see fit. But it's not some moral diatribe about ethics and truth and sportsmanship, blah, blah, blah. I didn't have any sort of urge to comment on this story. I mean, come on, I study sport and gender. This is not surprising. I am somewhat bemused by my cyclist friends who are just so sad about the whole thing. And I have felt that my ardent cynicism has been completely validated this week. But the people who are still holding on because Lance has done so much for cancer...really? Because we need Lance to enlighten those last few people who aren't aware of cancer? Still wearing your Live Strong bracelets because you like the mantra? Go ahead. Sure a duplicitous man used his ill-gotten fame and spearheaded a charity/movement that raised money for cancer. It's not as if cancer charities are operating in especially transparent ways th...

If you look at the accumulation of comments on Soccer Lens' "The 15 Greatest Sports Cheats of All Time " you would think the biggest controversy is whether Maradona's "hand of god" goal in the 1980s was worse than boxing coach Panana Lewis's tactics that lead to the loss of vision in a fighter Billy Collins, Jr. and, indirectly, his death. Or why Marion Jones was left off the list. Of course I think the biggest controversy was the inclusion of Stella Walsh. Walsh was a track & field athlete from Poland who, it was discovered after her death, to be intersex. She had a set of XX and XY chromosomes. So according to the people at Soccer Lens, Walsh was a cheat. This is despite the fact that she passed--passed!--the gender verification test which consisted of a physical examination of her genitals. There was suspicion throughout her career, the writers say, that Walsh was a man. Except, that she wasn't a man. She was clearly raised and lived as a woma...

I swore I had blogged about the Florida State cheating scandal already, but I can't seem to find it. Must be one of those posts that I did in my head and never transferred to the blog. [There are so many of those it seems.] Anyway the scandal at Florida State was one of the biggest (known) cases of academic cheating (within an athletic department) to date. It involved 61 student-athletes in 10 sports and included cheating on an online exam, getting answers from tutors and professors on exams, and plagiarized (written by others) papers. So the punishment , as determined by the NCAA: 4-year probation; adjustment to the win-loss records; and loss of grants-in-aid. In my humble opinion, this is nothing. Nothing! It's so nothing that Florida State imposed further sanctions on itself. For example, the NCAA mandated the loss of one scholarship in football over the next three years (that's one out of 85!); Florida State imposed another five--again over three years (in other words t...

I was astounded the other day when I read over at Women Who Serve , that a junior player was using an earpiece to receive coaching from her father. The earpiece thing falls into more hi-tech cheating in my mind--though I guess if you've ever watched any James Bond movie or Alias you're probably thinking not so much. A little more low-tech: cell phones. But apparently they can and have been used for cheating. Or so was reported to me when I got the rules for tennis districts, which start tomorrow. Be there 30 minutes early, use a super tiebreaker for the third set...OK...OK...no cell phones on court because text messaging has been used for coaching. Seriously? Previously you had to make sure your cell phone was silent. Any ringing cell phone resulted in point penalties. This year--any sighting of a cell phone on court results in loss of points. Guess I am just going to have rely on some old-fashioned, tried and true methods of cheating: look up to my fan box and wait until someo...

The Purdue's women's basketball team, a frequent contender in the NCAA tournament, might have some of its momentum stymied by sanctions as a result of a cheating incident . An assistant coach with the team was found to have written papers for a player. The NCAA has penalized the team by taking away two of their 15 scholarships this year and has placed them on probation for two years. The assistant coach, Katrina Merriweather will have to go in front of an NCAA infractions committee if she hopes to remain in intercollegiate coaching. The player, Cherelle George is not likely to place college ball ever again. The incident occurred under former head coach Kristy Curry's tenure. Curry knew about the allegations and did her own looking into them but thought it was an issue of bad blood between assistant coaches.