Competition Equality

Earlier this week, I ran across a story detailing a recent cheating episode within race car driving, specifically NASCAR. Seriously… as if there were any doubt whatsoever as to that fact. Cheating is rampant among all of our competition sports. I’ve written previous articles about athletes utilizing performance enhancing drugs to keep up with their other super human competitors and also talked about how cheating has been in basically every aspect of life featuring competition. Winning a competition and making wheelbarrows of cash while doing it, has transformed our sporting activities into scientific and engineering tasks. How can we create the six million dollar man? How can we create the most powerful engine under the hood and not get caught violating rules? How can we inject substances giving us that little lift that moves us past being a great athlete, to ”one in a million” athlete?

We’ve all seen it and we always have that lingering doubt in the back of our minds whether anyone has accomplished their feats legally and honestly. We have been trained to question athletes because there have been some over the years who turned out to be just as skilled at lying to the public as they were at their sport. If “that one guy” was lying, maybe this one is too. How can we ever know? We can’t and that creates the never ending stares of suspicion when someone comes along and does the unthinkable.

Our nation just witnessed Michael Phelps complete his goal of winning 8 gold medals in a single Olympics. He has taken his sport and brought it to a new level. He is the Michael Jordan, the Tiger Woods, and the Wayne Gretzky of swimming. We look at him in complete amazement at how hard he trains, how he withstands the pressure, and how he deals with adversity to reach his goal. Phelps, knowing he would be subjected to massive amounts of suspicion, volunteered to be part of a stringent testing program featuring the latest tests for drugs in blood and in urine samples. Cheaters are usually ahead of the testing programs so he has gone one step farther. His blood samples will be stored for the next 8 years to be subjected to any new testing to help stamp his innocence.

None of this would be necessary if our sports were not so corrupt with money, power, and ego satisfaction. You have to give it to Phelps though. He wants to prove his innocence by physical evidence. Most athletes want you to believe them because they are nice people. Nice people can be cheaters too as we have fallen for that trap many times before. In the end, we are left with the opposite thinking we would like to have. No longer are the best athletes innocent until proven to be a cheater, they are thought of as cheaters until proven innocent.

Given that there is always a team or individual who stands out in any sport, competition committees are always on the lookout to level the playing field. It’s good for ratings. Nobody will watch a sport where the same people continually win, it gets boring and Las Vegas doesn’t make much money under such circumstances. Part of this leveling ideology actually created the news story about the NASCAR cheaters mentioned at the beginning of this article. In the Nationwide Series (1 step below Sprint Cup), the Toyota team of Gibbs Racing has been particularly dominant this year. They have won 14 of the 25 races. 14 of the 15 Toyota victories belong to Gibbs. In car racing, there are currently 4 manufacturers. Winning 60% of the races creates a “level playing field” issue.

NASCAR, seeing the recent Toyota dominance, informed the Toyota teams to cut their engine power so the rest of the field would have a competitive chance to win. Does that sound like a solution? Isn’t the goal in competition to build an advantage and then use that to win? Baseball players throw faster, hit farther, and run faster. Football players get stronger, get faster, and develop better playbooks. Race car owners build better engines and cars. Gibbs Racing created their advantage legally and now they are paying a penalty for it. However, Gibbs Racing decided they didn’t agree and illegally tried to manipulate their car’s performance when tested for compliance. They did not remove the advantage and tried to cover it up and were caught doing so.

In an effort to create competition equality, NASCAR has destroyed what true competition is. Gibbs Racing of course was wrong in their efforts to cheat, but why should they have to pay the penalty in the first place? If your baseball team was 20 games up on the field going into the playoffs, should they be required to sit their starters and play their bench to make the playoffs even? If your football team wins by passing the ball, should they be required to run every down to give the other team a chance? Should Michael Phelps have to swim with a 10 pound weight tied to his midsection to even the field? You get the idea. There is no equality in competition. If there were, we would not have competition at all, there would be no point. Parity is fine, as long as it is the product of the sport itself.

Competition committees who alter the playing field by placing individual limitations on specific teams or individuals have failed the integrity of the sport. The other car manufacturers should have been forced to deal with their lack of competiveness, not given a falsified level field to race on. NASCAR, trying to be equal, created a situation where Gibbs Racing felt cheating was better than sacrificing their advantage. Other sports have done what NASCAR has done so they aren’t the only bad guy here.

Can you think of an area outside of sports where a level field has been theorized? Taxes? Communism? Everyone who doesn’t have something wants equality, but if you place those same people on the other side, you would be “stealing” from them. The sooner we realize that we aren’t equal, the better off we’ll be. Life is a competition. It’s not about winning. It’s about being the absolute best you can be. If we have competition committees ruling our everyday life, then we are penalizing the people who do their absolute best and rewarding those who are not. Insane reverse incentives. Level the playing field by removing the competition “fairness” and we’ll all be better off. If we have something to reach for, we try harder in every aspect of our life, sports included.

Citation: http://www.time.com/