I’ve been listening to all the Lance Armstrong news on the radio this morning, and it’s driving me a bit crazy. In case you’re not familiar with it, Lance is the world-famous cyclist who broke records and won a whole bunch of Tour De Frances (cycling’s biggest race) – and then was found to have been cheating the whole time.

It’s not what he did that is driving me crazy, but the response that I’m hearing on the radio. It’s the same response I heard after Bill Belichick and the Patriots staff illegally videotaped other teams, and during the baseball steroid scandals, and throughout a whole bunch of other sports-cheating news stories that I only half remember. The idea is that “if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.”

I hate that. It undermines everything that I enjoy about sports.

Cheating isn’t “trying really hard.” It’s cheating. Once you start cheating, you’ve stopped playing.

[Unless you’re playing Illuminati, of course… or certain variations of Crazy 8’s. In those cases, cheating’s encouraged, but that’s a whole other thing.]

As far as I’m concerned, the quote should be “if you’re not cheating, you’re allowed to play.”

How about you? How do you finish the sentence?

“If you’re not cheating,…”

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