Recently, I was running a loop near my home when I happened upon a car accident. It occurred in a complex intersection outside of my neighborhood, where drivers often drive too quickly. There were sirens and a flurry of activity by first responders. A logging truck had tipped over and lay prostrate through the intersection. Two police officers attempted to direct drivers through the area safely — a tall order amidst the chaos of rogue logs and curious drivers.
As I ran through the area — on the grass, removed from the road to be safe (1) — I watched the faces of the drivers passing through. They slowed down and craned their necks to see the mess of it all, transfixed by someone else’s mistake or misfortune, trying to make sense of the accident.
Photo: shutterstock
Moral Rubbernecking
What I described is not uncommon. Car accidents frequently pique the curiosity of passersby — a tendency which, unfortunately, often results in additional accidents (2). We have a word for this phenomenon: rubbernecking.
It seems rubbernecking often comes from a good place; we are motived by care or concern for those involved. But the rubbernecking phenomenon extends beyond car wrecks to mistakes and moral misdeeds of various other sorts, and not all of it is motivated by care.
Sometimes people make mistakes or get in trouble, and we can’t look away for reasons of pride, nosiness, or perverse curiosity. Sometimes we feel self-righteous, not having made the mistake ourselves. Often, we use another’s mistake as fodder for gossip.
This is what I want to focus on here — unfitting responses to human error. Specifically, I aim to examine our responses to cheating in the sport. I want to explore whether it is possible to hold both justice and grace in tandem, or to communicate “zero tolerance” for cheating without demeaning, gossiping, or treating banned athletes as less than human.
Doping and Other Misdeeds
Recently, a couple of high-profile athletes in the trail running and ultrarunning world were sanctioned for indiscretions. I have never met these athletes, and it would not be productive to name them here. Anyway, their bans were not isolated incidents.
You can find a global, current List of Ineligible Persons on the Athletics Integrity Unit website. It is written in size seven font and is 13 pages long. These are just the athletes who were caught, likely representing only a fraction of those who have gained an unfair advantage in the sport.
If the indiscretions named on the List of Ineligible Persons is any indication, our sport is a Whitman’s sampler of assorted cheating varieties — intentional, accidental, drug-taking, course-cutting, mechanical assistance, and otherwise. And this is a problem. Cheating ruins the sport. It undermines the terms of success for everybody. Like many, I think there should be harsh punishments for intentional cases of doping, strict liability for accidental cases, and longer bans, in many cases, to dissuade potential cheaters.
Even so, the public responses to the two recent, high-profile bans I mentioned have made me uneasy. The athletes have been made fun of and criticized in ways unrelated to their bad decisions. This has caused me to wonder whether it is possible for our community to hold two things together — justice and grace.
When someone messes up, can we hold them accountable, while also not plowing them over? Can we leave space for a person to change and to be restored back to the community? Can we sanction without demeaning?
Balancing Justice and Grace
For the past several years, I have worked as a teacher — first in a lower-school setting and now in a university. Teaching is the best job in the world. I love it. But one part about my job that I disdain — a task that makes me almost ill — is confronting cheaters.
When I first started teaching, I felt blindsided when it occurred. I was surprised every time. And while cheating was their problem, my responses to it said more about me than about my students because I expected them to be something humans can never be — above reproach in every way.
These days, I am still disappointed when students cheat, but I am no longer surprised because I know that people — even reasonably good people, all things considered — make bad decisions. These bad decisions have costs. When students cheat, my task as their teacher is to hold them accountable, in ways that generally impact their grades. As a teacher, I need to both minimize opportunities for cheating in the first place, and to penalize cheating behaviors when they occur — for their own sake, for the sake of the integrity of the learning process, and in fairness to their classmates.
But there are two beneficial things about catching cheaters in the classroom, which is not often true in the athletic context.
1. The Private Versus Public Nature of the Act
In the classroom, reckoning with a cheater’s mistake is often a private matter between the student, me, and in serious cases the administration. By contrast, when athletes cheat, these bad decisions are shared widely across digital platforms. To be clear, public records offer an important source of accountability so cheating athletes cannot persist as bad actors, and this communicates “zero tolerance” for the misdeed to the rest of the community.
However, it also creates a fishbowl effect, or opportunities for moral rubbernecking, not unlike a car accident. The athlete receives outsized attention for something that (in some cases) could amount to an accident or an isolated stupid decision. Or it could amount to a pattern of unrepentant bad actions. Not all cheaters are the same.
Again, accountability is important. Cheating is not a victimless crime; it is theft in a sport with limited resources to begin with. Cheating is parasitic on the community. Even so, our community has a responsibility to use this information well — both taking seriously the bad action and still treating the cheaters with dignity, as humans.
Think about it. We can’t cure one bad action, cheating, with another bad action, gossip. It just means we now have two problems instead of one.
2. Possibilities for Restoration
The second beneficial thing about catching cheaters in the classroom is that, when students cheat, I do not cease to be their teacher. And they do not cease to be part of the classroom community. Being face-to-face means we reckon with their bad action together, and there are opportunities for the student to grow and change course, in the context of the community.
Possibilities for restoration are trickier in the athletic setting. Athletes receive a sanction, meaning they are effectively removed from the community. For certain kinds of cheating, such as the use of anabolic steroids (3), the effects of their indiscretion can persist well past an athlete’s ban. In these cases, being restored back to the community on the same terms as prior to their bans is a practical impossibility. So, what should restoration look like?
Honestly, I am not sure. But, at the very least, it could involve maintaining a friendship with the sanctioned person to permit some semblance of stability and continuity so the person can productively move forward (4). Holding someone accountable does not mean excluding them from the human community.
Holding someone accountable does not mean excluding them from the human community. Photo posed by models. Photo: iRunFar/Eszter Horanyi
Final Thoughts
I get it. Athletic stakes are high. Cheating can amount to theft in a sport where resources are sparse to begin with. Fewer problems destabilize the community quite like finding out someone has been cheating. In a longer treatment of this problem, I would raise cultural and structural issues as well — the kinds of systems and incentives that contribute to running’s ongoing integrity problems.
But humans make mistakes — sometimes even big, messy, unrepentant mistakes — and our community, myself included, could do a better job of balancing justice and grace. I am not proposing anything radical — just that we re-think the way we talk about cheaters.
Call for Comments
- What do you think is the right balance of holding athletes accountable for their actions to protect the sport’s integrity versus allowing for the fact that humans make and can learn from their mistakes? Of holding, as the author writes, both justice and grace in conversations about these people and issues?
- Since, as the author writes, resources are limited in sports and cheating takes away other athletes’ fair access to those limited resources, does this change the way we might consider cheating in sports?
- What are your thoughts on redemption for athletes who have been disqualified from the sport for various misdemeanors?
[Editor’s Note: We empathize with the sensitive nature of this topic, and wish to help host a productive community conversation about it. Thus, we respectfully request you to follow iRunFar’s comment policy. Disagreement and debate are always welcome, so long as you share your thoughts constructively.]
Notes/References
- This is a note for my family, in case they are reading this.
- In 2003, rubbernecking was found to be the leading cause of vehicle crashes, accounting for 16 percent of all crashes. See J.P. Masinick and H. Teng (2004). Research Report No. UVACTS-15-0-62: An Analysis on the Impact of Rubbernecking on Urban Freeway Traffic. ITS Implementation Center, p. 12.
- See I.M. Egner, J.C. Bruusgaard, E. Eftestol, K. Gundersen. (2013). A cellular memory mechanism aids overload hypertrophy in muscle long after an episodic exposure to anabolic steroids. The Journal of Physiology, 591(24): 6221–6230. https://doi.org/10.1113/jphysiol.2013.264457
- A rough comparison is that, when I send my daughter to “time out,” I am always waiting on the other side of the door to embrace her and talk about what happened and what we can do better next time — both of us. Being there for the other person is an important part of providing stability and moving them productively forward.
