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.<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
I hate that. It undermines everything that I enjoy about sports.<\/p>\n
Cheating isn’t “trying really hard.” It’s cheating.\u00a0Once you start cheating, you’ve stopped playing. <\/span><\/p>\n [Unless you’re playing Illuminati, of course… or certain variations of Crazy 8’s.\u00a0In those cases, cheating’s encouraged, but that’s a whole other thing.]<\/span><\/p>\n As far as I’m concerned, the quote should be “if you’re not cheating, you’re allowed to play.”<\/p>\n How about you? How do you finish the sentence?<\/p>\n “If you’re not cheating,…”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How do you finish this sentence: “If you’re not cheating,…”?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","category-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-21","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}