Armstrong was a true champion. It's the public that wasn't made aware of what the real game was. All the cyclists knew it as did the organization and everyone professionally close to pro cycling. It was a doping game. And out of all that doped, Armstrong won 7 years in a row. He was a true champion.<p>The more accurate statement here is "cheaters become winners" and not the other way around. Cheating implies rules, and most rules are stupid, especially in sports. Doping of course changes the "sport" in many ways, and is illegal for good reason, but in a true competition of life and death, of success and failure, of rags to riches, of maintaining a family legacy, or of simply "winning" in today's "winner's society", the upside of cheating easily surpasses the downside. And for those who figure out how to cheat, it becomes easy, and part of the game. Then as they see everyone else cheat, the moral and ethical burden is easily nullified.<p>Rules in society are also pretty stupid. Drug dealers know this. Wall Street for sure knows this. And the smartest people who win, most often than not, do so by cheating, because it's all just a game. And it's okay to cheat in a game as long as you don't get caught. "Play dirty" is the western mantra that embodies this sentiment nicely, and it's a positive sentiment. It's antiestablishmentarianism, it's rock n' roll, it's Bruce Willis in Die Hard.<p>Regardless of what anyone thinks of Lance Armstrong, you have to hand it to the guy. He certainly made the most out of his cheating win streak through one of the greatest charities of all time. Cheating in sports is one thing. His true legacy was doing whatever he could to help others cheat death as he did.<p>Devils don't save lives (people do).
"Faster, Higher, Stronger" book showed a study where athletes were asked what they would give up for an Olympic gold medal and from what I remember a good portion would give up their lives in 5 years for that (or some other crazy time), the pressure and willing to win for professional and aspiring professional athletes is incredible.
Might explain why winners of free market capitalism want to institute measures (laws, regulations) to keep others from achieving the same level of winning.
Does someone know if this research has been published and is freely accessible? The difference of the losers of -0.5 compared to the expected value gives me the feeling N is not pretty high...
Very interesting article. Makes me think this is a tendency that we should all look for in ourselves since it could be we start pushing harder to maintain our new 'status' of winning.<p>It also seems a bit sad that we tend to get so wrapped up in our successes that we will start cheating to maintain our new self identity.
There is a very interesting interview with Lance where he talks about the whole cheating thing and living with a lie: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEfSdPz1WtA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEfSdPz1WtA</a>
Stories like this greatly depress me. I've been aware of the phenomenon since a young age, when my identically-aged first cousin and I were assigned to count yellow cars in the street in exchange for a small cash reward for each one we identified so as to temporarily relieve the adults of our company at the time. My cousin (whose parents are pretty jolly and easygoing) professed to detect three times as many yellow cars as I did. I'm pathologically honest (probably because I grew up in an abusive environment where even a small transgression was liable to result in a severe beating) and I was simply astonished at my cousin's willingness to maximize his reward at what seemed to me to be an insanely high level of risk. I learned much later in life that my father had bullied my uncle growing up and that the uncle's response was to develop peer-teaming strategies while my father went on to a successful but rather lonely and extremely competitive executive career.<p>To this day I have a very hard time dealing with any sort of economic activity that has more than a whiff of subjective advantage and am deeply uncomfortable accepting any sort of unexpected windfall, to the point of refusing well-earned and freely-offered promotions and having great difficulty enjoying gifts. I have literally gone hungry and been late on my rent because of an unwillingness to deposit a check (in payment for work) for an amount greater than I had expected to receive. Needless to say, this has had a pretty dire and cumulative effect on my career, material wellbeing etc. :-/<p>I forgot to add that the one context where this does pay off for me, although I rarely indulge in it, is playing Poker - since elaborate bluffing and systematic dishonesty is actually a legitimate play strategy in that game I'm able to manufacture tells and run a 'slow loser' strategy with ease and frequently walk off with the entire pot. I've never had the resources or risk tolerance to try it against professionals, though.
> When Lance Armstrong was found guilty of doping a few years ago, the sports world was aghast. For almost a decade, he had dominated cycling so thoroughly that the thought of anyone else winning bordered on ridiculous. Few had guessed that he had done it by cheating, and many found it hard to believe, even after Armstrong himself owned up to his dishonesty.<p>Huh. I was just barely a young adult when Armstrong began his period of dominance, and this doesn't match my recollection. Most people I spoke with who had any familiarity with cycling were utterly convinced he was cheating. Maybe this wasn't true outside the bubble of my peers?
I wonder how much of the first experiment described is not due to causation, but is instead from certain kinds of people being both more likely to win and to cheat.<p>Some of the other ones do point to causation, but it would be interesting to see an experiment where people <i>thought</i> it was skill, but the actual winners were chosen randomly (e.g. you get points, and they tell you who wins at the end, but you don't see the actual calculation, so you won't be suspicious.)