What Defines Cheating In Sports?

I personally have no interest in following professional sports, but I do occasionally read other people talking about sports or listen to people talking about sports on the radio. It seems that there is a lot of hoopla over steroids and whatnot. I'd be curious to know what people are actually upset about when a certain athlete is found to have used steroids, or blood doping or whatever the heck it is that athletes do; is it because they broke the rules of the sport or because it is unethical and subjectively dirty and underhanded to use these substances? Personally the only argument I can support is that the athletes broke the rules of the sport. If the rules say you can't take drug A B or C then you ought to be disqualified. But if there aren't such rules I don't see using drugs in the same sense of cheating. There was some guy in the Tour De France who was kicked out for having a blood transfusion or something. I find it hard to feel much enmity towards these guys because whatever they are putting in their bodies they're still huffing it on a bike for miles and miles. To me cheating in a bike race isn't using drugs, it would be if you put a motor on the bike or sticking a rod through a guy's spokes, having your friends pull a rope across the road as your rival passed by, taking a shortcut off the course or something. Chemicals are a much more nebulous subject.

I'm sure if I was allowed to take every single performance-enhancing drug known to man I still would not be able to throw a baseball as good as the worst professional ball player out there. The degree of physical ability and training that pro athletes have seems amazing enough to me. I would be more likely to call drugs cheating if there exists such a drug where you can take a guy off the couch, inject him with this substance and he can beat the undrugged pro athlete who has been training and practicing for years.

I dunno, I'm just glad I don't actually care about this subject! HA!