The Question of Ethics in Sports
The recent controversy surrounding Ferrari giving illegal team orders to Felipe Massa during the German Grand Prix once again highlights the issue of ethics in sports. Sports are highly competitive and because of this fact players and athletes can get highly charged up during competitions. In the heat of the moment sometimes ethics can be forgotten and all of the focus gets transferred to winning. We see this trend happening often in football these days, in cricket and also in Formula 1. This seems to have happened when large sums of money become involved in the process of sports. The more money riding on a game, the more chances there are that ethics will be forgotten.
In the past, sports were about something more than winning. They were about the spirit of competition, the taking part and the competitiveness of the whole affair. The founder of the Olympic Games, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, summed it up very well when he stated, “The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part, the essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well". This statement truly echoes what all sports in general should be about but that message seems to have been lost in the modern day. A lot of people say that the way an athlete plays or how exciting the match is is much more important than the end result.
The 2010 World Cup that took place last month in South Africa showed us a lot of examples of ethics being forgotten. The desire to win was so great that many teams did things that are not really in the spirit of competition. Some examples were Luis Suarez’s handball on the goal line that denied Ghana a goal and Uruguay ended up winning the match. The problem was not that Luis Suarez handballed the ball and denied the goal. The problem was that he was proud of the fact. He stated in an after match press conference that it was the modern day version of the Hand of God. People should be ashamed when they do something unethical, not proud of the fact. Germany’s goalkeeper Mauel Neuer is also guilty of leaving his ethics at home. He watched Frank Lampard’s shot go into the goal and he saw the ball land almost two feet into the goal but he retrieved the ball as if nothing happened. It seems football is losing its title of being the Beautiful Game and is being replaced by a game where handballs are encouraged, where shirt and short pulling is allowed and where anything is done to win the game.
An interesting factor of sports is the fact that it is difficult to uphold morals, values and ethics because one person’s morals and values could differ significantly from another’s. It seems to be up to the coaches, captains and leaders of sports teams to uphold a common set of values that their teams play by. They should not do what Ferrari did the other day and deny Massa a clear victory. Some of the common traits in sports are fairness, integrity, respect and equity. If these four aspects of the game are followed then there will be no question of sports being unethical. This concept of winning at any cost needs to be stopped and people need to be rewarded or punished for the way they play during a game not only for winning or losing.
There is a concept in sports at the moment, where if a player does something but is not caught then it is ok. Referees and umpires make mistakes and a lot of the time players take advantage of this fact. A disturbing trend has recently surfaced in cricket; in the past if a player nicked the ball to a keeper and he knew he had done it, he would walk back to the pavilion even before the umpire raised his finger. Nowadays it is exceedingly rare to find any cricketer that will walk on his own without being prompted to leave by the umpire’s decision. This is a recent trend and it seems the gentlemen’s game of cricket is being influenced by worldwide dodgy aspects of sports.
Tennis is one sport which is still maintaining a high degree of ethics and it is rare to hear stories of unethical behaviour coming out of the world of tennis. Players even apologise when they accidently gain a point that hits the top of the net. Golf is another sport that is pretty much free of unethical behaviour and players have been known to leave balls where they landed even if they think no one is watching them. It is this type of behaviour that needs to return to the world of big sports.
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