Cheating Persuasive Essay

There has never been and will never be a serious debate over who the second greatest athlete of all time is. This is because in society second place is not good enough it represents someone who did not win and no one idolizes a loser. A loser is lost in the shuffle and will never be remembered by the average sports fan. For this and many other reasons athletes will do just about anything in their power to be considered a winner, even if that means cheating. Cheating is displayed in every sport on every level and is performed by an athlete in an attempt to gain an advantage over the competition and ultimately win. Cheating comes in many shapes and sizes and can be as harmless as changing a score card in golf to as serious as ending your life for an upper hand on the playing field.

It is quite disturbing what some athlete would do in order to be considered a winner and in a famed survey that asked Olympians whether they would rather win a gold medal and die within 10 years or go on for the rest of their life and not win gold. Eighty percent of those surveyed said they 'd rather win the gold and die (Drehs). This
In the 1890s a man by the name of John McGraw and his Baltimore Orioles decided to capitalize on the thin rule book baseball operated on. This team changed the rule book many times because of their uncanny ability to find a loop hole in the system. One way they would cheat was their habit of cutting bases when the umpire wasnt looking (running from first to third or second to home) (Zumsteg 7). This ended up causing a rule change that said runners must touch all bases in order and reverse order if they had to return (Zumsteg 7). These athletes show that even sports figures of yesterday were cheaters and did it all in the hopes to be