Are sports heading toward 'major crash' because of cheating?

Some 30 minutes after this sports lesson began, Haley Gion is spent. She climbs down, shakes her head and heads upstairs for bed. She has yet to learn about Brandi Chastain's World Cup goal, Kirk Gibson's one-legged World Series home run or Jerome Bettis' long-awaited conquering of the Super Bowl. But she knows all about illegal drug use, gambling, federal indictments and cheating.

Thank you, sports.

"About the only thing we didn't touch on was a big sex scandal," says her dad, 38-year-old Dave Gion from West Des Moines, Iowa. "But with sports, it's probably just a matter of time."

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Cheating in sports is nothing new -- the day humans first discovered athletic competition, we began seeking an easier way to win. It's human nature. And in today's world, with money, fame and so much more to gain, it shouldn't come as a surprise that individuals are manipulating birth certificates, sticking themselves with needles and bending seemingly any rule they can get away with in order to win.

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The problem isn't with Barry Bonds, Tim Donaghy or Justin Gatlin. The problem is with us, the fans. When will we decide we've had enough? When will we decide that we don't want our memories messed with anymore, that we don't want to fall in love like we did with Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire in the summer of '98 only to find out years later that our infatuation was a fraud?

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Gary Player referred to 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. How do you stop that level of devotion?

It isn't hyperbole to suggest that if we never find an answer, the future of sports is at stake.

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"If we don't do something, it's going to be who has the best chemist and who is on their cycle at the right time. And that's a scary, disturbing thought."

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Still, there are those who say cheating doesn't matter. That they don't care. Another story about Bonds, Donaghy or everything that's wrong with cycling and they're going to spontaneously combust. They don't want to hear about cheating; they don't want to think about the future of sports. They'd rather look the other way and start planning for their upcoming fantasy football draft.

Then there's the argument that we should simply allow performance enhancers and stop pretending ethics and athletics can coexist. But what sort of a message does that send to kids like Haley Gion? And what will that do to the games themselves, besides fill them with even more drug-enhanced robot freaks?

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