Throughout the history of sport there have been various cheats, liars and frauds exposed that shocked the sporting community to the core of disbelieve. Most recently Andre Agassi`s confession about taking Crystal Meth got me thinking again about sportsmanship, winning and fairplay.

We all grew up with the old adage - If you can lie you can cheat, if you can cheat you can steal and if you steal you can kill – but yet all of us have crossed that first line somewhere in our lives. We might not have been caught, neither will we admit it openly but the fact is we have. Sportsmen and women are no different.

Have we become so obsessed with winning is everything and nothing else matters? Or is it the pressure to perform consistently at the highest level that cloud a person’s judgment? Or is money, fame and personal wealth the driving force behind athletes exhorting to unethical tactics to rise above the field?

Think about all the football dives we see daily, the rugby player admitting to faking an injury with a blood capsule and the F1 driver crashing his car deliberately. Newspapers report regularly match fixing allegations and then there is the more subtle cheats like golf players moving into his competitor’s eye line when they are putting.

As spectators we live and die by our teams. Recently in a World cup qualifying game Thierry Henry deliberately handled the soccer ball to set up a goal for his team and sent them through. Everyone in the world was outraged but the French supporters were happy because their team advanced. If your team win in the last minute of the game through unfair play, would you demand the match result be overturned?  I didn’t think so.

So maybe we should just accept cheating as part of the game and get on with it.