The sixth annual Battle of Ideas festival was held at the Royal College of Art last weekend, as hundreds of intellectuals gathered to debate various issues concerning world society from the ownership of Greek artefacts to that of football clubs. One that caught the eye was the question of cheating in sport as several personalities, including The Times’ Matthew Syed, tackled this notion from a plethora of perspectives – social, historical, cultural etc.

Cheating seems to be embedded in human culture. One of the first mentions of cheating was in Homer’s Iliad as Menelaus accused Antilochus of cheating in a chariot race at the funeral games of Patroklos. It seems to have been around for the entirety of recorded history. The sports that dominate the back pages of newspapers these days were nearly all created during the height of the British Empire. The term ‘sportsmanship’, a Victorian term, is a gendered notion that seems to suggest strong patriarchal values of having a ‘stiff upper lip’ and playing fairly.

But the classical notion of sport as a civilising act has been long dead according to Amol Rajan, deputy comment editor for the Independent. He reflected on what he calls the traditional ‘Shearer defence’ with reference to the now infamous Luis Suarez handball that prevented a winning goal in the final minutes of extra-time of the World Cup quarter-final versus Ghana. The BBC’s banal ‘pundit’ Alan Shearer said at the time that anyone would have done it at the time – a piece of ‘analysis’ that rung intellectually and ethically hollow, according to Rajan. Is hyper-competitiveness so natural to us that we will attempt to win by any means necessary?  Can Suarez’s actions be defended because it was an instinctive act of cheating and not a premeditated action?

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