The classic example of how to walk this line can be found in the figure of the corporate trainer Richard Hatch, the winner of the inaugural (2000) US version. Hatch very aggressively formed coalitions with other contestants, skillfully arranging to have his most dangerous rivals eliminated early. When it came down to him and his last competitor, Kelly Wiglesworth, however, Hatch’s speech to the last seven contestants to be eliminated essentially asked for their vote on the grounds that his actions had been predicated on strategy, rather than morality :

I don't think you really know who I am. I certainly had a strategy and I came to play the game. For me, instead of who's the better person, it is really about who played the game better...My approach to the game has been one of strategy. It certainly didn't turn out according to plan...But I was playing a game. I wouldn't change anything that I did and I trust you will respect what I did to play the game...

This speech is deservedly famous, as it adroitly transposes the excluded contestants’ feeling of frustration and resentment into a tool for Hatch’s own purposes, and effectively elides any distinction between tactics and ethics (an elision which, Brown argues in Edgework, is also characteristic of neoliberalism, as it “submits every aspect of political and social life to economic calculation…”). Indeed, as Hatch himself concludes (with no apparent irony): "I think I played as ethically as is humanly possible."