The list is really quite long; Roger Clemens and the whole performance-enhancing drug (PED) in baseball scandal, Kelvin Sampson and the University of Indiana, Bill Belichick and the video tape humiliation involving the New England Patriots, and the story surrounding Reggie Bush allegedly receiving illegal benefits while at the University of Southern California. And these are only the recent cheating-based stories.

There have been many other cheating stories over the past few years, whether it was boxing, NASCAR, Formula One, cycling and the Tour de France or NFL players taking human growth hormone, steroids and other PEDs.

Being that this is an Olympics year – the summer games will be held in Beijing – there have been stories discussing the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) pursuit of a better blood test for HGH, as well as other screening tests that can catch drug cheats. As a matter of fact, this has been an on-going story for the past several years, ever since the airing of Major League Baseball’s dirty PED laundry.

So the question really needs to be asked. Are these isolated instances, illustrative of the fact that cheaters get caught, or is everyone – or most people cheating – and do these recent cases represent a minuscule portion of the actual cheating that is going on?

Perhaps it’s time to bury the romantic concept of sport once and for all, and accept that the era of technology, bioengineering and enhanced life is officially here. Of course, old school cheating has always been a part of the story, and can still change the course of competition.

The romantic concept of sport – where athletes competed for the love of the sport – has been dying a slow death for the better part of 4 decades with the advent of free-agency, endorsement deals that pay better than prize winnings and salaries, and the explosion in popularity of sports in general. Events of the past few years have driven a figurative stake through the allegorical heart of the quaint, out-dated notion that is the romantic concept of sport.

For a minute, let’s not even bother with the PED issue and just focus on good old-fashioned cheating of the kind favored by Kelvin Sampson and Bill Belichick. These guys didn’t need cutting-edge science in their quest to get an illegal leg up over their competitors, just standard household technology to violate the rules.

Sampson is a recidivist cheater and I heard one college hoops analyst say that the cell phone is Sampson’s crack. The current-for-the-moment Hoosier head hoops coach was busted for misdeeds with his cell phone while holding the same position at the University of Oklahoma, and Indiana knew what they were getting when they hired him. And brother, did they get it. Sampson has not only apparently done the exact same thing that he got in trouble for doing while at Oklahoma – something that he was expressly forbidden from doing again – but has apparently misled investigators as well.