Cheat

A hilarious trip through the history of cheating sport.

Where there’s sport, there’s cheating. No sport is immune; athletics, swimming, rugby, American Football, cricket, baseball, badminton, motorsports, tennis and curling. Yes, even that sport on the ice with brooms.

Almost as soon as humans started playing sport competitively, they started to cheat. They cheated to win, for the fame, for the money and sometimes for reasons that are hard to understand.

From the fiendishly clever to the outright hare brained, the borderline to the blatant, Titus O’Reily takes us through the many and varied ways athletes and countries have tried to cheat over the years.

There’s the winner of the New York marathon who was driven in a car part of the way, the male basketballer whose drug test revealed he was pregnant, the Tour De France where many of the riders took the train, the Spanish Paralympic basketball team who faked being intellectually disabled to win gold at the 2000 Paralympics.

As well as sharing an alarming amount of tales involving swapping bodily fluids, Titus takes you through doping, illegal equipment, bribes, playing dirty, faking injuries, wearing disguises, dodgy referees, ball tampering, eye gouging, itching powder, licking an opponent to distract them and sending a dwarf out to bat to shrink the strike zone.

Just as sport has become more sophisticated, so has cheating in sport, from state backed doping programs to tiny motors in Tour De France bikes.

What does this say about us, that we cheat with such regularity and creativity? Will technology help stop cheating or will it only make it worse?

Mastering the not-so-subtle art of cheating is a hilarious trip through the history of cheating in sport, and a handy how-to-guide for the professional athlete in your family.

About the Author

Titus O’Reily is a writer, presenter, performer and broadcaster known for capturing the trials and tribulations of being an obsessive sports fan. His commentary and sporting round-ups have attracted over 300k followers on social media. As well as his own national comedy tours, O’Reily appears on The Front Bar, The Project and is a regular on ABC Radio and NOVA FM. He is in demand as a guest speaker at high-profile events like the AFL Grand Final. Titus has written four books: A Thoroughly Unhelpful History of Australian Sport (2017), A Sporting Chance (2018), Please Gamble Irresponsibly (2019) and Cheat: The Not-So-subtle Art of Conning Your Way to Sporting Glory (2020). His unique take on sport has been hailed by some of the most respected figures in sport as 'awful', 'childish' and 'barely comprehensible'. Others say 'hilarious'.