Sports

Altogether, it was quite a plunge for Jacob Runyan and Chase Cominsky, two stars of the professional fishing world. In a matter of weeks they went from ...

The chair of the Irish dancing body at the center of that cheating scandal recently survived a no-confidence vote. For Runyan and Cominsky, the alleged con was as simple as stuffing fish inside other fish. For others, sports are a convenient political tool: take, for example, the case of the swimmer Lia Thomas. Cryptocurrency became a major sponsor of professional sports – and then, a major liability for the NBA’s Miami Heat and arena naming rights deal with the embattled firm FTX. (Though Niemann is suing his rival Carlsen and others for $100m in hopes of clearing his name, he has admitted to cheating in prior online matches to boost his streaming numbers.) In his book The Edge: The War against Cheating and Corruption in the Cutthroat World of Elite Sports, Roger Pielke Jr makes a case for cheating as an inherently human trait. It’s a pretty good reflection of all that’s good and bad in everything we do.” “Mix in core governance of competition, and it’s a pretty fertile Petri dish for all the things that you just listed off – which is quite a list.” And while it’s expected that the best competitors would occasionally cross the line, it’s strange that so many would pick this year to do it. In [another case](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/06/irish-dancing-world-cheating-allegations-clrg), a dance teacher was accused of having traded sexual favors for higher scores. Filling the insides of their five Lake Erie walleyes with stones and supermarket filets at a north-east Ohio angling tournament. In October, a grand jury indicted Runyan and Cominsky on felony charges for cheating, attempted grand theft, possessing criminal tools and misdemeanor charges of unlawfully owning wild animals.