A new age of digital doping
If you think the world has gone mad, then let me add to how crazy it can really get. People compete in sport for fun and then realise they are good at it. “Good” meaning they are much better at the sport than the average competitor who competes in that space. Some people might have the right characteristics to perform a sport better than others, some don’t.
Elite wrestlers with all their muscle will not make a good cyclist and a tiny cyclist won’t be a good wrestler. It’s pretty obvious to know why.
Popular sports attract money and awareness and can offer competitors fame, cash, sponsorships and glory. The minute you add money or potentially becoming a Youtube sensation, you will attract a certain type of athlete. The type of person that internally has no moral compass or qualms about cheating to get the unfair advantage.
You are probably thinking I am talking about a doping scandal, but funnily enough I am actually referring to online or e-sports doping. Youtuber and professional cyclist Cameron Jeffers won the British e-racing championships earlier in the year but has since been accused of cheating by using a bot or automate-scripted program to make it appear as though he was cycling when he wasn’t.
Jeffers took apart his Zwift device, a device that allows your outdoor bicycle to be converted to an indoor bike, which tracks all your stats and scores. It can also be programmed so it feels like you are competing in a live event and that is how competitions are set.
All the uphills, downhills and challenges you face on the road, the Zwift configures to give you a similar experience. Cameron re-configured his device to make his bike appear fast, riding when he wasn’t and made it look like was pushing out higher workloads than other cyclists. Higher output means you cycle faster and leave other online competitors behind.
You don’t have to look further than your Strava app when you want to race for bragging rights. E-sports athletes lie about their body weight and reduce it which inevitably then calculates that your power-to-body-weight is better and rewards you by cycling faster in the race.
If athletes use their real body weight, then it would be a fair game, but they don’t.
There is generally no reward in these groups other than bragging rights, yet people find ways to cheat the system.
E-sports is massive and you only have to look at $6 million-worth of reasons to know why. This was the single best win by one player in a live e-sports event.
South Africa rank 58th in the world’s 100 highest-earning players with a combined total of almost $1 million. The US lead the pack with just over $140m of collective wins.
Fifa turns over $6 billion annually and have a massive world-wide following and professional football clubs like Manchester City are realising they need to tap into this market. That is why they signed 18-year-old Kieran “Kez” Brown as their first e-sports pro-player. In turn, Premier
League rival West Ham signed Fifa player Sean “Dragonn” to their team.
Diego Gigliani, vice-president of media and innovation at Manchester City, said: “As e-sports continues to gain momentum, it makes sense for our club to be part of the action and get closer to our fans.”
He also sees this move as a way to tap into a bigger fan audience.
And more fans obviously translates into more revenue for the clubs.
The top 10 Fifa gamers earn on average R1.2 million a year for playing online games. The more money thrown into an event, the more opportunists will be around to profit and the more digital doping is set to become a mainstream possibility.
There will come a point in time where there will have to be an anti-digital doping agency to curve the rise in people manipulating the rules for profit.