For those who believe that sport brings out the best in people the past few months have been rather unsettling. The Olympic games have been tarnished by allegations of bribery and corruption; the professional basketball season in America was delayed by a dispute over player salaries; Rupert Murdoch tried to buy Manchester United for ?625m, amid accusations that he will rig the television schedules to make sure that it is money well spent; the international cricket establishment was faced with allegations of bribery and illegal betting by senior Australian cricketers; an earbiting former boxing champion was invited to re-enter the ring; and Flo Jo dropped dead at 38, presumably as a result of her apparent abuse of performance-enhancing drugs.

Once, of course, sport was seen as a civilising force. For the Victorians, sport was meant to encourage leadership, teach team-work and form gentlemen. Ungentlemanliness, let alone cheating, was considered almost treasonable. In a sense, it was: Britain needed honest civil servants to sustain its empire, and sport was invented to provide them. To bend the rules was to miss the point. Sport was about honour and duty, and winning without them was not winning at all. If the Victorians were to sustain their self-image as the carriers of law and decency to the darkest corners of the globe, they needed moral reassurance from the games field. Sport was believed to forge national character, so if the boys were cheating on the playing fields of Eton, what might the adults be up to with the tax returns in India?

Since then, so much has changed. Today’s sportsmen make money-often, lots of it. Now sport is a proper career: an end in itself, not just a way of becoming a better adult. Sportsmen, like doctors and lawyers, are “professionals.” But the rhetoric of “professionalism” has undermined sport’s moral purposes. Instead sport is seen as entertainment-and in entertainment, within the bounds of law, anything goes. It is thought to be old hat to harp on too much about sportsmanship and honour-too much stress on sportsmanship is even held responsible, by some, for Britain’s alleged sporting decline.

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