Imagine you are a teacher, giving tests over the course of several years. Even though you mention other behavior that is forbidden, for a long time you never tell your students that copying from a crib sheet, or another student, is wrong. It’s never listed as being against the rules. You leave the room when giving an exam, and you grade on a curve. What do you suppose will happen? If a C student does better, and in doing so starts outperforming others, forcing their grades down, will all of them chose integrity over better grades? Of course not.

You ask the students if they cheated. What answer will you get?

Phelps gets suspended, A-Rod gets … nothing

Yeah, Michael Phelps got suspended. Why? Because if he smoked pot, he broke the rules. Baseball, on the other hand, had no punishment for steroid use for the time in question. Steroids, specifically, were not “banned” until 2002, and that’s not even right, because there was no punishment for their use until 2004. So yeah, A-Rod did something commonly accepted as cheating in almost every sport, but up until baseball tested for them and had punishment, there was nothing to distinguish steroid use from vitamin supplements and eating your spinach (other than steroids needing a prescription, but that doesn’t seem to be the objection) except public perception, and public perception doesn’t sign the paycheck. So A-Rod will get some well-deserved derision and maybe lose some sponsorship money, too, but the organization that is Major League Baseball shouldn’t get free pass here, and nor should the players’ union — they resisted the implementation of these rules. Anyone discussing this? I don’t know — I’ve tried to avoid these stories. Too many sanctimonious sports pundits abound. (Personally, I think all modern electronic devices are performance-enhancing, so they’re all hypocrites if they use a word processor or cellphone to get their job done)

(Oh, and one could substitute law enforcement people not giving other law enforcement people e.g. parking tickets as another example of this, to name another example completely at random. Do they start parking illegally? You betcha.)