Letter

Dear Reader,

I did project in order to elaborate more on the reasons, why someone would want to cheat. In my opinion, the most significant reason, why athletes cheat is that they are surrounded with high expectations that they fear that they will not be able to achieve. My thesis and my expository essay discuss the reasons, why people cheat, such as the high expectations and that even though there are many athletes that get caught each year cheating they still continue to cheat and risk being seen as a cheater. This is also closely related to my golden thread, which is that success is an expectations that keeps on increasing and that once someone succeeds they will continue to want more and to go above and beyond the previous expectations. It is very easy to become hungry for more success and to achieve more once someone achieves something. Success is time consuming and requires a lot of hard work, but the reward can be even greater.

My pieces in this multi-genre project discuss all of the various aspects success and its significance and importance in the lives of athletes. The first piece is a quality piece about success that uses personification of success to summarize the life of Lance Armstrong. Success is a very dominant yet lonely force. If someone wants to be really successful in anything that they do they must almost abandon everything else that they do and only focus on the things that truly matter to them. It is for that reason that a lot of people do not like success as well as the fact that people eventually become very jealous of the accomplishments of an individual. This presents the nasty side of success that shows how people can be jealous of one’s success and will even try to do anything they can to make them go away. The first piece also discusses the importance of being honest, while succeeding, because if someone ends up cheating then everything they do might be brought to questioning and as a result they might not achieve anything and be remembered as a cheater. In my second piece, which is a T-shirt design, I try to relate the idea of high exceptions and success to myself. As a swimmer, I train very hard and that comes at sacrifice, such as not exceeding in school as much as I want to or giving up time that I could spend with friends for another practice and another chance to improve my swimming. The T-shirt shows my goals as a swimmer and what I want to become and that is a very important goal for me, to go to the Olympics one day. My third piece discusses the fear that an athlete might have before a  race or a performance, which is supposed to help the reader visualize and try to image, where the idea of cheating might come from and how the process is very stressful. The poem is a pantoum and I try to extend it a couple more lines to keep the idea going and to incorporate all of the negative through and the pressure felt before a race, which is crucial to understanding the importance and the need to succeed that an athlete can feel before a race. Finally, my last piece is a convincing piece that shows how an athlete can be convinced to cheat, how the last moments of insecurity before a race can cause an athlete to try and take some performance-enhancing substances in order to secure a position or make sure that they win and succeed. This is another poem, but is meant to be read as two voices. On the left we have a voice of dishonesty trying to convince the swimmer on the right that they are not capable of achieving their goals and that they need something extra to get to succeed in the race that is about to happen. All of the pieces show the various phases and steps in cheating, weather it is insecurity or the need to cheat or the pressure to accomplish a goal. All of these combine and finally force an athlete to cheat, which is very harmful to the athlete if they get caught.

Overall, in this project I tried to show to the audience the significance of the issue of cheating in the world of sports. Cheating ruins the integrity of the game. This project has also made up my mind about cheating. Originally, I thought that there could be ways that cheating could be tolerated, but after researching and realizing that it ruins the experience of the game, I realize that it should be punished. Even if it does not help the teams achieve their goals, such as the well-known Deflategate, the athletes that cheat should be banned from the sport, because they question loyalty and the very integrity of the sport. I believe that it is important to look at the reasons why athletes cheat, because that might help preventing future generations from cheating, by reducing the pressure and the need to succeed that they face, but it should never be any form of justification for any type of cheating.

Sincerely,

Maciej Olszewski