If you could cheat... would you?

Here's the thing:  there is a right way and a wrong way to do things.  It's black and white, and there are no shades of gray.  If you cheat and you get away with it, are you as satisfied as if you hadn't cheated?  Why am I mentioning this?  Well, besides the obvious discussions that have been ongoing with the amount of doping (= cheating) in sports, there was recently a local development that was of interest to me. 

There was a fellow triathlete that I was casually acquainted with who is now headed to prison for defrauding one of his clients.  It was an amount that was pretty substantial, and allowed this triathlete to live pretty well for a few years.  But he got caught.  And now there has been some speculation that, if his morals allowed him to do this, how much of a stretch would it have been to his morals to use PED's to improve his athletic performance?  Certainly, he was able to afford it.  Obviously, in the big picture, this is a minor issue, but it does cause me to ask the bigger question:  how many people cross the line?  And is it worth it? 

From minor offenses such as drafting, which may be accidental, to major, blatant cheating, there is a continuum of cheating.  Certainly, in a drafting call where the person in front of you slows down and you are unable to get through the box in 15 seconds, I am less judgmental.  Or, if you are on an open road, and a car (or semi) blows by you, there is an unavoidable draft that you are catching (the press truck in the early Ironman Hawaii races was legendary for providing a big draft to the race leader).  Those, to me, are not major issues, and are often unintentional.  I guess that's the tipping point for me:  intention.  If the attempt is to intentionally get an edge by skirting the rules, I don't have a lot of tolerance.  Does that mean that I don't try to get every edge that I can?  Absolutely not.  Certainly, I'll try to do what I can to get the most out of myself and my equipment.  But, I tend to base my decisions on intent, rather than the "letter of the law."  For instance, blood doping wasn't illegal in 1984, but does anybody really think this was okay to do for the Olympics?  And I've always found it somewhat amusing that Lance Armstrong has always said that he has have never tested positive for a banned substance, rather than that he has not taken any PED's.   I guess I don't subscribe to the old adage, "If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying."

The funny thing is that even though a lot of endurance athletes make fun of a sport like golf, it is actually one of the sporting (IMO) of all sports.  Golfers call penalties on themselves, even if nobody else has seen the violation.  What other sport does that?