As I heard the news about the test results of the horse who won the Kentucky Derby on June 5th, 2021, I thought back to the increasing list of athletes who have cheated with performance-enhancing drugs. I wondered from the perspective of the second-place person or team, who now presumably is the winner, how completely uninspiring a win that would be. Someone else seems to have cheated to win the game. A game that is something that occurs in a point in time. It’s not something that can be redone in any way, shape or form without a time machine and probably a whole lot of mess.
It is incredibly frustrating to think that you will never have that moment in the winner circle after having done your best, worked your hardest, trained for years, and to walk off thinking it wasn’t good enough. Only months later to find that it was, and that moment of triumph, that moment of basking in that very point in time, in which training, dedication, perseverance, and commitment all come together in that moment. It must be gutting.
I can only empathize, it’s these such times that one might want to demand that everyone is brought back to the field, all the competitors, that same audience, on that same kind of day and redo the award ceremony, all paid for by the cheaters.
If there’s a lesson to walk away from in all of this, is that when you do reach the conclusion of your goal, your race, or whatever it is that you are so incredibly focused on, you should always know to hold your head high. Know that you truly did the best you could, you didn’t cheat, you didn’t bend the rules, and you took no shortcuts. You did this all on your own terms. and if somebody bested you, then they should be congratulated and if they cheated to achieve that, then that shame of your congratulations can go on the presentation shelf for all to see along with those ill-gotten trophies.