As for "cheating", I guess that's a matter of opinion. It is no more cheating that what sprinters do trying to time the gun, long jumpers do trying to hit the board, or hurdlers do hitting the hurdles and not having it be "deliberate". There are consequences for pushing the envelope and well as rewards for getting away with it. A rec with a lot of dq's should get no more notice than a long jump with a lot of scratches. And one shouldn't forget that the rules of walking are specifically written so that it is only a violation if the lifting is visible to the human eye.
This is of course a separate issue, so I'll split it off. My problem is that in each of the other "cheating" issues that you mention above (except for the hurdles, and there's evidence that hitting hurdles slows rather than speeds), the sport has moved to using mechanical non-human devices to measure much more precisely when an athlete is actually cheating. A sprinter can't anticipate the gun closer than 0.1 seconds; a jumper can't mark the plastecine--there's a bright white line of demarcation. Walking has the ability to implement strict technical standards, but it refuses to do so. I and many other suspect this is so because it would dramatically slow down the events. Walking is now pretty much the last event where the question of "cheating" is left solely to the discretion of a human judge (the only other case being perhaps "Volzing").
<<<<If you don't like the event, fine. If you think it is the event where the rules are violated the most due to inability to officiate, then I'd say you may be right, and it shares that distinction with the 110 hurdles. But other than taking drugs - where walking is no less guilty than most events - 99% of the athletes are not cheating, they are simply pushing themselves and the rules to the limit, as they should be.>>
My contention wasn't about whether I liked walking or not, and certainly respect the effort involved in the event. My point is simple: the reliance on fuzzy standards implemented solely by human judges leaves open the ability to incrementally squeeze past the judging standards, and this ability should not be discounted for accounting for much of the improvement in the events.
As for walkers using EPO to achieve these improvements, why haven't native-born European distance runners achieved the same level of improvements? David Moorcroft's 13:00 from 1982 would still be an outstanding mark for a European, but an also ran globally. This huge discrepancy in improvements between the two groups stands out as a glaring counterargument.
RMc
