Red tracks wrote:
This is just drivel. Americans cheat all the time even though they don't have to (according to your logic above). Barry Bonds was rich and already a great baseball player before he doped. Lance Armstrong risked the good faith of the cancer community and the whole world. And he lived an apparently transparent life. All the baseball players who cheated had no need to cheat. And what about all the insider traders and other criminals in every country. They don't need to do it.
Do people not steal or lie or cheat in Norway? Is the risk of getting caught so great that no one does anything wrong?
Ha! .. I was going to write basically the same thing and once again you beat me to the punch. We are 100% on the same page thank you for destroying that guy's garbage argument. The will to win in to or to the best and to boost your ego is embedded in every culture and probably more so in the west than Africa. Yes escaping poverty may add a certain mount of motivation to some to "win at all costs". But as your examples and many many others prove it is clearly not a necessary condition. And to counter the poverty as motivation for cheating argument there are also cultural differences that make some Africans even less likely to cheat such as a suspicion and paranoia of modern medicines/ substances. I remember reading a detailed account of bekele when he was injured and the difficulty in convincing him to even take a vitamin pill or an Aspirin because he didn't trust the Western medications/ solutions.