Sport, as in life, is riddled with contradictions, the most basic being that between the joy of participation and the individual human desire to win. As sport has become increasingly professionalized that desire to win has been bound up with the prospect of great wealth. But with great wealth comes ugly greed. Barely a week goes by without a new case of cheating hitting the headlines. Bloodgate, Crashgate, the drug takers, the match fixers and the professional divers; the list is endless. Corruption appears to permeate every aspect of modern professional sport, yet our addiction to sport seems to know no bounds. Its as if we are all hooked onto a giant soap opera whose purpose is to blind us from the bleaker realities of daily life.

As in Roman times, its bread and circuses for the masses while our rulers stuff their pockets. As the clock ticks down to the 2012 Olympics, sport will increasingly be making the headlines both on and off the playing fields.

British sport will be under the microscope as never before. So will our progressively obese society with its multifarious social and economic ills. The government talks of an Olympic legacy but nobody seems convinced. With football, our national sport, becoming the play thing of billionaire financiers, no one is quite sure whether the Premier League monolith will go the way of our banking system. Will the bubble burst? At the other end of the spectrum, parents are unsure whether grassroots sport is as healthy for their kids as the government would have us believe.

Rampant cheating and intense pressures, even at the youngest level, makes us question where sport is heading in the 21st century. Sporting Polemics is a website where the sporting contradictions will be unravelled. You are invited to take an active part in that process either by direct contribution or by responses to existing articles. No article or response will be edited but the editorial team reserve the right to accept or refuse an article on the grounds of its relevance. Personal vitriolic will be set aside.

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