This month saw the passing into semi-retirement of British cyclist Bradley Wiggins, with his failed attempt to win the classic Paris Roubaix race marking his move down the divisions to his own branded cycling team, within which he will focus his attentions on winning another Olympic gold medal in Rio.

The success of Wiggins on the road, most notably in his annus mirabilis in 2012 when he won Paris Nice, the Tour of Romandie, Dauphine Libre, the Tour de France and the Olympic time trial gold medal, has mirrored the tremendous growth in cycling in the country during the last few years.

Cycling has become, if not cool, certainly cooler, and the spotlight given to the sport by riders like Wiggins and former world champion Mark Cavendish, has prompted a number of attempts to glean lessons from the sport and apply them more widely.

Most of these attempts have revolved around organizational effectiveness, with Richard Martin using the metaphor of the peloton to describe a more agile way of working.

What can cycling teach us about ethics?

Of course, it’s hard to think of cycling without thinking about cheating.  Whilst the sport is undoubtedly beautiful, both in the terrain ridden through and the apparent purity of man against nature, that purity has been shattered throughout the sports history by doping.

A recent study set out to explore the nature of cheating in cycling, and whether any parallels can be made with cheating in the corporate world.

Normally when we think of corporate fraud we think of rogue individuals who are acting upon their own evil instincts rather than anything systemic that underpins their behaviors.

The study into cheating in cycling suggests that cheaters often do so more to benefit their team than themselves individually.

Cheating for the good of the team

The study begins its exploration in 2010, at a time when greater monitoring of the blood of the peloton began in a bid to crack down on cheating in the sport.

The analysis found that the role within the team was crucial, with the key riders in each team most likely to have dodgy bloody values.  Next in the hall of shame were the key domestiques for those key men.

The study suggests that the teams least likely to have cheaters on it were those where each rider was free to compete individually.  Of course, that isn’t really how the sport works so it isn’t clear just where such teams were found.

In other words, the authors suggest that people were cheating less for themselves than they were their team.

I’m not convinced by the cycling analogy, if only because I’m not sure there are many cycling teams that do operate in an lone wolf kind of way.

Nevertheless, the general finding that a central strategy to guard against cheating and wrongdoing is to reduce the pressure on people to win does appear to have some merit.