Would you be proud to “win first place” by cheating?

I had the weird experience of paddling on a dragon boat team last weekend. In the first race we used our own team members and came in 3rd. In the second race we took out four members of our team and replaced them with more powerful paddlers from two other teams who weren’t in our class and came in 2nd by a fraction of a second. In the final we took out an additional paddler and replaced him with another ringer and we barely got first place.

I haven’t read the rule book on this practice but it is clearly not authorized because each team had to wear specific I.D. bracelets. But we simply just switched bracelets to try to fool the officials. And it worked.

The bizarre thing is that other members of my team are so proud of their first place “victory”. I only got to paddle twice and they gave me a medal. I accepted it only to not make a big deal about it. I also feel embarrassed to have participated in this fiasco and can’t bear to even look at the medal. Am I crazy to feel this way? What do you think?