Day -25: Scandals and Controversies!!

It's actually very frowned upon to kick a referee in the face.

Despite the International Olympic Committee (IOC)’s stated vision “to build a better world through sport – to inspire, by being the best that we can be,” Olympic history is full of shady characters (many of whom are…literally high-level figures within the IOC). The extensive legacy of Olympic scandals and controversies is frequently un-fun: a lot of past Games’ strife has involved doping, authoritarian governments, harm to local communities and wildlife, bribery, racism, injuring people’s knees, killing people, and Nazis.

Also: a lot of like, problematic officiating decisions involving finicky rules of sports I don’t understand and therefore will not be attempting to talk about.

And yet! There have also been some significantly more whimsical-seeming scandals and controversies, which I will offer a sampling of here:

Innovative Approaches to Being Disrespectful

• Seemingly there was a very hostile vibe at the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, in which local spectators were constantly “booing, hissing, and whistling” at basically every competitor who wasn’t from the Soviet Union. Władysław Kozakiewicz from Poland—a country that was apparently at the time generally pissed at the USSR for having so much control over Eastern Europe—did a very high and impressive jump at the pole vaulting finals and was so sick of all the haters that he bras d’honneur-ed at the crowd. This is all news to me, but the bras d’honneur (also known as the “Iberian slap,” “Italian salute,” or, in Brazil, “the banana”) involves pointing your fist upward with one arm while the other arm is gripping the bicep, and it is a very inflammatory way to say “fuck you”/“up yours.” Anyway, then Kozakiewicz did another really good jump and did the gesture again! And then he broke a world record in pole vaulting!

  The USSR had a VERY negative reaction to this and made noise about how Kozakiewicz should lose his gold medal for being so distasteful. The Polish government claimed that he actually wasn’t doing a rude gesture and in fact was just having involuntary muscle spasms in his arms due to pole vaulting so hard, which I think is very funny.

A joyously obscene gesture (or, if the Polish government is to be believed, an involuntary muscle spasm) from Moscow 1980 gold medalist Władysław Kozakiewicz.

• At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Cuban taekwondo-er Ángel Matos got mad at a referee and kicked him in the face. Kicked him in the face!!!

Innovative Approaches to Cheating

• At the 1932 Summer Olympics in L.A., Swedish equestrian Bertil Sandström won silver in dressage but then was demoted to last places…because officials found that he was using FORBIDDEN CLICKING SOUNDS to get his horsey to do what he wanted! He claimed the clicking noise was just his saddle a-creakin’ but the feds were not convinced.

• At the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, modern pentathlete Boris Onishchenko from the USSR used an épée with a special button in the handle that would make the electronic scoring system detect a hit when he pushed it, even if he didn’t actually successfully jab his opponent.

• At the 1984 Summer Olympics in L.A., Puerto Rican long jumper Madeline de Jesús got injured and wasn’t going to be able to run in the qualifying heat for the 400 meter relay. Conveniently, her identical twin sister Margaret also happened to be competing at the Olympics, so she swapped in for Madeline in the qualifier—and did in fact make it to the next stage of the competition! But then their coach found out and was like “absolutely we are not doing this” and pulled the team out of the final.

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• There was a LOT of controversy when Beijing was selected to host the 2008 Summer Olympics, most of which is outside of the purview of this newsletter. It seems like China did a lot to try to convince the outside world that it was in fact A Great Place to Host the Olympics, which included Beijing government trying to crack down on misbehavior from local police. This included distributing pamphlets to cops saying that officers needed to stop “being arrogant” and “hanging up on people who call to report crimes.” Iconique!!!!

Unexpected Interruptions from Random Guys

• During the men’s marathon at the 1972 Munich Olympics, hotshot American Frank Shorter was on track to win, but then some other racer was the first guy to run into the stadium where the finish line was and everyone was like “!!!!! wow an upset!!!” But then the crowd was like “wait a minute, this is just a random man,” who turned out to be a West German student named Norbert who had snuck onto the track for reasons that remain ambiguous to this day. So then people started booing him and then Frank showed up to finish the race and was like “why is everyone booing my arrival” and then some guy in the audience yelled “don’t worry, Frank” and Frank said “Why should I worry? I’m winning” because he wasn’t even aware there was an imposter in the mix. Anyway it seems like everything ended up working out for Frank, who was later played in a movie by Jeremy Sisto from Clueless! Here is video footage of this whole situation, featuring an apparently-famous outburst from ABC commentator Erich Segal going “It’s a fraud, Frank!”

  

  Random German man Norbert Südhaus rolling up to the men’s marathon finish line in Munich to the boos of all.

• So—there’s this disgraced Irish ex-priest named Neil Horan (not to be confused with Niall Horan, the also-Irish third-best member of defunct pop group One Direction) who bops around high-profile European events like the World Cup and the birth of Prince George yelling about the end of times and occasionally praising Hitler, all while wearing outlandish outfits. He came to the 2004 Athens Olympics to cause additional ado: toward the end of the men’s marathon, he ran onto the track and tackled Brazilian runner Vanderlei de Lima while wearing a big sign warning that the second coming was near. Bummerly, de Lima lost his lead in the race and was so discombobulated from being attacked that he couldn’t make up time, so he ended up getting bronze.

• The men’s 100 meter final at the 2012 London Olympics was about to start when spectator Ashley Gill-Webb threw a water bottle at Usain Bolt!!! His aim was not particularly good so instead it hit Tyson Gay! Gill-Webb happened to be sitting next to a judo bronze medalist from the Netherlands who punched him!!! Gill-Webb ended up getting arrested and the race was unaffected.

  Sebastian Coe, chair of the organizing committee for the London Games, later said, “I'm not suggesting vigilantism but it was actually poetic justice that they happened to be sitting next to a judo player.”

Extracurricular Athlete Mischief

• At the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, a bunch of Australian athletes really wanted to see their countrymen play Serbia in the basketball semifinal but I guess couldn’t get tickets to the game, so they used fake credentials to get in, prompting police action(!!) from the city government. The Australian Olympic Committee was very like “they did nothing wrong!!” and paid off their fines (around 3100 USD per athlete) and also said they were going to provide counseling to the athletes’ parents which is…huh? Anyway, in that particular game, Australia lost fairly badly to Serbia anyway—crime apparently DOESN’T pay!!

• Objectively the much bigger instance of Extracurricular Athlete Mischief in Rio was when famous swimmer and himbo Ryan Lochte and various less-famous male teammates drunkenly peed all over a Brazilian gas station and then falsely claimed to the world that they had been robbed at gunpoint.

  Today, Lochte charges $59 for personalized videos on Cameo; his reviews are generally positive, although one customer said “some of the pronunciations of several words were not correct” and another reported that Ryan “wished the wrong person a happy birthday.”

  

  Ryan Lochte also went on to appear on season 1 of reality competition show The Traitors but did not demonstrate significant capacity for Machiavellian machinations.

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• Right before the 2004 Summer Games in Athens, Konstantinos Kenteris and Katerina Thanou—two extremely big-deal Greek sprinters—missed mandatory drug tests the night before the Opening Ceremony. They had both already missed previous drug tests, so this was Not A Good Look from a doping perspective. But then later that night, both of them ended up in the hospital, because they were in a motorcycle accident!!! BUT!! It quickly became clear that Athens police had no record of such a crash occurring! In 2011, they ended up getting convicted of faking the crash, and their coach plus a bunch of doctors were convicted of perjury for backing up the athletes’ story! But then later that year an appeals court decided we can’t really know for sure whether the crash was faked—hmm.

  Per NYT, “Mystery and miscommunication are nothing new for the pair.” Can you imagine someone saying this about you and your coworker??? One example given: “In March 2003, they were supposed to be training in Crete but were found to be in Qatar.” Who among us??