The Summer Olympic - 127 Years Of Scandal And Counting, Part 1
Ahead of the Paris games, a reminder that the Olympics and controversy have long gone hand-in-hand.
From Athens 1896 to next year’s Parisian spectacular, the Summer Olympics has produced more than its fair share of glory. But wherever there are medals to be won, you can be sure that there will be those athletes willing to bend the rules. And if you think that cheating and skulduggery are new phenomena in Olympic sport, prepare to have your illusions shattered.
1908: Halswelle’s Swimming Walkover
London’s first games was memorable for many things, among them the only walkover in the history of Olympic sport. And, irony of ironies, it occurred in the men’s 400m swimming. American John Carpenter won the event, only to be disqualified for deliberately blocking British competitor Wyndham Halswelle. Carpenter’s manoeuvre would have been legal in his homeland but was outlawed in the UK. The gold medallist disqualified, a rerun was requested but since Halswelle’s sole rivals were also from the US, they decided to give it a miss so guaranteeing the home athlete his unusual place in Olympic history.
1912: The Ballad Of Jim Thorpe
The greatest sportsman that ever lived? It’s a title that sits very well on the broad shoulders of Jim Thorpe, the Oklahoma-born American football legend who, when he wasn’t playing a mean game of baseball or basketball, won gold medals in both the pentathlon and the decathlon at the Stockholm games. Only problem was, in the age of the amateur, Thorpe dared to play two seasons of semi-pro baseball. For this, he was stripped of his Olympic titles, an astonishing overreaction that wouldn’t be reversed until 1983, fully 30 years after the death of the Sac and Fox sporting colossus, a man whose name still looms large over the games he dominated.
1936: Hitler’s Games
There are any number of awful things about the Berlin Olympics but the behaviour of American Olympic Committee chairman Avery Brundage is particularly contemptible. With Jesse Owens winning every gold going, the US looked set to complete its sprint dominance with victory in the men’s 4×100. This they subsequently did but it was without the involvement of Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, two Jewish Americans who were withdrawn from the team on Brundage’s instructions for fear of upsetting the hosts. By the way, the only country to boycott the Berlin games in opposition to Hitler’s treatment of Jewish Germans? The Republic of Ireland.