Cheating In Olympic Games
News broke last week that despite a state-sponsored doping scheme, the Russian delegation would not be wholly disqualified from the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Instead, individual athletes’ fates are being assessed by their respective sporting federations. Those without evidence of doping, it seems, will be able to compete – a far more lenient response from the International Olympic Committee than many might have expected. Moreover it’s more lenient than the IOC’s historical counterpart, the ancient Greek Olympic Council, likely would have handed down.
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Ancient Olympians didn’t have performance-enhancing drugs at their disposal, but according to those who know the era best, if the ancient Greeks could have doped, a number of athletes definitely would have. “We only know of a small number of examples of cheating but it was probably fairly common,” says David Gilman Romano, a professor of Greek archaeology at the University of Arizona. And yet the athletes had competing interests. “Law, oaths, rules, vigilant officials, tradition, the fear of flogging, the religious setting of the games, a personal sense of honor – all these contributed to keep Greek athletic contests clean,” wrote Clarence A. Forbes, a professor of Classics at Ohio State University, in 1952. “And most of the thousands of contests over the centuries were clean.”
That said, ancient Greeks proved to be creative in their competitiveness. Some attempted to jinx athletes to prevent their success. According to Romano, “curse tablets could be found in athletic contexts. For instance, strips of lead were inscribed with the curse, then folded up and placed in the floor at a critical part of the athletic facility.”
Judging from the writings of the second-century A.D. traveler named Pausanias, however, most cheating in the ancient Olympics was related to bribery or foul play. Not coincidentally, the mythological basis of the Olympic games involves both, according to Romano’s writing. The figure thought to have founded the Olympic Games, Pelops, did so as a celebration of his marriage and chariot victory over the wealthy king Oinomaos, spoils he only gained after bribing the king’s charioteer to sabotage the royal’s ride. The first Games are said to have been held in 776 B.C., though archeological evidence suggest they may have begun centuries earlier.
References to legendary instances of cheating have survived the centuries. A scene of a wrestler attempting to gouge the eyes of an opponent and bite him simultaneously, with an official poised to hit the double-offender with a stick or a rod, graces the side of a cup from roughly 490 B.C. In Greece today, pedestals that once held great statues still line pathways that led to ancient stadiums. But these were not statues that heralded athletic feats, rather they served as reminders of athletes and coaches who cheated. According to Patrick Hunt, a professor of archaeology at Stanford University, these monuments were funded by levies placed on athletes or on the city-states themselves by the ancient Olympic Council.
At the 67 CE Olympic Games, Roman Emperor Nero supposedly made frequent use of bribes—the first of which might have been to allow him to compete, as the early Games were traditionally limited to Greeks. Perhaps the most blatant example of his bribery occurred in the four-horse chariot race, in which he was allowed to compete with 10 horses.
In Pausanias’ account, which is analyzed and translated in Forbes’ article, there were three main methods of dishonesty:
- The opening ceremony at the 2012 Olympic Games in London. “Even one cheat in that 10,500 is too many but using intelligence-based testing the message is clear to any athlete who believes.
- Claims of questionable officiating and even cheating flared Wednesday with the Olympic gymnastics, shooting and boxing competitions coming under fire. Australian veteran shooter Russell Mark.
- Like the Olympics, the Military World Games are held every four years. The inaugural competition was held in Rome in 1995 and this is China’s first time hosting the event, which will continue.
There are several stories of city-states trying to bribe top athletes to lie and claim that city-state as their own (a practice that continues in some form today, as the story of Dominica’s imported ski team from 2014 proves). When one athlete ran for Syracuse instead of his home city-state of Croton, the city of Croton tore down a statue of him and “seized his house for use as a public jail,” writes Forbes.
Then there was direct bribery between athletes or between those close to the athletes to influence the results. In 388 B.C., during the 98th Olympics, a boxer named Eupolus of Thessaly bribed three of his opponents to let him win. All four men were heavily fined, and up went six bronze statues of Zeus, four of which had inscriptions about the scandal and a warning to future athletes.
Finally, there were “fouls and forbidden tricks,” as Forbes refers to them. He references a fragment of a satirical play found, in which a group of performers claim to be comprised of athletes “skilled in wrestling, horse-racing, running, boxing, biting, and testicle-twisting.” Athletes were beaten with rods or flogged for fouling another player, for cheating to get an advantage, like starting early in a footrace, and for attempting to game the system that determined match-ups and byes.
And, it turns out, spectators did some cheating of their own, too. “One woman dressed as a man to see her son perform,” says Patrick Hunt. “She was caught and penalized.” Judges even ran into trouble at times. Forbes makes note of an instance in which officials voted to crown a member of their own city-state, an obvious conflict of interests. The judges were fined, but their decision was upheld. Once again, the modern Olympics haven’t been much different, for those who remember the 2002 Winter Games when a French judge gave Russian skaters high marks, allegedly in exchange for a Russian judge reciprocating for French ice dancers.
Entire city-states could get into trouble as well. In 420 B.C., according to Pausanias, Sparta was banned from the Olympics for violating a peace treaty, but one of their athletes entered the chariot race pretending to represent Thebes. He won, and in his elation, revealed who his true charioteer was. He was flogged and the victory was ultimately recorded as going to Thebes, with no mention of his name, which could be seen as an additional punishment (some records of Olympic victories have been discovered).
The modern events and global inclusivity of today’s Olympics may suggest how far we’ve come since ancient times, but scandals like the one playing out in Russia this summer remind us of what Patrick Hunt calls human nature: “We want an edge. Russian athletes may be banned from Brazil because of cheating, but people have always been looking for performance enhancing tricks.”
Jason Tremblay – PFT CertificateSince sport was created over two thousand years ago, so too has cheating. Competitors and coaches have always been searching for loopholes in the IOC ruling system, creating performance enhancing drugs, and using tactics to provide the upper hand in competition. While this competitiveness and drive to win has created implements that are contrary to the values of fair play in sport; competitiveness is also the reason why we have sport science. Athletes have become on drugs to reach the highest levels. Cheating and sport science have been intertwined ever since the origin of sport in Ancient Greece.
Cheating in the Ancient Olympic Games
In the first set of Olympic Games there were no rules forbidding performance enhancement aids. There is evidence of performance suppression tactics such as bribery and curses. On one such occasion legend has it that curses were placed on competitors so that they would not be at their best, or that the God’s of the Underworld would drive them mad. This involved the burial of a lead tablet containing the curse in racing venues. Another method of cheating, which was typical in the ancient world and still common today, is bribery. In the ancient world hidden payments were made for athletes to purposely suppress their performance and lose the event. In one famous case, a man who had previously promised his son’s opponent money, refused to pay the opponent. Unfortunately the man had said this in public, where everyone could hear him. Responses to cheating in the Ancient Olympic Games involved the removal of any titles that the cheater had earned, as well as the erection of a monument recording the cheaters achievements for all time.
Pre-PED Testing Era
Cheating In Olympic Games To Play
During the early 20th century athletes began to discover the power behind ergogenic aids and performance enhancing drugs. Long distance athletes began taking performance aids before and even during races. One such example occurred in the 1904 Olympic Games where Thomas Hicks consumed strychnine and brandy before and during the race. Until the Olympic games of 1968, the use of PEDs was simply a part of sport. There was no testing forbidding it and as a result sport science programs allocated financial assets to the development of ergogenic aids and PEDs. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now begin to see why certain nations such as Belarus, East Germany and the USSR were so successful in international competition. The benefits of PEDs can be seen in the diagram of annual training loads of the Bulgarian National Weightlifting Team seen below.
Cheat hill climb racing 2 game guardian. Introduction of Drug Testing
After the 1962 Olympics the IOC had seen enough of the effects that performance enhancing drugs were having on the games. The integrity of the Olympics was being challenged by the scientists making PEDs, coaches administering PEDs and the athletes taking them. In 1968 the IOC began drug testing at the first ever Olympic games. Although drug testing systems were put in place, the testing was not vigilant enough to detect many of the drugs that athletes were taking. In the 1968 Olympic Games only Hans-Gunnar Liljenwall, a Swedish Pentathlete, had tested positive for the use of alcohol. As drug testing protocols became more and more intensive, the number of athletes who tested positive in the 1972 Games and 1976 Games began to rise drastically.
Cheating In Olympic Games Gymnastics
The Ben Johnson Scandal
The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics sparked one of the greatest sprinting rivalries of all time between Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson and American sprinter Carl Lewis. The American sprinter would eventually go on to win Gold in the 100 meter. After the 1984 games, the lead up to the 1988 Summer Olympics belonged to the Canadian Ben Johnson. Johnson confirmed his status as the number one sprinter in the world by beating Lewis and smashing the world record at a time of 9.83 seconds at the World Championships of 1987. In the Seoul 100 meter dash Ben Johnson clocked an incredible time of 9.79 seconds and beating his rival Carl Lewis to win gold. The success of Johnson was short; Ben Johnson was only king of the sprinting world for 3 days before drug testing results showed that he had tested positive for Stanzolol. Johnson’s main defense for cheating was that other competitors were cheating as well and that he was just trying to maintain pace with his competitors. This was a claim that gathered weight with the release of the Exum Report, which accused Carl Lewis of taking performance enhancing drugs. The Ben Johnson scandal is widely considered to be the biggest doping scandal in the history of the Olympics.
References
Potter, David. (2012) Cheating is as old as the Olympics. Retrieved August 4