Gold medal for controversy

The ancient games of Olympia, formally dating back to 776BC, were one of the formats the Greeks used to worship their Gods and have forever been founded on principles of goodwill. Even in the earliest events neighbouring kings signed treaties to agree a truce allowing athletes to travel and compete.

Of course the Olympic Games has evolved into the world’s greatest sporting spectacle since they were reinvented by Pierre de Coubertin who founded the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1894 leading to the first Olympics being hosted by Athens two years later.

As Rio de Janeiro prepares to host the 2016 Games the lead-up has featured some of the greatest controversies in the history of the event.

Amidst a slumping economy that has seen Brazil suffer their worst depression since the 1930s there were concerns that the facilities and infrastructure would not be completed on time. While the venues have been finished transportation concerns for fans persist while construction companies have been embroiled in a nationwide corruption scandal.

However, it is the anxieties over health matters that have led to high-profile withdrawals as athletes wish to avoid the threat of being bitten by a Zika-infected mosquito with Brazil even declaring a public health emergency leading to breeding grounds being cleared by specialist teams.

This continues from earlier problems with human sewage filtering into Olympic waters creating a number of disease-causing viruses. At test events a number of athletes fell ill.

That’s not the end of it with violence in the city on the increase with even the local police recently striking, demanding better resources to cope, while some brandished banners at the airport, greeting new arrivals with signs welcoming them ‘to hell’!

Of course the Olympics has been the centre of controversy in the past with individuals taking advantage and nations using them as an opportunity to further their political ideals.

In 1936 Adolf Hitler was determined to prove to the world the superiority of the ‘Aryan’ people only to be undone by a black man from Ohio who claimed four gold medals. Despite being present for the majority of the ceremonies Hitler refused to hand over medals or shake the hand of Jesse Owens in Berlin.

Mexico City in 1968 also became famous for political reasons.

With civil rights prominent in the US, black athletes were encouraged to boycott the Games. However, two African-American sprinters, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, staged a non-violent protest on the podium by raising their right fists in a Black Power salute. They were subsequently banned from the Olympic village for violating protocols yet they had raised awareness to international levels.

Controversy this year surrounds Russia. The World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) had recommended all Russian athletes be banned after its independently-commissioned report found evidence of a four-year ‘doping programme’ across the ‘vast majority’ of Olympic sports.

The IOC stopped short of applying a blanket ban in a move criticised by Wada and others, while swimmers Vladimir Morozov and Nikita Lobintsev became the first Russian athletes to appeal against their ban to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) says a three-person panel will have the final say on which Russian athletes can compete at the Rio Games, a decision which stunned and confused the sporting world. Only last week the IOC said individual sports’ governing bodies must decide if Russian competitors are clean amid claims of state-sponsored doping.

But it now says the newly-convened panel ‘will decide whether to accept or reject that final proposal’.

The three-person panel comprises Ugur Erdener, president of World Archery and head of the IOC medical and scientific commission, Claudia Bokel of the IOC athletes commission, and Spanish IOC member Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr, son of the ex-IOC president of the same name.

More than 250 Russian athletes have so far been cleared to compete. However, the International Weightlifting Federation last Friday formally suspended Russia’s eight-strong weightlifting team because of doping offences.

It will not be the first time athletes have faced exclusion. Montreal in 1976 was boycotted by 22 African nations who were protesting about the involvement of New Zealand who had sent a rugby team to play earlier in the year in South Africa.

Four years later with the Cold War at its peak, the US and its allies withdrew from the Moscow Games, instead hosting an alternative, the Liberty Bell Classic in Philadelphia.

Once this year’s Games begin there will be the opportunity for further controversies. Caster Semenya will receive plenty of publicity, not all of it positive.

She shot to world fame in 2009 when she won the 800m World Championship and was forced to undergo gender testing. The results proved that she has natural but higher than average testosterone levels, a condition referred to as hyperandrogenism, and has been cleared to race. She has posted the best times in the world this year by some margin.

This will not be the first time a winner’s gender has been questioned. In 1936 Helen Stephens won the women’s 100m with her vanquished opponents claiming she was “too fast to be a woman”. An examination proved she was. Or so everyone believed! In 1980 Stephens was shot outside a Cleveland shopping mall with the subsequent autopsy proving she was really a man!

Hopefully there will be no repeat of the doping scandal that surrounded Ben Johnson (1988) or athletes stooping to the same level as Tonya Harding who failed to report an attack on her main competitor, Nancy Kerrigan, ahead of the 1994 Winter Olympics, planned by her ex-husband.

Conversely, I am sure that there will be allegations of ‘match-fixing’ where strange results occur. In 1972 the US basketball team were leading the USSR in the dying seconds only to see the Soviets given three chances to win the game, which they did in the end amidst great controversy. To this day the US team has not claimed its silver medals.

Roy Jones Jr can also feel hard-done-by having landed 86 punches on Park Si Hun in their 1988 light-middleweight boxing bout only to see the South Korean lift the title. While the result still stands the three judges were all banned for two years.

One example of cheating that has been proven was when Borys Onyshchenko was found to be using a sword in the fencing section of the modern pentathlon with a hidden push-button circuit-breaker allowing him to register hits at will.

Despite the controversies the Olympics has been responsible for many positive changes, particularly those emanating from events mentioned earlier. Two additional examples are the 1948 introduction of competition for wheelchair athletes and, more recently, the 2000 Sydney Olympics where North and South Korea combined under a unified flag.

Let’s hope that Rio 2016 will be remembered for the positive memories it creates.