Tarnished gold Some of the great Olympics cheat Essays - Sports

Tarnished gold: Some of the 'great' Olympics cheats Faster, higher, farther...sneakier? From non-disabled Paralympians to rigged fencing foils and badminton players intent on losing - here's our guide to the Olympians who fell far short of the high Olympic ideals... Guy Adams @ guyadams Wednesday 1 August 2012 11:00 BST Tarnished gold: Some of the 'great' Olympics cheats An official threatens Greysia Polii and Meiliana Jauhari of Indonesia and Jung Eun Ha and Min Jung Kim of Korea with a 'black card' disqualification In the long history of Olympic cheating last night's effort (or rather lack of it) by badminton players at Wembley Arena is a little unusual. Rather than attempting to win through the employing of devious methods the players from China and South Korea, in fact, appeared to be attempting to lose in order to manipulate a draw. The farcical scenes that saw players booed, jeered, disqualified and then reinstated - have today led to the launching of disciplinary proceedings against the four players. The fiasco began when Chinese top seeds Wang Xiaoli and Yu Yang started to show little interest in beating Koreans Jung Kyung- eun and Kim Ha- na to finish top of Group A. Coming second would have meant avoiding compatriots and second seeds Tian Qing and Zhao Yunlei at least until the final. Tian and Zhao had been sent off their natural path to the final as second seeds by defeat to Denmark's Kamilla Rytter Juhl and Christinna Pedersen earlier in the day. The Koreans responded to China's antics by copying them and referee Thorsten Berg emerged to warn all the players and subsequently disqualify and reinstate them. Though the desire to lose may have been unusual, mendacity, manipulation and outright cheating at the Olympic games are nothing new... Ben Johnson, Seoul, 1988 There were drug cheats before, and there have been drug cheats since. But it took the downfall of Ben Johnson to demonstrate the apparent ubiquity of banned substances at the very highest level of sport. On the evening of 24 September, the Canadian sprinter set a new world record of 9.79 seconds in the men's 100m final, lifting his hand in triumph as he crossed the finish line ahead of arch rival Carl Lewis and Britain's Linford Christie, in what a BBC commentator declared "the greatest sprint race in history". Three days later, it became the most tarnished. Johnson was stripped of his medal, and had his record expunged after a sample of his urine tested positive for stanozolol , an illegal steroid. He initially denied cheating, but later confessed - arguing that drug use was endemic in top-tier athletics. In a way, he had a point: six of the eight finalists in that famous 100m race were at some point in their careers tainted by association with "juicing", and several, like him, served bans. But no one fell further, or harder, or more publicly than Ben Johnson. And somehow, the Olympic ideal would never feel quite the same. Boris Onischenko , Montreal, 1976 At the height of the Cold War, when Olympic sports were a cipher for political clashes between East and West, the heavily- favoured Russians took on second- favourites , Great Britain, in the fencing leg of the Modern Pentathlon. Onischenko , who had won silver in the previous two Games, and was desperate to go one better, easily dispatched the UK's Danny Parker. Then he won a baffling bout against Adrian Parker, in which the electronic scoreboard registered a hit, despite an apparent lack of contact between Onischenko's epee and Parker's body. Next up was Jim Fox, a British Army captain. Early in their bout, the scoreboard once more lit up, suggesting a Soviet triumph. But Fox, who was sure he'd taken evasive action, was having none of it - and demanded an examination of his opponent's sword. "I thought the weapon was faulty," he later recalled. That was only the half of it. Buried beneath the leather handle, judges discovered an intricate wiring system designed to register a "hit" when a small button was pressed. "It was a real engineering job," said Mike Proudfoot , the British team manager. "Not just a ham amateur's effort. They had