An analyst and assistant coach with the Canadian women’s soccer team have been sent home from the Olympics after New Zealand Football lodged a complaint about a drone being flown over the women’s team’s training session at Saint-Etienne, presumably spying on the team ahead of the Canada-New Zealand matchup on July 25.
While instances of doping have sadly become commonplace at the Olympics, other cheating instances by athletes and their coaches are rarer. Here’s a look at some earlier Olympic cheating scandals (that we know about).
CUTTING THE COURSE: In 1904, American Frederick Lorz appeared to win the men’s marathon at the Games in St. Louis, Missouri and officials were preparing to hand him a medal when spectators called a halt to proceedings, claiming Lorz had not run the whole course. Lorz said he had crossed the finish line as a joke. After becoming exhausted after 15 kilometres, he got a lift with his manager. When his manager’s car broke down around the 30-kilometre mark in the race, Lorz ran the rest of the way. Lorz was initially banned from racing for life, but the ban was rescinded less than a year later and he resumed racing, winning the 1905 Boston Marathon.
CLUCKING ALONG: Swedish equestrian Bertil Sandström had been poised to take the silver medal in dressage at the 1932 Los Angeles Games before he was relegated to last for clucking to his horse, in direct violation of rules that state riders may not use their tongues or whips to control their mounts. Sandström claimed the sound was a squeak from his saddle and appealed the decision, but was unsuccessful.
BRINGING THE HEAT: East German lugers Ortun Enderlein, Angela Knösel and Anna Maria Mueller were disqualified from the 1968 Games in Grenoble, France after a judge and three witnesses reported seeing them warming their sled runners prior to starting their third run, which would have caused their sleds to slide faster. “This has nothing to do with sports any more. This is just trying to outmanoeuvre your opposition with dirty tricks. It’s a scandal,” Richard Hartmann, coach of the West German team, said at the time, as reported by United Press International. A coach of the Austrian team, who unsuccessfully argued the East German men should also be disqualified, called heating the runners on a luge “worse than doping.”
ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING: Soviet Union pentathlete Boris Onischenko was disqualified from competition during the Montreal 1976 Games for rewiring the handle of his epee so he could register a hit without touching his opponent with his weapon. The deception was discovered during the second round of competition when a British athlete complained to a referee that a registered hit had not touched him. Onischenko’s epee was confiscated and Onischenko fought with a different weapon — winning four out of five of his bouts — while his doctored epee was examined by the weapon control committee. “I can’t imagine why he did it, what an idiot,” the secretary general of the Union Internationale de Pentathlon Moderne said at the time. Onischenko was disqualified and banned from the sport for life. He is believed to have acted alone, with the Soviet delegation expressing regret over the incident. “The team … the trainers did not know. These are not our methods.”
TAKING OUT THE COMPETITION: Ahead of the 1994 Games in Lillehammer, American figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was assaulted after a training session by a large man who hit her above the knee with a metal baton. The assailant was linked to the ex-husband of rival figure skater Tanya Harding, who said Harding had approved the assault. Kerrigan recovered in time to compete at the 1994 Games alongside Harding. Kerrigan won silver while Harding finished eighth. Harding was eventually banned from skating, fined and sentenced to supervised probation and community service for her role in the assault.
THROWING THE MATCH: Four doubles teams — two from South Korea and one each from China and Indonesia — were disqualified from women’s badminton at the 2012 Games in London after throwing matches to optimize their positions in the playoffs. The Chinese team was accused of starting the problem by deliberately losing a match to avoid meeting another Chinese team in the semi finals. Other teams then started behaving in a similar way. “Sport is competitive,” said International Olympic Committee vice president Craig Reedie at the time. “If you lose the competitive element, then the whole thing becomes a nonsense.”