Triumphs, tears and a doomed Dublin bid
DORANDO PIETRI TAKES A LEFT TURN
IN ONE of the most remarkable and unfortunate scenarios in Olympic history, the little Italian led the 1908 marathon as he entered London’s White City stadium. Alas, he turned left instead of right, and as the crowd informed him of the error, he collapsed in exhaustion.
He would collapse a further four times in those final few hundred yards, the final tumble just ahead of the line, from where he was given help and dragged over. He finished first before his inevitable disqualification for receiving assistance.
The writer Arthur Conan Doyle, who was there for the Daily Mail, later used the newspaper to raise a fund to help Pietri open a bakery
THE ROY JONES JOKE
ROY JONES JR is the case invariably cited when the scandalous standard of judging in Olympic boxing is mentioned.
What happened to Jones at the Seoul Olympics of 1988 remains a jaw-dropping tale.
He obliterated South Korea’s Park Si-Hun in the light middleweight final, landing 86 punches to 32 and forcing a standing eight count in the second round.
When the verdict went to the home fighter by split decision, it is said Park apologised to Jones Jnr. In a sport rife with corruption, and where case histories groan with accounts of wretchedly bad decision-making, what happened to Jones remains the dismal standard-setter.
Irish fighters, up to and including Katie Taylor in Rio, have suffered from judging that can be most charitably called terrible – but often demands more scepticism than that.
But given all that, this case remains out on its own. The scandalous decision is made more ridiculous by the fact that Jones went on to be one of the greatest fighters of all time.
THE SCANDAL OF ALL SCANDALS
EVEN Russia don’t make cheats like they used to. What played out in the modern pentathlon at the 1976 Olympics is unlikely to ever be matched for sheer skulduggery.
It centred on Boris Onischenko, a true great of the sport who was a three-time world champion and part of the gold-medal winning Soviet team of 1972. Within that orbit, few could match him with a fencing sword in hand.
All of which made the events that played out more extraordinary. There had been a suggestion something was amiss when Onischenko appeared to miss the British athlete Adrian Parker by a couple of inches and yet the scoring light illuminated for a hit.
But it was odder still when Parker’s team-mate Jim Fox stepped up against Onischenko and the same thing happened.
‘Boris tried it on the wrong bloke with me,’ Fox would later say. He had felt something was amiss in the way Onischenko had apologised, and also in the way he had wanted to change his sword once it had drawn attention.
Fox called for Onischenko’s epee to be examined and it was then that a network of wires was found under a pressure pad in the handle. It transpired the Soviet had been triggering the scoring system at will.
Britain would go on to win the modern pentathlon gold. Onischenko, meanwhile, was called before Leonid Brezhnev for a dressing down and was dismissed from the Red Army. He was last known to be working as a taxi driver in Kiev.
RADCLIFFE IN MELTDOWN
IT ENDED in tears on the side of a road. Paula Radcliffe had gone to Athens in 2004 as a heavy favourite in the women’s marathon, and in pursuit of the kind of medal that once seemed a formality in light of her other achievements in distance running.
Indeed, as a gauge of where she stood in that Olympic cycle, she had broken the marathon world record in both 2002 and 2003, the latter coming with a truly mindboggling run that would not be beaten until 2019.
But how wrong it went for Radcliffe on that biggest stage. The athlete herself has never blamed the conditions for what transpired, even though it topped 35°C that day and humidity was around 31 per cent. On a tough course, it would have been a testing environment in the best of times.
In this instance, though, she said her agonising abandonment of a dream around the 23-mile mark had nothing to do with the weather. In accepting that she could go no further while placed fourth and losing ground, she dropped to her haunches and wept.
Part of the problem, it was later suggested, was a reaction to antiinflammatories she had taken for a leg injury. In detailing ‘the biggest day of my running’ in her subsequent book, she explained how after a night of endless trips to the toilet, her entire body started shaking violently during her prerace ice bath.
By 22 miles she said her legs felt like ‘sore lead weights’ and that she was empty inside. With only four miles to go she stopped and started to well up, before trying to go again. After a few yards she gave up and dropped to the kerb.
Five days later, amid harsh criticism of ‘quitting’, she started in the 10,000m final but dropped out with eight laps to go. She never won an Olympic medal.
RUSSIA GET KICKED OUT
IT happened outside of the Games, in November 2015, but the decision by the IAAF, now World Athletics, to kick Russia out of their sport for state-sponsored doping remains one of the most significant moments in sport’s recent history.
Only one heavily vetted Russian was authorised to compete in the athletics at Rio 2016 as a neutral — the long jumper Darya Klishina — and the nation quite rightly remain as pariahs and outcasts in the sport to this day.
BLADES OF GLORY
It SEEMS surreal to recall the days when Oscar Pistorius was celebrated as an inspiration to people with disabilities the world over. To think, in winning six Paralympic sprint golds on those distinctive blades, there was a time when the ‘fastest man on no legs’
was among the most recognisable sporting figures on earth.
It peaked with his appearance at London 2012 when, having won a lengthy battle through the courts, he was permitted to compete against able-bodied runners.
He was the first amputee to do so and went on to reach the semifinal of the 400m. He wrapped up a poignant Games by carrying the South Africa flag at the closing ceremony.
FREEMAN UNITES A NATION
EXPECTATION has rarely been heavier – or worn so lightly.
In that way typical of the Olympics, the slight girl in the hooded body suit at Sydney 2000 had come to represent far more than an athlete in a 400m race.
Cathy Freeman was not simply Australia’s only serious hope of a gold medal in the athletics of a home Games, but she was also a proud carrier of the Aboriginal flag.
She was positioned as a symbol of unity and carried the weight of all the narratives that gathered around it.
By the time she took to lane six for the final, you could have understood if the magnitude of the pressure slowed her down. But that didn’t happen. Her gold medal and lap of honour under two flags remains a classic snapshot from the history of the Olympics.
SUPER SATURDAY
LONDON 2012 was a truly invigorating Games to attend, starting with an opening ceremony that has never been matched before or since.
But with each wearying revelation of a new doping scandal stemming from the Games, the realisation deepens that there is no memory safe from the wretchedness of cheating – or at the very least, pervasive suspicions.
That includes Super Saturday, the spellbinding evening in the
Olympic stadium when the hosts won three golds in less than threequarters of an hour. First, shortly after 9pm, was Jessica Ennis, that inscrutable and marvellous talent who annihilated the best heptathletes in the world. Then there was Greg Rutherford, winner of the long jump, and finally, Mo Farah, the 10,000m champion. The latter still has his passionate advocates, but doubts about him and his training methods have mushroomed in the intervening years.
GAY’S DUBLIN DREAM
WHEN he was the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Gay Mitchell decided the city should try and host the Olympics.
It is an absurd idea today, but it was even more ridiculous in the early 1990s, when the capital’s infrastructure and resources were more modest than today.
This was around the time that the idea of relocating a Premier League club to the city was being floated, and the projects were backed by some of the same people.
Neither idea was a good one, and neither generated serious momentum but did manage to attract attention.
If the idea was preposterous in the early 1990s, it was equally silly in 2017 – when then-Minister for Sport, Shane Ross, suggested it could be a realistic target for the city.
Hosting the Olympics has bankrupted cities, and the costs run to billions and billions.
Give it a few years, though, and this idea will be resurrected once more – only for it to be laughed out of town.
It really is the only fitting response.
A LIFETIME OF TEARS
TEARS are a fact of sporting life, but what those tears represent can be overlooked. This is especially the case in the aftermath of an Olympics, when letters pages and radio phone-ins feature gripes about failure and taxpayers’ money.
That grousing overlooks the aching pain of an athlete failing to produce their best on a stage that has consumed their entire lives.
Two Irish examples illuminate the point. One was Derek Burnett in Beijing. Four years earlier, he almost made the final in the trap shooting event.
But in 2008, he was well off and devastated by his performance. ‘You spend so long trying to qualify and it’s so difficult to qualify,’ he told us, tears welling in his eyes. ‘It’s totally devastating, so it is.’ The second example was rower Sanita Puspure in Rio. She missed out on the semi-finals by less than a second, with a time that would have been good enough to win two of the other quarters.
She was close, but not close enough. And the agonising miss left her utterly devastated.