THE 50 MOST STUNNING OLYMPIC MOMENTS
WITH the Olympics shunted into the future, Sportsmail sets off today on a long look at its storied past.
It remains to be seen if the coronavirus has any further impact on the Tokyo Games, which were due to start this week and will instead commence on July 23, 2021.
But in their absence, we have endeavoured to compile a countdown of 50 of the most stunning moments since the Games began in their modern guise in 1896.
Naturally, there is a hefty and unapologetic British bias among the memories.
And equally there is attention to the scandals and mishaps and quirky tales, because the Olympics have always been about so much more than ‘faster, higher, stronger’. At many junctures, ‘sleazier, dirtier, weirder’ has been just as apt.
The following days will see a nod to the wonderful and woeful elements that have made the Olympic Games what they are. And a reminder of what lies ahead.
50 MARY PETERS BRINGS A SMILE TO A NATION
STARTING with the good. The great, in fact. Mary Peters is one of those athletes whose accomplishments lifted her high above any step on any podium. She came to represent the brightest light of hope for Northern Ireland at the darkest point of its Troubles, sealed by winning pentathlon gold at Munich ’72 — the same year in which 479 lives were lost to the violence.
Her adventure in reaching those Olympics had already been quite something — a real story for the era. As an instance of life before Lottery funding, on her 16th birthday her father gave her two tons of sand to make a long jump pit. On her 17th he gave her a truck-load of cement to build a shot-put circle to go with the home-made hurdles.
With the escalation of the Troubles, she would hear bombs going off around Belfast on her bus journeys to train and once three soldiers were murdered in a flat adjoining hers. Against that backdrop, Peters won gold aged 33, surviving a day-two surge from home favourite Heide rosendahl to win by 10 points — equivalent to one hundredth of a second in the closing 200m.
She was celebrating at the British base when she heard the IRA had threatened to blow her up on her return. She said ‘B******s’ to that and went straight to Belfast, where she was carried through the city on an open-topped lorry.
In noting how she set a trend for female British multi- sport stars including Jessica Ennis-Hill, she laughed when she told Sportsmail in 2017: ‘I wouldn’t begrudge Jess or anyone else a penny of what they get but, when I won the Olympics, endorsements weren’t the same.
‘I did an ad for a building society. That was funny because a little later I wanted to buy a two-bedroom cottage outside Belfast, the one I still live in, so I went to them for a loan. They said no.’ Aged 80, she is still partying given any chance and d has raised well over £1million for r young sportspeople through her foundation.
49 RYAN LOCHTE WASN’T ROBBED
FROM the great to the dumb. And perhaps one of the more surreal episodes in recent Games, given the saga thatt played out after the six-time Olympicic champion gave an interview at rioio 2016 about being robbed at gunpoint.nt. His claim was that men dressed as police held him up, along with threeee US swimming team-mates, and put a gun to his head. Police reports put forward a different version of events, namely that Lochte and his team-mates had trashed a restroom at a petrol station. Security, they said, then pulled their guns on the swimmers and demanded money. After developing into a major international incident, Lochte admitted exaggerating but was cleared of falsely communicating a crime. He lost his sponsors.
48 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 tumbleum just ahead of the line, from tuw w where he was given help and dragged d 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 t help Pietri open a bakery.
47 MAX WHITLOCK DOES THE TH DOUBLE
BRITAIN Br had never won an Olympic gold gol medal in gymnastics and in the space of two hours at rio 2016, a qquiet 23- year- old from Hemel Hempstead Hem won a pair of them.
He had arrived in Brazil with hopes of ‘snatching’ a bronze in the floor before launching an assault on gold on the pommel horse against team-mate Louis Smith.
With no expectation of succeeding in the first of those disciplines, he stacked a floor routine with his hardest manoeuvres — and to his obvious surprise he executed it in a way he never expected to set up the most unlikely of doubles. Smith, meanwhile, broke down in tears after
silver in the pommel. He has four Olympic medals and none are the gold he wants most.
46 AN ACTUAL ROBBERY
WHILE ryan Lochte dreamt up a scenario, roy Jones Jnr lived it at the Seoul Olympics of 1988. 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, in which Olympic boxing has seen some of its worst, this ranked as the oddest result of all. Jones went on to be one of the greatest fighters of all time.
45 THE SCANDAL
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 remarkable. 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. Bizarre.
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 dubious in the manner Onischenko had apologised, and also in the way he had wanted to change his sword once it had drawn attention.
The Brit 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. A scandal in any language but there was a bigger picture to think of.
‘What you have to remember is that I was very publicly a member of the British Army and Boris was a half- colonel in the KGB,’ recalled Fox. ‘It became a huge international incident.’
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.
44 WHEN GOLD BECOMES SILVER
IF the beauty of the Olympics is the test of self, then the agony is surely when the margins of failure are miniscule. Within those terms, it is hard to comprehend the pain going through the mind of Britain’s Lutalo Muhammad in the moments after the 80kg taekwondo final at rio 2016.
He had won bronze at London 2012 and, with less than a second remaining against cheick Sallah cisse of the Ivory coast, he was leading 6-4. All that was needed was for Muhammad to stay out of the way. It is necessary to know at this point that the scoring system has only two blows that can exceed a two-point margin and with a spinning kick to Muhammad’s head, cisse found one. The fourpointer gave him an 8-6 win and Muhammad’s tears ( below) became one of the defining images of the Games.
43 ANN’S ABORTED SHOPPING TRIP
Ann Packer arrived at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo as a favourite to win the 400m gold medal for Britain. What played out was a glorious divergence from the plan.
She had twice broken the Olympic record in reaching the final, where she then set a european record but could only finish second.
Dismayed, she was teetering on skipping the 800m, for which she was also entered and briefly considered going on a shopping trip instead.
However, the fact her boyfriend, the GB captain robbie Brightwell, had underperformed in the men’s 400m after a political issue with team bosses served as the jolt to get up and run again.
Having only contested the 800m distance five times before, and never at any meaningful meet, Packer went on to break the world record and take gold.
She quit after the Olympics, aged 22, and has been married to Brightwell ever since. Two of their sons, Ian and David, went on to play for Manchester city.
42 THE TRAILBLAZER
WOMEN’S boxing remained an unconquered frontier in the push for equality prior to London 2012. With those Games including it for the first time, the world came to know and then love the wonderful movement and beaming smile of a softly spoken Leeds flyweight called nicola Adams. She danced her way to the final where she faced china’s ren cancan, a three-time world champion who, ominously, had made a habit of beating Adams in major fights. ‘Losing to her is starting to annoy me,’ Adams had told Sportsmail in the months ahead of the Games. She went on to crush ren 16-7 for gold, then won another at rio 2016. Her place among British Olympic greats is secured.
41 GOLDEN COUPLE
On August 16, 2016, something unique happened. Jason kenny won the men’s keirin to take his sixth gold medal and tie chris Hoy as Britain’s most successful Olympian. On the same day his fiancee, Laura Trott, won the omnium to take her personal tally to four golds, making her the nation’s most garlanded female Olympian. Between them, they have 10 gold medals. Astonishing.
In the delirium of that day, Trott took to Twitter and posted: ‘I love him to bits. Our kids have to get some of these genes, right?!’
They married a month later.