Olympics Controversies
Games in this era without a controversy is a distant and unrealistic dream. With performance enhancement steroids, betting and bidding, illegal trades and participation and above all the huge amount of money that is involved, controversy is to remain a part of all games. This lens peeps into the various controversies that have marred the Olympics.
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Olympics, sports, sports controversies, Olympics controversies
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The history of Olympics Controversies
A peep into the controversies, scandals and boycotts
The controversies in the Olympics started as early as 1908, when Dorando Pietri of Italy collapsed several times from exhaustion at about 400 yards before the finish line of the 26-mile marathon. The officials helped him to his feet every time he fell and eventually guided him across the finish line first. But Pietri did not finish the race under his own power. There were protests made and ultimately the victory was awarded to the second-place runner, the United States' John Hayes.The case of Jim Thorpe, an American athlete was another one. After almost an year of his winning both the pentathlon and the decathlon at the 1912 Games, it was discovered that Thorpe had played semiprofessional baseball. This meant that he had been paid to play a sport and thus was ineligible to participate in the Olympics. Thorpe's gold medals were taken from him. Sixty-nine years later, however, the International Olympic Committee reinstated Thorpe's achievements and returned his gold medals to his children.
The 1916, 1940 and 1944 were canceled because of the World Wars.
In the 1956 Melbourne Games, in a water polo match between Hungary and the Soviet Union, political tensions caused the match to end as a pitched battle between the teams.
In the 1968 Mexico City games, politics took center stage in the medal ceremony for the men's 200 meter dash, where Tommie Smith and John Carlos made a protest gesture on the podium against the segregation in the United States; their political act was condemned within the Olympic Movement, but was praised in the American Civil Rights Movement.
Political intervention was again seen at Munich in 1972, this time with lethal consequences. A Palestinian terrorist group named Black September invaded the Olympic village and broke into the apartment of the Israeli delegation. They killed two Israelis and took 9 others, hostages. The Israeli government refused their demand that they release a few prisoners and a tense stand-off ensued while negotiations continued. Eventually the captors, still holding their hostages, were offered safe passage and taken to an airport, where they were ambushed by German security forces. In the firefight that followed, 15 people, including the nine Israeli athletes and five of the terrorists, were killed. After much debate, it was decided that the Games would continue, but proceedings were obviously dominated by these events.
In the 1976 games at Montreal, there was also a boycott by African nations to protest against a recent tour of apartheid-run South Africa by a New Zealand rugby side.
The 1980 games held in Moscow was boycotted by 66 nations, including the United States, Canada, West Germany and Japan. In 1984 the Soviet Union, and 14 Soviet Allies, reciprocated by boycotting the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
The 1988 Seoul games saw the first of the doping scandals when many of the athletes, most notably men's 100 metres winner Ben Johnson, failed mandatory drug tests.
In the 1996 Summer Olympics at Atlanta, the atmosphere at the Games was marred when a bomb exploded during the celebration in Centennial Park.
The 2008 Beijing Olympics is full of controversies. It started much before the games begun, with Tibet protesting against the Chinese policies and the way they have handled Tibet. Then there were controversies around the opening ceremony and the fireworks telecast on televisions. This was followed by the age controversy in the gymnastics events.
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Facts you never knew
About Olympics
An insight into the history of Olympics
The Olympic Games is an international multi-sport event. The original Olympic Games were first recorded in 776 BC in Olympia, Greece, and were held until AD 393. Interest in reviving the Olympic Games proper was first shown by the Greek poet and newspaper editor Panagiotis Soutsos in his poem "Dialogue of the Dead" in 1833. Evangelos Zappas sponsored the first modern international Olympic Games in 1859. He paid for the refurbishment of the Panathenian Stadium for Olympic Games held there in 1870 and 1875. This was noted in newspapers and publications around the world including the London Review, which stated that "the Olympian Games, discontinued for centuries, have recently been revived! Here is strange news indeed ... the classical games of antiquity were revived near Athens.
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Olympics controversies - Boycotts from Olympics
Incidents of boycotts from the Olympics
From the wikipediaThe 1956 Melbourne Olympics were the first Olympics to be boycotted. The Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland refused to attend because of the repression of the Hungarian Uprising by the Soviet Union; additionally, Cambodia, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon boycotted the games due to the Suez Crisis.
In 1972 and 1976, a large number of African countries threatened the IOC with a boycott, to force them to ban South Africa, Rhodesia, and New Zealand. The IOC conceded in the first two cases, but refused to ban New Zealand in 1976 because the boycott was prompted by a New Zealand rugby union tour to South Africa, and rugby was not an Olympic sport. The countries withdrew their teams after the games had started; some African athletes had already competed. A lot of sympathy was felt for the athletes forced by their governments to leave the Olympic Village; there was little sympathy outside Africa for the governments' attitude.[citation needed] Twenty-two countries (Guyana was the only non-African nation) boycotted the Montreal Olympics because New Zealand was not banned.
Also in 1976, due to pressure from the People's Republic of China (PRC), Canada told the team from the Republic of China (Taiwan) that it could not compete at the Montreal Summer Olympics under the name "Republic of China", despite a compromise that would have allowed Taiwan to use the ROC flag and anthem. The Republic of China refused and as a result did not participate again until 1984, when it returned under the name "Chinese Taipei" and used a special flag.
In 1980 and 1984, the Cold War opponents boycotted each other's games. Sixty-five nations refused to compete at the Moscow Olympics in 1980 because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The boycott reduced the number of nations participating to only 81, the lowest number of nations to compete since 1956. The Soviet Union and 14 of its Eastern Bloc partners (except Romania) countered by boycotting the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. They contended that they could not guarantee the safety of their athletes. Soviet officials were quoted as saying, "chauvinistic sentiments and an anti-Soviet hysteria are being whipped up in the United States." The 1984 boycotters staged their own Friendship Games in July-August.
There had been growing calls for boycotts of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing in protest of China's poor human rights record and response to the recent disturbances in Tibet, Darfur, and Taiwan. President George W. Bush showcased these concerns in a highly publicized speech in Thailand just prior to the opening of the Games. Ultimately no nations withdrew before the games began. There have also been campaigns calling for Chinese goods to be boycotted.
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"Get your Golf swing right."
Doping controversies at the Olympics
Instance of doping case from the games
One of the main problems facing the Olympics is doping, or the use of performance enhancing drugs. In the early 20th century, many Olympic athletes began using drugs to enhance their performance. For example, the winner of the marathon at the 1904 Games, Thomas J. Hicks, was given strychnine and brandy by his coach, even during the race. The only Olympic death caused by doping occurred at the Rome Games of 1960. At the cycling road race in Rome, Danish cyclist Knud Enemark Jensen fell from his bicycle and later died. A coroner's inquiry found that he was under the influence of amphetamines. By the mid-1960s, sports federations were starting to ban the use of performance enhancing drugs, and the IOC followed suit in 1967.The first Olympic athlete to test positive for the use of performance enhancing drugs was Hans-Gunnar Liljenwall, a Swedish pentathlete at the 1968 Summer Olympics, who lost his bronze medal for alcohol use. About seventy-three athletes have followed him over the next 38 years, several medal winners among them. The most publicised doping-related disqualification was that of Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, who won the 100 meter dash at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, but tested positive for stanozolol. He subsequently had his gold medal stripped. It was awarded to runner-up Carl Lewis, who himself has at times been under suspicion of using performance enhancing drugs, though has never tested positive.
The recent 2000 Summer Olympics and 2002 Winter Olympics had instances of several medalists in weightlifting and cross-country skiing being disqualified due to doping offences. A Romanian gymnast Andreea Raducan who was stripped of her gold medal in the All-Around Competition of the 2000 Sydney games was an innocent victim of the anti-doping initiative. Test results indicated the presence of the banned stimulant pseudophedrine which had been prescribed to her by an Olympic doctor. Raducan had been unaware of the presence of the illegal substance in the medicine that had been prescribed to her for a cold she had during the games.
My favorite books on Olympics
Michael Phelps: Beneath the Surface by Michael Phelps, Brian Cazeneuve
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Magic Tree House Boxed Set, Books 13-16: Vacation Under the Volcano, Day of the Dragon King, Viking Ships at Sunrise, and Hour of the Olympics by Mary Pope Osborne
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Amazing Pace by Paul McMullen
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The Complete Book of the Olympics: 2008 Edition by David Wallechinsky, Jaime Loucky
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Political contoversies and Violence in the Olympics
Political interference in a game meant for harmony and peace
The Olympics has been affected by political incidents on many occasions. The 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin are an example of how the Olympics have been used to promote a political agenda. The German Nazi Party promoted the 1936 Games as propaganda for the superiority of both the Aryan race and the facist political structure. In a similar vein the Soviet Union did not participate in the Olympic Games until the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki. A political incident on a smaller scale occurred at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. Two American track-and-field athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, performed the Black Power salute on the victory stand for the 200-meter track and field race. Interference of politics in the Games is not a thing of the past. Currently, the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran specifically orders its athletes not to compete in any Olympic heat, semi-final, or final that includes athletes from Israel. This directive had an impact at the 2004 Olympics when an Iranian judoka who had otherwise earned his place, did not compete in a heat against an Israeli judoka.Terrorism & Olympics
The Olympics though was meant to bring peace to the world couldn't do it completely. Three Olympics were cancelled because of war: due to World War I the 1916 Games were cancelled, and the summer and winter games of 1940 and 1944 were cancelled because of World War II.
Terrorism has also threatened the Olympic Games. In 1972, when the Summer Games were held in Munich, West Germany, eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage by the terrorist group Black September in what is known as the Munich massacre and were later killed in a failed liberation attempt. During the Summer Olympics in 1996 in Atlanta, a bombing at the Centennial Olympic Park killed two and injured 111 others. The Olympics have also been used by regimes with human rights crises to try and silence their opposition. The Mexican government, ten days prior to the 1968 Summer Olympics, used the impending Olympic games as an excuse crack down on student demonstrations in Mexico City. The incident would become known as the Tlatelolco Massacre. The Chinese government has been accused of similar tactics in their dealings with the 2008 Tibetan unrest before the Beijing Olympics. The concern in both of these examples is the propensity of host countries to use the Olympic Games as a reason to repress political dissention within their own borders.
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Controversies from Beijing
Incidents that the Beijing Olympics had to offer.
The Beijing Olympics though was organized very well, had quite a few controversies to deal with.The opening ceremony was the first. The first one was that the girl we thought was singing "Hymn to the Motherland" during the Opening Ceremonies (on left) was actually lip-synching. We could have taken that but for the fact that she was made to lip synch because the actual girl that won a national competition (on right) to perform the anthem was deemed not "flawless in image." What would flawless mean for a child and that too at a stage like that of the Olympics.
The other controversy was around the fireworks used in the Opening ceremony because part of these, it is said were pre-recorded. Among the sections that were pre-produced were parts of a stunning fireworks display across the city, a series of fireworks "footprints" that led to the Bird's Nest stadium where the four-hour extravaganza was staged.
In the controversies during the events, the women's gymnastics competition in Beijing took the center stage. The ages of He Kexin, Yang Yilin, and Jiang Yuyuan were the subjects of controversy. Though the girls' passports and national identity cards issued by the Chinese government state that all three had reached the age of 16 in the year of the Olympics, local media and some official speak reveals that the girls were under-age to compete in the Olympics.
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by rdilipk1
A commerce graduate and a postgraduate in Business administration, I have worked in finance for a couple of years before I entered the computer manufa... (more)
