Cheating at the Winter Olympics: the cold facts
As athletes make their way to Pyeongchang, South Korea, to take part in curling and bobsleigh, ice hockey and luge, will all the competitors be playing fair? on Winter Olympic dirty tricks Catching cool customers.
Defending women’s luge champion, 24-year-old mechanical engineer, Ortrun Enderlein, and her two East German teammates were brilliantly successful at the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble.
Enderlein, the “world’s most perfect female luger”, won gold and her confederates were placed second and fourth.
Strangely, the team would always show up directly before their round, and leave the scene hastily afterwards.
Fellow competitors suspected hanky panky.
When judges tested the runners of their sleighs with snow, it “hissed and vaporised”.
Apparently, just before each race the team had been heating them, so as to reduce friction with the ice and achieve a faster time.
Such hijinks led to all three being disqualified, and having to return their medals.
East Germany insisted that the decision was a capitalist plot, hatched by West Germany.
The mystery man in black Austrian skiing legend, Karl Shranz, claimed that during the slalom, also at Grenoble in 1968, a man in black clothing crossed his path, causing him to skid to a halt.
Weather conditions were atrocious, a thick fog hung over the course, and several competitors had asked to no avail that the race be cancelled.
Shranz believed that the mystery man who had interefered with his descent was a French policeman and that he had done so deliberately.
Judges allowed Shranz to rerun the last two thirds of the race. On this second run he knocked half a second off the time taken by French super skier, Jean-Claude Killy.
Shranz began to celebrate, and was interviewed by the media as the winner. “You always expect a victory like mine when someone trains as hard as I did,” he said proudly.
Killy was furious. He had already won the downhill and the giant slalom, and had been poised to win a hat trick.
Shortly afterwards, a gatekeeper came forward and claimed Shranz had not passed through gates 18 and 19 on the first run.
The Austrian responded that this was because the man in black had distracted him. French officials reckoned that he had made the whole episode up about the intruder.
After deliberating for five hours, the judges disqualified Shranz and gave victory to the host nation’s star, Killy, who ended up achieving his precious hat trick of gold medals. Quelle surprise!
American figure skaters, athletically built Tonya Harding and the more graceful Nancy Kerrigan were great rivals. Harding badly wanted a gold medal and was willing to go to unbelievable lengths to get one.
Just before the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, Harding’s ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, and her bodyguard, Shawn Eckhardt, hired a hitman, 22 year-old Shane Stant. His task: To club Kerrigan in her right knee so that she would be unable to compete. His fee: $6,500.
“I was walking toward the locker rooms, away from the ice”, said
Kerrigan, who was practising at Detroit on January 6, 1994.
“Someone was running behind me. I started to turn, and all I could see was this guy swinging something...” Stant’s metal police baton missed Kerrigan’s knee and caught her thigh instead. She suffered bruises but recovered in time for the games.
Harding’s dirty play had backfired: she finished a measly eighth in Lillehammer, while Kerrigan won silver.
Gillooly, Eckhardt, Stant and their getaway car driver were given prison sentences.
Harding received three years’ probation, 500 hours of community service, and a $160,000 fine, and was banned for life from competition and coaching.
Although extremely successful sporting wise, Spain isn’t a country you’d necessarily associate with the Winter Olympics — not, that is, until 2002.
German-born cross-country skier and one time customs officer, Johann Mühlegg, had failed to win a single medal in his home country. After accusing the German skiing federation of poisoning him, he moved to Spain, and became a Spanish citizen in 1999.
When he won three gold medals in the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, it gained the admiration of everyone in his new country.
Even King Juan Carlos offered his congratulations, hailing him as “an example of our athletes to follow”. Nobody suspected anything fishy.
But just a day after bagging the hat trick, the Spaniard tested positive for the red blood cell-boosting medicine, darbepoetin.
Little was known about the substance, which had only recently been developed. So Mühlegg was allowed to keep his medals… until the following December when the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that they should be withdrawn.
Canadian snowboarder Ross Rebagliati’s celebrations at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano were also short-lived.
His impressive performance in the giant slalom appeared to justify the Vancouver man’s gold medal, until marijuana was discovered in his system, and he was disqualified.
This time the outcome was different. Marijuana was not on the list of banned substances, and Rebagliati’s gold medal was given back to him.
Canadian figure skating pair, Jamie Salé and David Pelletier, managed only to finish second despite skating flawlessly at Salt Lake City in 2002.
They lost, inexplicably, to Russia’s Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze who had fouled up in their routines.
Radio commentators in USA and Canada, who had pronounced Salé and Pelletier the winners, were outraged by the result.
Later, French judge Marie-Reine La Gougne broke down and admitted that Didier Gailhaguet, head of the French ice sports fedration, had pressured her to vote for the Russian couple, regardless of their performance.
This was allegedly in exchange for giving an advantage to Salé and Pelletier in the ice dancing competition several days later.
An inquiry was ordered, and the International Skating Union upgraded the Canadian couple’s medal to gold. La Gougne, and Gailhaguet were suspended from any involvement in international skating for three years for matchfixing, and were banned from participating in the next Winter Olympics at Turin in 2006.
Former director of Russia’s anti-doping laboratory, Grigory Rodchenkov, disclosed to the New York Times that Russian athletes competing in the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi had been supplied with a cocktail of three banned performance-enhancing substances, as part of a state-sponsored doping programme.
The home nation’s results were spectacular. Russia won 33 medals, more than any other country, and finished in sixth place.
Tests were carried out during the games. But in the dead of night, Russian officials had exchanged tainted urine from their athletes with clean samples, by passing them through a “mouse hole” drilled into the wall of the anti-doping laboratory.
When the urine was tested next day, there were, of course, no signs of doping.
A report in 2016 concluded that the bottles showed scratch marks where they had been opened and interfered with.
Russia has been banned from taking part at Pyeong Chang, though its athletes will be allowed to participate as neutrals. It denies the doping, and claims to be the victim of an American plot.
As the Winter Olympics 2018 get underway, what shenanigans will be awaiting us this time around?
