In every sport, at every level, there are occasional opportunities for athletes to bend or ignore the rules to give themselves an edge.
And in every sport, at every level, at least some of them do.
Cheating, in all its myriad forms, has long been an unavoidable part of sports. For hundreds of years, it has been at the center of some of the most dramatic athletic scandals and controversial moments, raising questions of integrity and, in many cases, spurring significant changes to the rules themselves.
The history is so long and vast that it would be impossible to come up with a comprehensive list of cheating incidents in sports. So instead, here is a timeline of 10, from deceit in ancient Greece to the 2017 Houston Astros.
388 BC: Boxing bribery
Yes, even in the days of Plato and Sparta, there is evidence of cheating. In a 1952 journal article titled “Crime and Punishment in Greek Athletics,” Ohio State professor Clarence Forbes detailed some of the athletic scandals in ancient Greece, including a boxing bribery incident at the 98th Olympics in 388 B.C. Eupolus of Thessaly allegedly bribed all three of his opponents to let him win, prompting games organizers to impose “heavy fines” on all four men. The money, according to Forbes, was then used to erect six bronze statues near the entrance to the stadium in Olympia, with inscriptions on four of them criticizing the men and warning against future cheating.
1904: Fred Lorz hitches a ride
The marathon at the 1904 Summer Games in St. Louis has been described by Olympics.com as “the most bizarre spectacle in Olympic history.” One runner was reportedly chased off the course by a pack of wild dogs. Another stopped at an orchard to eat some apples, developed stomach cramps, took a nap − and finished fourth. And a third man was supposedly hallucinating and carried by his trainers over the finish line. The apparent winner was American Fred Lorz, who spent 11 miles riding along in a car. He was called out and admitted to cheating before he could be awarded a medal.
1919: The Black Sox scandal
It was the first bombshell scandal in professional baseball, and perhaps the most flagrant. In 1919, members of the Chicago White Sox accepted money from professional gamblers to effectively throw the World Series. Eight players were implicated in the scheme, with each of them later being indicted by a Chicago grand jury on conspiracy charges. Though they were all acquitted in the criminal trial, commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis still permanently banned them from organized baseball.
1951: CCNY point-shaving scheme
Thirty years after the Black Sox scandal, a group of college basketball players — starting at City College of New York — decided to take money from bookmakers, this time in exchange for manipulating the scores of games. A whopping 32 players from seven colleges eventually admitted to accepting bribes in the point-shaving scheme. Two of those players and at least 10 other fixers, agents or bookies went on to serve jail time, according to ESPN.
1986: The “hand of God”
This infamous goal by Diego Maradona led Argentina to a 2-1 win over England in the quarterfinals of the 1986 World Cup, which his team would eventually win. He initially said it was the “hand of God” that knocked the ball into the net, rather than his own. But in his autobiography 14 years later, Maradona fessed up. “What hand of God?” he wrote. “It was the hand of Diego! And it was like stealing the wallet of the English, too.”
1994: Figure skating attack
Cheating incidents in sports rarely involve acts of violence, but this one did. In a brazen assault, a man named Shane Stant attacked top U.S. figure skater Nancy Kerrigan with a baton after practice. The twist? It was later revealed that Stant had been hired to attack Kerrigan by the ex-husband of her main rival, Tonya Harding, in hopes that the injury would prevent Kerrigan from competing in the national championships and 1994 Winter Olympics. (Kerrigan was forced to pull out of the national championships but recovered and won silver at those Games; Harding also competed in Lillehammer and placed eighth.)
2000: Disgrace at the Paralympics
Perhaps one of the most shocking and oft-forgotten cheating scandals took place at the 2000 Paralympics, involving Spain’s intellectual disability basketball team. The team won gold in Sydney but was later found to be fraudulent, with 10 of the 12 players having faked their disabilities. The incident had a number of devastating ripple effects, with Paralympic organizers deciding to suspend the entire intellectual disability classification at each of the next two Games, leaving athletes with legitimate disabilities on the sidelines for eight years. And the two Spanish players who actually had intellectual disabilities had to forfeit their medals, just like their teammates.
1995-2005: Baseball’s steroid era
With apologies to Lance Armstrong and Russia’s state-sponsored scheme, baseball’s steroid era remains the biggest doping scandal in history. Dozens of players were implicated, including Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro and several other big-name stars. Congress got involved. Major League Baseball was forced to overhaul its drug-testing policies. And while the time period listed here covered the “peak” of the era, including the 1998 home run record chase between McGwire and Sammy Sosa, its effects stretched well beyond this window − from the Mitchell Report to Barry Bonds’ trial for perjury.
2015: Deflategate
This was a weird one, and one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history was in the middle of it. The accusation was that Tom Brady, then of the New England Patriots, asked team equipment staffers to deliberately underinflate footballs in the AFC championship game against the Indianapolis Colts, which the Patriots won. Brady was suspended four games and appealed that suspension all the way to a U.S. appeals court, and the NFL commissioned a 243-page investigative report into what happened. Deflategate, as it came to be known, wasn’t as dramatic as Spygate or as sinister as Bountygate, but it will likely go down as the most memorable cheating incident in recent NFL history, given the quarterback involved.
2019: Houston Astros scandal
Sign-stealing has always been a part of baseball, but the Houston Astros took it to a whole new level when they began using a camera in centerfield to zoom in on an opposing catcher’s signs to his pitcher. The second part of the scheme was far less technologically sophisticated; The Astros would bang a trash can to signal to their teammate that a breaking ball was coming, or not bang it to signal a fastball. The incidents cast a pall over their 2017 World Series title led to several suspensions, firings and fines − and, years later, the introduction of PitchCom, a way for catchers and pitchers to communicate their signs wirelessly.
Follow Tom Schad on social media @Tom_Schad
