The five-ring circus

Opinion

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This article was published 31/07/2021 (1502 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

You might say Moroccan boxer Youness Baalla really sank his teeth into the Olympic spirit during his opening bout at the Summer Games in Tokyo.

That’s because Baalla, 22, tried to literally take a bite out of opponent David Nyika’s ear late in the third and final round of his loss to the New Zealand fighter.

Baalla decided to channel Mike Tyson — who famously took a chunk out of Evander Holyfield’s ear during a championship fight at Madison Square Garden in 1997 — during a clinch in the centre of the ring.

The fight continued and Nyika, who was one of New Zealand’s flag bearers at the Games opening ceremony, registered a 5-0 win to book a spot in the quarter-finals. He was surprised the referee didn’t see the attempted bite, which was only picked up on television.

“Did you see that? I don’t think the ref saw it. She was the closest one,” Nyika, 25, said after his victory. “He (Baalla) didn’t get a full mouthful. Luckily, he had his mouthguard in, and I was a bit sweaty… I think he tried to get my cheekbone. He probably just got a mouthful of sweat.”

It wasn’t the first time one of Nyika’s opponents has tried to chomp him mid-bout.

“I have been bitten once on the chest before at the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games, but c’mon man this is the Olympics,” he declared.

This tale of the teeth is far from the first time an athlete’s questionable behaviour has made headlines at the Games, as we see from today’s medal-winning list of Five Athletes Who Didn’t Quite Live Up to The Olympic Spirit:

5) The athlete offender: U.S. swimmer Ryan Lochte

The really bad sport: There’s no question Ryan Lochte was a star in the Olympic pool. A 12-time Olympic medallist, his seven individual medals place him second in history in men’s swimming behind the legendary Michael Phelps. But Lochte also developed a reputation as one of swimming’s bad boys.

In 2016, he sparked an international controversy when he falsely claimed he and three other American swimmers had been pulled over and robbed by armed men with police badges while in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, at the Summer Olympics. While initial news stories reported they had been robbed at gunpoint after a night out in Rio, details later emerged that the “robbers” were actually security guards at a gas station where the swimmers had urinated outside the bathroom and Lochte allegedly vandalized a framed poster.

The swimmers, who were returning to the Olympic Village from a party, stopped at a Shell gas station to use the restroom. Days later, Rio police held a news conference and said the athletes had vandalized the restroom, breaking a soap dispenser and mirror. Police concluded the swimmers had lied and there had been no crime committed against them, prompting outrage directed at Lochte in media accounts around the world.

In a later TV interview, Lochte admitted that he had lied, explaining that he “over-exaggerated” the part of his story in which he said an officer pointed a gun at his forehead. The story spun out of control after Lochte exaggerated the details to his mother, who told the media her son had been robbed at gunpoint. After the truth came out, Lochte was dropped by his sponsors and a given a 10-month suspension by U.S.A. Swimming and the United States Olympic Committee. Charges of falsely reporting a crime were dropped in 2017.

4) The athlete offender: Soviet pentathlete Boris Onischenko

The really bad sport: Boris Onischenko has been dubbed the greatest cheat in Olympic history. A three-time world champion and two-time Olympic silver medallist, Soviet army colonel Onischenko was a huge star in the modern pentathlon, a challenging five-discipline event that includes fencing. At the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal, Onischenko was considered the best fencer and expected to easily win his matches.

The thing is, he won them a little too easily, scoring points without actually touching his opponents, who started to suspect something was amiss. During his bout with British team captain Jim Fox, the scoreboard lit up to indicate a Soviet point, but the British Army captain insisted he had taken evasive action and demanded his rival’s sword be examined. “I thought the weapon was faulty,” Fox later said. Faulty didn’t quite describe the reality.

When officials confiscated Onischenko’s epee they made a shocking discovery — the Soviets had somehow rigged the sword so Boris could press a hidden button and trigger the electronic scoring system at will. “It was a real engineering job,” Mike Proudfoot, the British team manager, said later. “Not just a ham amateur’s effort. They had to dismantle the weapon to discover it.” In the end, “Disonischenko” and the Soviet squad were banished, and the rules of the sport were changed to ban grips that could hide wires or switches.

Some Soviet Olympians were so angry with “Boris the Cheat” they threatened to throw him out of a hotel window. He was eventually drummed out of the Red Army, fined 5,000 rubles, scolded by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, stripped of all sporting honours and forced to work as a taxi driver in Kyiv. And Britain won the gold.

3) The athlete offender(s): Uruguay’s men’s basketball team

The really bad sport(s): When the subject of basketball powerhouses pops up, Uruguay, the second-smallest nation in South America, doesn’t typically merit a great deal of attention, but it wasn’t always like that. The Uruguayans were once among the most feared teams in international basketball. They finished sixth at the 1936 Berlin Games, the first time a basketball tournament was staged at the Olympics, and fifth at the 1948 London Games before capturing bronze medals at both the 1952 Games in Helsinki and 1956 Games in Melbourne.

At the 1952 Games, if they had awarded a medal for bad sportsmanship, Uruguay’s national hoop squad would likely have taken the gold. Their run to the bronze in 1952 featured some of the ugliest action ever seen on the Olympic hardwood. “Uruguay won the bronze medal while making enemies of every team it played,” according to a 2016 ESPN.com article.

“In a rough semifinal against France, all but three Uruguay players fouled out by the end of the game, and Uruguayans twice attacked the U.S. referee because of disputes, once kicking him in the groin. That resulted in the ban of two players from the Olympics. Uruguay’s next match resulted in three injured players on the Soviet team. Uruguay finished with a victory over Argentina that included a game-stopping brawl and so many fouls the teams had only seven players on the court at game’s end.”

According to olympics.com, the match against France was regarded as one of the most violent in basketball history. “Uruguay were down to just three men for the final minute,” the Olympic website says. “The scores were level when the American referee Vincent Farrell called a foul against the South Americans. Their players were incensed and a violent fight broke out, and Farrell was seriously injured, and carried off the court unconscious. The police were called, and it was established that two of the biggest perpetrators of the violence were (Wilfredo) Peláez and Carlos Roselló.

The two men were banned for the remainder of the tournament, and all future Olympics.”

2) The athlete offender: Cuban taekwondo star Angel Matos

The really bad sport: When it comes to sore losers, they don’t come much sorer than Angel Matos of Cuba. Matos was slapped with a lifetime ban after infamously kicking the referee in the face following his disqualification in a bronze-medal match at the Beijing Games in 2008.

A gold medallist at the 2000 Sydney Games, Matos was winning the match 3-2 against Kazakhstan’s Arman Chilmanov with 1:02 remaining in the second round of the over-80 kilogram bout when he fell to the mat after being hit. Matos was sitting there, awaiting medical attention, when he was disqualified for taking too much injury time. Fighters get one minute, and Matos was disqualified when his time ran out.

After a heated exchange, he took his anger to the extreme, pushing a judge, then striking referee Chakir Chelbat of Sweden in the head with a high kick that caused a cut that required stitches. Not content with that, Matos followed up the kick by spitting on the floor and was escorted out. “We didn’t expect anything like what you have witnessed to occur,” World Taekwondo Federation secretary general Yang Jin-suk said.

“I am at a loss for words. This is an insult to the Olympic vision, an insult to the spirit of taekwondo and, in my opinion, an insult to mankind.” A tournament official announced the lifetime ban for Matos and his coach, Leudis Gonzalez, over a loudspeaker a few minutes later. Afterward, Gonzalez charged the match was fixed, accusing the Kazakhs of offering him money. In 2018, Matos told the Havana Times he was sorry, sort of.

“It’s something I still regret until this very day because I didn’t want my sports career to end this way,” he said, before adding: “They tried to buy me off that day so that I would lose the fight, my trainer and I were both offered money and we refused.” Like we said, sore loser.

1) The athlete offender: Aussie swimming legend Dawn Fraser

The really bad sport: OK, our No. 1 item isn’t really bad behaviour, but it’s such a great story we had to share it. It features swimmer Dawn Fraser, who has been voted Australia’s greatest female athlete in history.

She was the first to win three consecutive gold medals in the same event, the 100-metre freestyle, and she finished her career with eight Olympic medals (four gold and four silver), 27 individual world records and 12 relay world records. She was the first woman to swim the 100-metre freestyle in under one minute, but she was also a woman who marched to her own drummer.

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At the 1964 Tokyo Games, she angered sponsors and the Australian Swimming Union by marching in the opening ceremonies after being told not to, and wearing an older swimming costume in competition, as she found it more comfortable than the one supplied by the sponsors. Then there was the famous flap over the flag. For fun, she helped snatch an Olympic flag from a flagpole outside Emperor Hirohito’s palace. As Fraser, 83, told abc.net.au this month, her races were over at the 1964 Olympics and she had moved out of the athletes’ village and into the Imperial Palace Hotel while she was being filmed for a documentary called Dawn!

On a Friday night, she was enjoying beers with members of the men’s hockey team when the Australian team doctor said: “Hey, Frase, do you want a flag?” Together with the doctor and one of the hockey players, two flags from the long line of poles were purloined as souvenirs. When they heard police whistles, they ran and Fraser parked herself on a park bench, where two police officers asked what she was doing. As Fraser got up to leave, the flag fell out from under her jacket.

She was marched down to the police station. An Aussie official brought Fraser’s gold medal to the station to prove who she was. “I heard them all clapping and then they let us go,” Fraser recalled. Hours later, an officer arrived with a big box of flowers and begged her to open it.

“There was a letter from the emperor saying, ‘Here’s your souvenir, please take it back to Australia,’ and that’s how I got the flag.”

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca