Like their modern-day counterparts, ancient athletes had a way of capturing the public’s imagination. Through ancient authors such as Pindar, Pausanias and Dio Chrysostom, we can still learn today about the incredible achievements of some of the best-known Olympic victors of ancient times. Although the modern sporting legends of today have no reason to be jealous of the ancient champions, the truth is that there are certain victories and records from the past that would make even the most decorated Olympians of the modern Olympics blush.

Despite the fact that the ancient sports and competitions were quite different from our modern professional sports, the ancient champions—just like those of today—were heroes among their people. Perhaps their greatest accomplishment of all is the fact that what they achieved is still remembered today; their names are still prominent in athletics, even two or three thousand years after their deaths.

Orsippus of Megara was an ancient Greek athlete who won the stadion race of the fifteenth Ancient Olympic Games in 720 B.C. He became the crowd’s favorite, and he was thought to be a great pioneer for being most likely the first ever athlete to run naked. Pausanias, who very often reported on the ancient Olympics like a modern-day sports journalist, states: “My own opinion is that at Olympia he [Orsippus] intentionally let the girdle slip off him, realizing that a naked man can run more easily than one girt.”

Varazdat was an athlete from Armenia who won the Olympic boxing tournament during the 291st Olympic Games. We are aware of Varazdat’s victory from a memorandum kept in the Olympic museum in Olympia. The first historiography about Varazdat was written by Movses Chorenatsy in his Armenian History.

In ancient Armenian royal and aristocratic families, the physical education of youngsters had a disciplined and orderly character. They were taught swimming, boxing, wrestling, weightlifting, and military exercises. Varazdat, with the benefit of this rigorous training, went on to be the winner of various boxing competitions held in Greece. He later achieved his greatest triumph, when he became the Olympic champion at the Olympics of 385.

Although men were originally the only ones allowed to compete in the Olympic Games, this soon changed. Several women took part in the ancient Games, and even won competitions. The most famous of these was Cynisca of Sparta, the first woman to win at the Games. By her success, she paved the way for many other women, and helped usher in a new era in the ancient sporting world.

Cynisca’s and her male team were successful in the four-horse chariot racing, winning in 396 B.C. and again in 392 B.C. Cynisca was the most distinguished female athlete of the ancient world, and many historians use her as a symbol of the social rise of women, and the beginning of the movement to give them equal rights and opportunities.

We don’t know much about the Olympic victor Polydamas of Skotoussa. His background, family life, and even the details of his Olympic triumph remain shrouded in mystery. Aside from the fact that Polydamas’ statue was remarkably tall and strong, we have no other information on his appearance.

Like many athletes of his time, Polydamas was just as well-known for his non-athletic exploits as he was for his prowess in the Olympic games. Ancient authors tend to compare his feats to those of the legendary Greek hero Herakles. Polydamas once killed a lion with his bare hands on Mount Olympus, in a quest to imitate the labors of Herakles, who famously slew the Nemean lion. For similar reasons, Polydamas once managed to single-handedly bring a fast-moving chariot to a halt.

These exploits soon reached the ears of the Persians. Their king, Darius, sent for Polydamas. After he was received by the Persian king, the athlete challenged three Persian “Immortals” to fight him, and managed to defeat them all in a single fight.

In the end, however, Polydamas’ strength could not prevent his demise. One summer, Polydamas and his friends were resting in a cave when the roof began to crumble down upon them. Believing that his immense strength could prevent the cave-in, Polydamas held his hands up to the roof, trying to support it as the rocks crashed down around him. His friends fled the cave and reached safety, but the great wrestler was killed.

Onomastos of Smyrna was the first ever Olympic victor in boxing, at the twenty-third Olympiad in 688 B.C., when this sport was added. According to ancient historians, Onomastos was not only the first Olympic boxing champion, but wrote the rules of Ancient Greek boxing as well.

Onomastos also holds a record which remains remarkable even today. After hundreds of ancient and modern Olympiads, he’s still the boxer with the most Olympic boxing titles, with four victories to his name. Laslzo Papp, the world’s greatest amateur boxer of the twentieth century, came close to Onomastos’ record—but he stopped at three Olympic victories before becoming a professional boxer.

The famously handsome boxer Melankomas was from Caria, a region in modern-day Turkey. In an effort to prove his courage, Melankomas chose to compete in athletics, since this was the most honorable and most strenuous path open to him. Amazingly enough, Melankomas was undefeated throughout his career—yet he never once hit, or was hit by, an opponent.

His boxing style involved defending himself from the blows of the other boxer, and never attempting to strike the other man. Invariably, the opponent would grow frustrated and lose his composure. This unique style won Melankomas much admiration for his strength and endurance. He could apparently last through the whole day—even at the height of summer—and he would refuse to strike his opponents, even though he knew that by doing so he would quickly end the match and secure an easy victory for himself. In this manner he won the Olympic boxing tournament at the 207th Olympic games.

Chionis of Sparta was an athlete who caused much debate regarding his athletic achievements, with the most notable of these being his long-jumping records. Records suggest that in the Olympics of 656 B.C., Chionis jumped a record of seven meters and five centimeters. This feat would have won him the long jump title at the 1896 Olympic Games, and would have placed him among the top eight at a further ten modern Olympics, up to and including the 1952 Games of Helsinki. As well as his amazing achievements in long jump, Chionis was also renowned as a triple jumper—capable of reaching up to 15.85 meters.

But the most remarkable fact about this man is that none of his jumps were enhanced by modern-day drugs or training equipment; his records were truly honest and honorable.

Diagoras of Rhodes might not be the greatest of ancient athletes, but his family is without doubt the greatest sporting family of the Ancient world. Diagoras won the boxing event in the Games of 464 B.C. He was also a four-time winner in the Isthmian Games, and a two-time winner in the games at Nemea.

His sons and grandsons also became boxing and pankration champions. During the eighty-third Olympiad, his sons Damagetos and Akousilaos, after they became champions, lifted their father Diagoras on their shoulders to share their victory with him. Legend says that during Diagoras’ triumphant ovation on the shoulders of his sons, a spectator shouted: “Die, Diagoras, for Olympus you will not ascend”—the meaning being that he had reached the highest honor possible for a man and athlete.

Theagenes was one of the first celebrities of the ancient sporting world. He became famous throughout the world at the tender age of nine.

It seems that the boy was walking home from school one day when he noticed a bronze statue of a god in the marketplace of Thasos, Greece. For some reason, Theagenes tore the statue from its base and took it home. This act outraged the citizens, who perceived it as blasphemy against the gods, and they debated whether or not they should execute the child for his deed. One elder, however, wisely suggested that they should have the boy return the statue to its proper place. Theagenes did this—and his life would never be the same again.

He went on to become one of the greatest athletes of all time. He was a successful boxer, pankratiast, and runner. He won the Olympic boxing tournament in the seventy-fifth Olympiad of 480 B.C., and in the next Olympics he won the title in the Pankration. In addition to his two Olympic victories, Theagenes won numerous honors in other sports and other games. Altogether he was said to have won over 1,400 contests in many different kinds of sport. His incredible achievements made him a living myth—to the extent that many people even believed that Heracles was his father.

If we were to compare Theagenes with a modern boxing hero, such as Harry Greb (the boxer with most official victories (261) in professional boxing’s history) it would seem that Theagenes outnumbers him by nearly 1,250 victories.

Most historians agree that Milo remains to this day the greatest wrestler and fighter (from any combat sport) the world has ever known. Milo of Croton became an Olympic champion several times during his nearly thirty-year career. His size and physique were intimidating, and his strength and technique perfect—and many people accordingly believed that he was  the son of Zeus.

He was said to eat more than eight kilograms of meat every day. Some say that he even once carried an adult bull on his shoulders, all the way to the Olympic stadium, where he slaughtered and devoured it. Yet Milo was not merely a hulking wrestler; he was also a musician and a poet, as well as a student of the mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras.

The greatest wrestler of the twentieth century, Alexander Karelin, was often called the modern-day Milo of Croton—but he himself acknowledged that he would not stand a good chance against the real Milo.

Theodoros II is a budding author and a law graduate. He loves History, Sci-Fi culture, European politics, and exploring the worlds of hidden knowledge. His ideal trip in an ideal world would be to the lost city of Atlantis.

As fans, we tend to forget that athletes have lives outside of sports. It’s just that we don’t often to get to see them when they’re not performing.

But when you do a little digging, you might be surprised to find what their off field interests actually are…

10Iron Mike: Bird Whisperer

What hasn’t Mike Tyson done? He’s been the heavyweight champion of the world, appeared in hit movies, stepped into the ring at WWE matches, and starred in a one-man show on Broadway. He’s even dined on human flesh.

So should we really be surprised to learn that he’s also dabbled in competitive pigeon breeding and racing?

Tyson says that pigeons were the first thing he ever really loved. Ever since he saw them flocking through his Brooklyn neighborhood when he was younger, he’s been fascinated by the feathery city-dwellers. Currently, Tyson oversees a coop in New Jersey that houses over 400 pigeons.

But it wouldn’t be Mike Tyson without a dash of crazy. Tyson made headlines last October, when he claimed the government was conspiring to rid the US of the his beloved rock doves.

9Tim Duncan Prefers The Halls Of Undermountain To The Hall Of Fame

Everything about Tim Duncan is understated: He’s one of the NBA’s most nonchalant players, his game isn’t flashy, he doesn’t have a signature move. He’s nicknamed the “Big Fundamental” for a reason—he’s boring. But after more than 15 years in the NBA, four World Championships, and two MVP awards, he can deal with being labeled dull.

But Duncan does find time to cut loose when he’s playing Dungeons & Dragons. He’s not shy about his hobby either. In fact, he loves any kind of role-playing fantasy game, and he frequently attends Texas Renaissance Fairs. When he got to the Spurs, he even requested that his nickname be “Merlin.”

8The NFL’s Biggest Star Wars Fan

American football fans who came of age in the late 1970s remember Lester Hayes as one of the NFL’s best cornerbacks. His coverage skills, coupled with a hefty dose of stickum, helped the Oakland/Los Angeles Raiders win two Super Bowls in the ’80s.

But Hayes was as much a fan of the Star Wars trilogy as he was of football. He was enamored with the space opera, boasting that he saw it at least 70 times. He loved it so much that he claimed Luke Skywalker would be a cornerback if he played football. Arguably his most endearing quip about the franchise came during the early ’80s, when he declared that he was the league’s “only true Jedi.”

And thanks to Hayes’ legendary exploits on the field, some of his teammates even believed he might genuinely be aligned with the Force.

7The Linebacker With A Soft Spot For Comics

He’s the hero comic book fans need—and the one they deserve.

When Chicago Bears linebacker Lance Briggs isn’t busy obliterating opponents on the football field, he can usually be found quietly browsing the aisle of his local comic book store.

The seven-time NFL Pro Bowler, well-known for delivering brutal hits to opponents, has an affinity for comics that dates back to his childhood. Even at 33, he still spends hours scanning the shelves for the right comic before forking over his cash.

In 2011, he took his love of the medium to the next level, writing his own comic for Top Cow Productions. Entitled Seraph, the comic mixes “faith with action” to tell the story of a tormented hero who winds up with supernatural powers after trying to kill himself. Briggs has also founded a social networking site for fellow enthusiasts and routinely holds comic book drives for disadvantaged youngsters.

6Pro Basketball’s Memory Savant

Jerry Lucas had the story-book career that most basketball players dream of. Following an All-American campaign at Ohio State—where he guided the Buckeyes to three straight Final Fours before winning a national championship in 1960—he carried his prowess over into the pros, where he won an NBA title with the New York Knicks before eventually being inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.

But Lucas didn’t just have the right stuff when it came to playing hoops, he had a special gift that extended beyond the hardwood. For most of his life, Lucas had an obsession with memory tricks, often memorizing and organizing everyday items. Whether it was alphabetizing the word “chandelier” or learning pages from the New York phone book, Lucas spent years training his memory—with aspirations of becoming a magician when he retired from basketball.

After hanging up his sneakers in 1975, he actually became a memory education expert. His teachings aim to help children improve their memory and he’s written numerous books on the subject.

5MLB Slugger With A Penchant For R&B

On the baseball diamond, Dick Allen was an all-star outfielder. But off the field, he moonlighted as an R&B singer.

One of baseball’s most feared sluggers in the 1960s and ’70s, Allen had his best seasons with the Philadelphia Phillies and Chicago White Sox. While playing for the Sox in 1972, Allen had a career year, belting 37 homers and bringing in 113 runs while hitting .308 to capture AL MVP honors.

But his rugged exterior masked a melodic voice, and he often spent his down time in the recording studio. He also occasionally performed national anthems around Philadelphia, most notably in front of a sold-out Spectrum crowd before a 76ers game.

His hard work in the studio eventually led to a record deal and in 1965 he released an single album with his soul group, The Ebonistics.

4The Mailman Keeps On Truckin’

Karl Malone is cut from a different cloth. A basketball superstar, he never lost touch with his humble beginnings. Born in rural Louisiana, Malone grew up with a firm appreciation for the outdoors. An avid fisherman and hunter, Malone’s love of the rugged lifestyle spilled over into his NBA career, where he was admired for his unyielding work ethic and notorious for his physical play (just ask Isaiah Thomas and David Robinson).

Off the court, Malone balanced his life in the spotlight by frequently slipping away into solitude. The open road was where he found peace of mind. The highway was his sanctuary.

So in the early 1990s, he capitalized on a childhood dream, establishing a truck-driving company. It was called Malone Enterprises Trucking, Inc., and it lasted less than two years. But while Malone may have discovered that the trucking business wasn’t for him, the love of hauling supplies never left him. He frequently hopped in his Big Rig for a few hours to clear his mind during the season.

In 2005, the Mailman proved he could deliver off of the hardwood, when he used his trucking skills to help haul away debris left behind from Hurricane Katrina.

3Linebacker Tangles With Snakes In The Off Season

It’s not unusual for football players to find success in high-profile careers when they’re done with football. Terry Bradshaw and Howie Long found a second life as actors. Others, like Dan Dierdorf and Phil Simms, made it big as play-by-play announcers.

But not many football players turn to herpetology—the study of snakes and other reptiles. Well, except for Chad Brown that is.

Brown’s love for snakes began as a child, but his passion intensified when he was a student athlete at the University of Colorado. During his freshman year in 1991, he bought a boa constrictor to keep in his dorm room. Since then, he’s accumulated thousands of snakes.

Brown continued to dabble in herpetology even after he turned pro. He eventually opened his own exotic reptiles pet store, before tragically losing it to a fire.

2The Football Player Who Tackled The Legal System

In the 1970s, the Minnesota Vikings had one of the NFL’s stingiest defenses. Anchored by their fearsome front line—the Purple People Eaters—the Vikings reached the Super Bowl four times in a single decade.

Defensive tackle Alan Page was an integral part of that success. During his 12-year tenure with the Vikings, he played in all four Super Bowls, went to nine Pro Bowls, and was named an All-Pro nine times. But despite all of his success on the gridiron, Page had loftier aspirations—he saw a life after sports, one that involved practicing law. And his legal career is just as distinguished as his football one ever was.

Page understood he wouldn’t play football forever. So during his stint with the Vikings, he started taking law classes at the University of Minnesota. When he retired from football in 1981, he was hired as an Assistant Attorney General in Minneapolis. He would eventually rise through the ranks to become the state’s first African-American Supreme Court Associate Justice. As of 2014, he’s been on the court for more than 20 years.

1The Defensive End Obsessed With The JFK Assassination

Before a car accident tragically took his life, Derrick Thomas was on his way to a Hall of Fame career with the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs. A highly-touted defensive end from the University of Alabama, Thomas made an immediate impact for the Chiefs. He notched 10 sacks and made 75 tackles in his first year with the team, earning Defensive Rookie of the Year honors while also being named to the Pro Bowl. Lauded for his efforts with children’s charities, Thomas’ desire to help youngsters emanated from his own troubled youth.

His early years were marred with tragedy. In 1972, when Thomas was only five years old, his father was killed in action in Vietnam. Growing up without a father was rough, and Thomas had a troubled childhood, almost going completely off the rails before his mother and the community stepped in.

One thing Thomas never let go of was his fascination with the US military, primarily with its aviation branch, as well as its endless list of alleged conspiracies. Thomas was deeply fixated on the JFK assassination. He studied thousands of documents, read hundreds of books on the subject, and believed Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, to be “true to life.” He even met with Marina Oswald, the wife of alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, and chatted with eye-witness Jean Hill on a Kansas City radio program.

The more he studied, the more he understood the politics of the conflict in Vietnam. He eventually connected the events that led up to the war to his father’s death, placing specific blame on Kennedy’s killers. The way he saw it, the bullet that killed Kennedy was the same one that killed his father. He surmised that if Kennedy wasn’t killed, then maybe the US wouldn’t have escalated the situation in Vietnam, and maybe his father would have returned home to him.

Sports reporter by day, internet sleuth at night, keep up with Brandon at On Campus Sports, Highlands Today, or on Twitter

Today’s professional athletes are often viewed as overpaid and selfish, with recent sports headlines being dominated by scandals involving domestic abuse and performance-enhancing drugs. The people involved in these issues don’t represent the majority of athletes, however. Many outstanding athletes have even put their careers on hold and their lives at risk to serve in the military during times of war.

10Louis Zamperini

Zamperini, a runner who competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, went on to serve in World War II. He went missing during the war after his plane crashed in the Pacific Ocean and was assigned an “official death date” by the War Department, which included a letter of condolence sent by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The reality was that Zamperini survived 47 days at sea while floating on a raft, only to be captured and taken prisoner by the Japanese.

After surviving in the Pacific by collecting rainfall and catching the occasional albatross, Zamperini was subjected to cruel torture at the hands of Mutsuhiro Watanabe, a Japanese sergeant whose nickname was “The Bird.” His indomitable spirit may have been foreshadowed in his Olympic performance, where his closing lap in the 5,000 meters was recorded at just 56 seconds as he tried to run down his competition.

His story was immortalized in the book Unbroken, which has been adapted into a feature-length film directed by Angelina Jolie.

9Warren Spahn

Spahn was one half of the dominant pitching duo that inspired Gerald V. Herm to write the poem that was later shortened to the epigram, “Spahn and Sain and Pray for Rain.” The Baseball Hall of Famer is the all-time leader in wins among left-handers and sixth overall with 363 wins. Before beginning a baseball career that would include 17 All-Star Game appearances, two no-hitters and a Cy Young Award, Spahn served in the Army beginning in 1942.

Spahn saw a great deal of combat, serving in a unit that included convicts who had been released early from their sentences in exchange for enlisting. Spahn fought during both the Battle of the Bulge and the Battle of Hurtgen Forest. Of the latter battle, Spahn said, “We were surrounded in the Hurtgen Forest and had to fight our way out of there. Our feet were frozen when we went to sleep, and they were frozen when we woke up. We didn’t have a bath or change of clothes for weeks.”

Spahn’s unit earned recognition for taking and maintaining the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen, the only bridge over the Rhine River taken by Allied Forces. In addition to the Distinguished Unit Emblem, Spahn also earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.

Some baseball historians believe that his service time may have prevented him from reaching 400 wins, but Spahn himself thought the war played an important role in shaping his career, saying, “I matured a lot in those years. If I had not had that maturity, I wouldn’t have pitched until I was 45 . . . after what I went through overseas, I never thought of anything I was told to do in baseball as hard work. You get over feeling like that when you spend days on end sleeping in frozen tank tracks in enemy threatened territory.”

8Bob Kalsu

Look up at the Ring of Honor at Ralph Wilson Stadium in Orchard Park, New York. Among the names of legendary Buffalo Bills is a man who never made it past his rookie year in the National Football League. That’s because Bob Kalsu, during a time in which many professional athletes were able to avoid the Vietnam War due to their high-profile careers, volunteered for active duty and was called on to serve in one of the most dangerous and war-torn areas. Stationed at Firebase Ripcord, Kalsu was named the acting commander of his unit when his commanding officer had to be airlifted out to have shrapnel removed from his neck.

The North Vietnamese Army was determined to move Kalsu and his men from Ripcord, and the firebase was subjected to 600 rounds per day, the heaviest attacks coming when choppers landed to bring supplies. Despite his rank, Kalsu exposed himself to the heavy fire so he could assist his men in carrying the newly delivered shells to their position on the hill.

Philip Michaud, who was there with Kalsu at Ripcord, described him as “a fearless guy, smart, brave and respected by his troops.” Of the frequent NVA attacks, Michaud relayed the following about the acting commander: “Rounds were coming in, and he was out there. I told him a few times, ‘It’s good to run around and show what leadership is about, but when rounds are blowing up in your area, you ought to hunker down behind a gun wheel. Or a bunker.’ ”

Perhaps the most heart-wrenching part of the story has to do with Kalsu’s family life back home. After Kalsu died by enemy mortar fire, an Army officer was dispatched to his home to tell his wife of the incident. She was not there. The officer was directed to a local hospital, where he gave Jan Kalsu the news shortly after she had delivered the couple’s second child, a baby boy.

7Archie Williams

Like fellow gold medalist Jesse Owens, Archie Williams threw a wrench into Adolf Hitler’s theory of Aryan dominance with his performance at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. While the story of how Hitler refused to shake Owens’s hand after his victories is quite well known (in reality, he shook no athlete’s hand after the opening ceremonies, regardless of their race), Williams felt similarly snubbed. When asked about his exchange with the German Chancellor, Williams said, “Hitler wouldn’t shake my hand either!” Williams competed in the 400 meters, an event in which he had set the world record of 46.1 seconds earlier that year while competing for UC-Berkeley at the NCAA Championships.

Williams’s athletic career was cut short by a hamstring injury, so he earned his pilot’s license and became a commercial pilot. He later served as a pilot during World War II and was commissioned in the Air Force in 1943. Williams worked with the Tuskegee Airmen as a flight instructor and remained in the service for over 20 years.

6Dwight F. Davis

The Davis Cup is a tennis tradition that began back in 1900, when Dwight F. Davis and other members of the Harvard tennis team wished to arrange a match between the United States and Great Britain. The annual competition is likely Davis’s legacy, but the founder of the Davis Cup was also awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for “extraordinary heroism in action between Baulny and Chaudron Farm, France, September 29–30, 1918.”

Davis’s citation relays his impressive feats during battle. “After exposure to severe shelling and machinegun fire for three days, during which time he displayed rare courage and devotion to duty, Major Davis, then adjutant, 69th Infantry Brigade, voluntarily and in the face of intense enemy machinegun and artillery fire proceeded to various points in his brigade sector, assisted in reorganizing positions, and in replacing units of the brigade, this self-imposed duty necessitating continued exposure to concentrated enemy fire.

“On September 28, 1918, learning that a strong counterattack had been launched by the enemy against Baulny ridge and was progressing successfully, he voluntarily organized such special duty men as could be found and with them rushed forward to reinforce the line under attack, exposing himself with such coolness and great courage that his conduct inspired the troops in this crisis and enabled them to hold on in the face of vastly superior numbers.”

Davis then went on to serve as President Calvin Coolidge’s Secretary of War and Governor General of the Philippines. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

5Charley Paddock

Anyone who has seen the movie Chariots of Fire will remember Charley Paddock as the brash American who defeats Harold Abrahams by a wide margin in the 200 meters on his way to a silver medal at the 1924 Olympics. In reality, Paddock also won gold in the 100 meters and the 4×100 meter relay, along with another silver in the 200 meters in the 1920 Olympic Games. He held world records in several events throughout his career, earning recognition as the “World’s Fastest Human.”

His Olympic efforts were bookended by service in both World War I and World War II. Serving in the Marine Corps, Paddock was a lieutenant of field artillery during World War I and a member of the personal staff of Major General William P. Upshur during World War II. Both Paddock and Upshur died in a plane crash while serving during World War II.

4Ted Williams

Teddy Ballgame is remembered by most baseball fans as one of the greatest hitters to ever play. Over his career, Williams batted .344 while hitting 521 home runs. These numbers are all the more impressive considering that he lost several years of his playing career while serving in the Navy in two different wars: World War II and the Korean War.

He served as an instructor during World War II. During the Korean War he took enemy fire and was hit multiple times, even crash-landing during one of his missions. During his time as an enlisted man, Williams earned three Air Medals for Aerial Flight Operations, along with a Navy Unit commendation and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

During his time in Korea, Williams served as a wingman to another iconic figure: John Glenn. The two spoke fondly of one another. According to Glenn, Williams “was just great. The same skills that made him the best baseball hitter ever—the eye, the coordination, the discipline—are what he used to make himself an excellent combat pilot.”

3Roy Gleason

Gleason made it to the big leagues at just 20 years of age, being called up to play with the Los Angeles Dodgers toward the end of the 1963 season. Only up for a “cup of coffee,” Gleason earned a hit in his only at-bat that season, though he did appear in seven other games as a pinch runner. The Dodgers won the World Series that year, so Gleason earned a World Series ring for having been on the active roster during the season.

Gleason returned to the minors, blocked from the big leagues by a roster full of Dodgers legends. In 1967, he was called to active duty in Vietnam, where he served as a sergeant. While out on patrol, the North Vietnamese Army attacked the unit Gleason was leading, and Gleason was injured by shrapnel that had torn through his arm and leg. Gleason continued to fight despite his injuries, returning fire until his injuries forced an evacuation by helicopter.

Among the many things left behind in Vietnam because of the rapid evacuation was Gleason’s 1963 World Series Ring. The Dodgers replaced the ring Gleason lost in a ceremony at Dodger Stadium in 2003. Gleason was further awarded a Purple Heart and earned a Special Congressional Recognition for his service.

2Chad Hennings

A Dallas Cowboy who served during wartime, Hennings won the Outland Trophy as a collegian before joining the Cowboys for three Super Bowl titles over nine professional seasons. A graduate of the Air Force Academy, Hennings was drafted by Dallas in 1988 but had to first serve four years in the military before he could begin his pro career.

Serving in the Persian Gulf, Hennings flew 45 missions over Iraq as a part of Operation Provide Comfort, earning two Air Force Achievement Medals, along with an Outstanding Unit Award and a humanitarian award. The operation in which Hennings participated was largely a humanitarian effort, providing aid to Kurds in Northern Iraq while also clearing any remaining Iraqi threats from the area.

After serving in the Persian Gulf, Hennings returned to professional football but continued his service in the Air Force. Hennings remained a member of the Air Force Reserve throughout all of his nine years in the NFL.

1Chuck Bednarik

Concrete Charlie is highly regarded among those who long for the days of the rugged football player who refuses to leave the field under any circumstance, known for his time with the Eagles. The NFL is now filled by highly specialized athletes excelling at a single position, but Bednarik was not one of those. He played on offense, on defense, and on special teams before special teams even had its own name. As his plaque in Canton, Ohio reads, Bednarik was a “bone-jarring tackler,” and if that’s not enough, he was also a “rugged, durable, bulldozing blocker.”

If anything served to harden Concrete Charlie, it was likely his service during World War II. A member of the Army Air Corps, Bednarik was just a teenager when he joined as an aerial gunner, flying 30 combat missions, all over Germany.

According to Bednarik, the most dangerous of those missions was a simple delivery. Bednarik was charged with delivering gasoline 16 kilometers (10 mi) behind enemy lines to refill 500 of General Patton’s tanks. Bednarik recalled the mission, saying, “We had no bombs in the bomb bay; we had nothing but gasoline—thousands of gallons of gasoline. Picture taking off or landing with a plane full of gasoline. If we had crashed, I would be dust. That mission scared the hell out of us. We went over and landed, and I could hear boom, boom, boom from where the fighting was going on. We dumped that gas and got the hell out of there real fast.”

For his service, Bednarik earned the Air Medal, four Oak Leaf Clusters, four Battle Stars, and the European Theater Operations Medal.

J. Francis Wolfe is a freelance writer and a noted dreamer of dreams. He aspires to one day live in a cave high in the mountains where he can write poetry no one will ever see.

Intersex people in sports have generated huge controversy. In particular, those who compete as women are often seen as having an unfair advantage in strength, stamina, speed, or size. Frequently, these individuals have been publicly humiliated—described as “freaks” and “cheats” and subjected to physical examinations that violate their personal privacy and dignity.

Their hard work has sometimes been for nothing as they have been disqualified from competing or retrospectively stripped of titles and medals. Their sexual anatomy has sadly overshadowed some truly great human achievements and raised some uncomfortable questions about our gender binary prejudices.

10 Pinki Pramanik

Pinki Pramanik was an Indian female track runner, specializing in 400- and 800-meter events. Her career was advancing well until she encountered some disturbing harassment. Some youths planted a gun on her and brought it to the attention of police. She was prevented from competing at an event but was eventually cleared of all charges as eyewitnesses confirmed her innocence. Even so, she took three months off to recover from the incident.

While her results and track times suffered after this initial persecution, she went on to win a silver medal for her country as part of the 400-meter women’s relay team at the 2006 Commonwealth Games. She also won several gold medals at smaller events before retiring from athletics. However, the gun-planting incident was only the beginning of the attempts to frame her for crimes she didn’t commit. In 2012, she was publicly accused of being male and of having raped a woman.

Initial gender testing in the wake of these allegations was inconclusive. However, Pramanik was held in a male prison without bail for 26 days while these tests were conducted. A clip which showed her naked was also leaked online and went viral at the time. She claimed that the tests occurred without her consent while she was drugged and had her hands and feet tied.

A more advanced chromosome-pattern test was also ordered. Eventually, it was determined that Pramanik was a male pseudohermaphrodite. She had a disorder of sexual development, with an underdeveloped penis and internal testes. Experts argued that this would make her incapable of rape, but the police maintained that she could achieve an erection and still be guilty. How the police knew this is unclear. Pramanik was also suspended from her job because of the allegations.

During the sensational trial, the media referred to the woman who had brought the allegations against Pramanik as her “live-in lover.” But according to Pramanik, the woman was a single mother who had originally lived next door. When the woman’s partner left her, Pramanik took pity on the woman and invited her to move in because she lived alone. The woman lived with Pramanik for several years. At some point, however, this woman took naked photographs of Pramanik and attempted to blackmail her with them.

Throughout the trial, Pramanik insisted that she was female and blamed the compulsory use of testosterone in her training as the cause of her more masculine appearance. After she was found innocent of the rape charge, she stated in an interview with Outlook: “I have locked myself in my house. I don’t want to go out or show my face.”

Eventually, the woman who had made the allegations confessed to having been put up to it by the husband of another famous Indian athlete. This man was in a dispute with Pramanik over some land.

9 Caster Semenya

In 2009, 18-year-old Caster Semenya of South Africa became the center of global media attention after her debut at the world athletics championships in Berlin. However, this had more to do with her elevated testosterone levels than her gold medal in the women’s 800-meter track event (with an impressive time of 1 minute 55.45 seconds).

Semenya allegedly had five times the amount of testosterone that “normal” women have. Outrage was expressed by those who claimed she had an unfair advantage. Subsequent tests revealed that Semenya had internal testes and lacked a womb and ovaries. The results were made public, and Semenya was deeply embarrassed.

“If it wasn’t for my family, I don’t think I could have survived,” she told the BBC in an interview. “I was world champion but I was never able to celebrate it. [ . . . ] It was upsetting, you feel humiliated. [ . . . ] I just want to be me. I was born like this. I don’t want any changes.”

Semenya was classified as a true hermaphrodite. She was advised to have corrective surgery or hormonal treatment before her condition led to potential health problems. The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), which carried out the gender tests, originally considered banning Semenya from competing in future events and revoking her gold medal.

But she was eventually allowed to return. She retained her gold and won silvers at the 2011 World Championships and the 2012 Summer Olympics. But after time away from running, injury, and undergoing the advised treatment for her condition, Semenya never topped her 2009 time of 1 minute 55.45 seconds.

8 Ewa Klobukowska

At the height of the Cold War in 1964, the Summer Games were held in Tokyo. Ewa Klobukowska competed there as part of the Polish team in the 4 X 100-meter relay for women. The Poles beat the somewhat faster American athletes due to their more coordinated exchanges. The Polish team won a gold medal for their country and established a new world record. Klobukowska also picked up a bronze medal in the women’s 100-meter track.

During that time, athletes from the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries like Poland were under general suspicion in the West, and the women were often stereotyped as being unnaturally robust and mannish. They tended to be slandered in the Western media with suggestions of gender cheating or blatant ridicule that called them “freaks of nature.”

In 1968, the IAAF introduced sex chromatin testing for gender identification in an attempt to quash exactly this kind of name-calling and rumormongering. Klobukowska was the first to be singled out. According to the IAAF, she had “one chromosome too many.” She was disqualified from competing in women’s events. Poland was allowed to keep its 1964 gold medal, but the world record time was scratched from the books. The time of the American relay team became the world record instead. In 1968, Klobukowska, who had been classed as a chromosomal male, controversially gave birth to a child.

The IAAF’s decision concerning Klobukowska is now considered to be an injustice because the results of sex chromatin for gender identification are no longer deemed as reliable as they once were.

7 Stella Walsh

Stella Walsh became one the most famous intersex athletes of all time. Throughout her life, though, no one seemed to suspect her of being intersex. She was born in Poland in 1911, christened “Stefania Walasiewicz,” and raised as a girl. Her family emigrated to the US where she soon became known as “Stella Walsh.”

Walsh lived in Cleveland, Ohio, and showed an aptitude for athletics. She became a rising star of track-and-field events and set a new world record in the 100-meter dash in 1930. She was tipped to win gold for America at the 1932 Olympics. But the Great Depression cost Walsh her job with the New York Central Railroad, and she could no longer afford to pay her own way to the Olympics, as many athletes in those days were expected to do.

The Olympic Games of 1932 were held in Los Angeles. The only way Walsh could get there was to take a job with the Polish consulate in New York City. She ended up representing Poland instead of America at the games, which many Americans saw as a betrayal. As a result, her citizenship was delayed by 15 years.

Competing under the name of “Stanislawa Walasiewicz” at the 1932 Olympics, Walsh equaled the world record for the 100-meter race and won gold. The long stride of her running style was likened to that of a man’s. At the next Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936, she once again represented Poland but this time won a silver, losing the gold to her American rival, Helen Stephens, by just 0.2 seconds.

Given Stella’s “betrayal” of her adoptive country, this might have seemed like a poetic end to some people. However, in a weird twist that has largely been forgotten, Helen Stephens actually became the first female athlete to be subjected to an at-event gender examination after accusations that she was a man. She passed, although some might say she was even more mannish than Walsh.

By the end of her career, Walsh had achieved 26 new world records. In 1980, she died when she was gunned down in the cross fire of an armed robbery in Cleveland. The coroner discovered that Walsh had ambiguous genitalia caused by a rare chromosomal disorder known as “chromosomal mosaicism.” Despite the gender confusion this condition may sometimes cause, Walsh lived her entire life as a woman.

6 Maria Patino

Maria Patino represented Spain in the hurdles in the 1980s. Officials had already given her a “certificate of femininity” at the World Track and Field Championships in 1983, but she forgot to take it with her to the World University Games in Japan in 1985.

After submitting to a swab test, Patino—a feminine woman by all outward appearances—was advised to claim an injury and drop out of the competition because her test results were ambiguous and needed clarification. She complied and received a letter two months later with the results. Completely stunned, Patino read that she had failed the test and been officially classified as “male.”

Until that moment, Patino had no idea that she had a Y chromosome, making her intersex. She was diagnosed with androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS) and disqualified from competing. She challenged the IAAF’s decision and found experts who managed to convince sports federations that her AIS gave her no advantage over other competitors. The IAAF’s decision was reversed but not in time for Patino to compete in the Olympics.

Thanks in no small part to Patino challenging the rules of gender verification testing (GVT), the IAAF dropped compulsory GVT in 1991. The International Olympic Committee followed suit in 1999. However, both organizations still reserve the right to order individual GVT when there are strong doubts about or challenges to a female athlete’s sexual identity (as was the case with Caster Semenya).

5 Santhi Soundarajan

Born into the lowest caste of Indian society, Santhi Soundarajan lived with her parents and four younger siblings in a hut before obtaining a state scholarship. She distinguished herself as a middle-distance runner while studying at a college in Chennai. After breaking national records, Soundarajan went on to win a silver medal at the Asian Athletics Championships in South Korea in 2005. The following year, she represented India at the Asian Games and received another silver medal for her performance in the women’s 800 meters.

The day after her victory at the Asian Games, Soundarajan was called in for tests by the Indian Athletic Federations doctor. The doctor left her with a panel of IAAF-appointed experts, and she underwent a 30-minute physical examination. One day later, she was dismissed from the games. However, she didn’t know why until she saw it on the evening news like everyone else: Soundarajan had been stripped of her medals because she was not, according to the IAAF, a real woman.

Like Maria Patino, Soundarajan had AIS. Unlike Patino, she did not challenge the decision. Depressed, she retreated to her rural village and attempted suicide by ingesting poison. “Everyone looked down on me,” she said in an interview with ESPN. “Everyone was looking at me in this new way: Is she a man? Is she a transvestite? It’s very hurtful. It ruined my life and my family’s life.”

Fortunately, Soundarajan recovered enough to go on. In spite of the stigma, she used some of the prize money that was given to her by the state to set up a school to teach talented but impoverished children how to run. Sadly, this venture did not last as there was not enough money to support it.

Although she had always identified as a woman, Soundarajan eventually found it easier to avoid unwanted attention and rumor by cutting her hair short and dressing and living as a male. Six years after winning her silver medal, she was living in a rudimentary house opposite the hut she grew up in. She makes mud bricks for a living.

4 Erika/Erik Schinegger

Erika Schinegger experienced gender confusion as a child, but she had no clue that she was an “inside-out male” until after she won a gold medal for skiing. Schinegger won the women’s downhill at the Alpine World Ski Championships in Portillo, Chile, in 1966.

Later in her career, at age 20, she underwent testing at the 1968 Winter Olympics at Grenoble, France. It was discovered that her saliva contained only male hormones. She was put through extensive medical and psychological testing, and eventually, her lower torso was opened surgically. A penis and testicles were found to have grown internally. Schinegger underwent several more surgical procedures and officially changed sex, becoming “Erik.”

In 1988, Erik made headlines again when he handed over his 1966 gold medal to former French skier Marielle Goitschel. The exchange was broadcast on Austrian television, and the story was circulated by the European media. By that stage, Eric was 40 years old, married, and a father. He was running a hotel and ski school in the Carinthia region of Austria.

3 Dora, Heinrich, Or Horst Ratjen

Dora Ratjen was central to one of the biggest sports scandals in history. At birth, the midwife announced, “It’s a boy.” But she quickly changed her mind and said, “It’s a girl after all.” When Ratjen got pneumonia some months later, her father asked the doctor to examine his daughter’s genitalia. The doctor told him, “Let it be. You can’t do anything about it anyway.”

“My parents brought me up as a girl,” Ratjen told arresting police officers in Germany in 1938. “I therefore wore girl’s clothes all my childhood. But from the age of 10 or 11, I started to realize I wasn’t female but male. However, I never asked my parents why I had to wear women’s clothes even though I was male.”

Ratjen failed to develop full breasts like other girls and experienced her first male ejaculation at puberty. She ended up having to shave her legs every other day. She became a loner, avoided swimming and social events, and worked with other women in a tobacco factory. When she joined an athletics club in 1934, Ratjen experienced acceptance as a talented “female” high jumper.

Ratjen went on to win gold for Germany at the European Athletics Championships in Vienna in 1938. She cleared the bar in the high jump at 1.70 meters, setting a new world record. On the train home, she was stopped by a policeman as she stretched her legs on the platform at Magdeburg. A ticket inspector had informed the officer that Ratjen was really a man disguised as a woman. The policeman asked Ratjen to accompany him to the station, and Ratjen was arrested that afternoon, charged with suspicion of fraud. Her gold medal was confiscated.

Before this arrest, Ratjen had also previously represented Germany at the 1936 Summer Olympic Games in Berlin. She had placed fourth in the women’s high jump (as shown in the video above). Her teammate, Elfried Kaun, won bronze in the same event. However, Germany had three outstanding female high jumpers at that time. The third, Gretel Bergmann, was deliberately sidelined from the team. Bergmann was Jewish, and Hitler did not want a Jewish girl representing Germany.

Soon after Ratjen’s arrest in Magdeburg in 1938, the charges of fraud were dropped. Ratjen changed her name to “Heinrich” (or “Horst”) and began a new life as a male. In the decades following World War II, this led to a conspiracy theory that the Nazis knowingly replaced a female Jewish athlete with a man. However, it seems much more likely that no one had any idea that Ratjen was a hermaphrodite with ambiguous genitalia and a confused gender identity because she was raised as a girl.

“I never had any suspicions [about Ratjen’s sexual identity], not even once,” said Gretel Bergmann in an interview with Spiegel Online International. “In the communal shower, we wondered why she never showed herself naked. It was grotesque that someone could still be that shy at the age of 17. We just thought, ‘She’s strange. She’s odd.’ ”

2 Zdenka Koubkova/Zdenek Koubek

In 1934, Zdenka Koubkova, a Czechoslovakian track-and-field athlete, became the subject of rumors when she declined to participate in a medical examination that was part of a scientific study on the effects of athletics on women’s bodies.

Soon afterward, she dropped out of athletics and resigned from the Czech Women’s Athletic Federation—which was remarkably suspicious because she had just set a new world record for the women’s 800-meter track at the Women’s World Athletic Championships in London. According to contemporary sources, she was a pseudohermaphrodite.

In 1935, it was revealed that she had undergone a sex change operation and become a man, despite the possibility of being conscripted into military service. She also visited America and performed in a cabaret due to her condition.

1 Edinanci Silva

Edinanci Fernandes da Silva, a Brazilian judoka (female judo wrestler), was born with both male and female sex organs. She underwent surgery in the mid-1990s to officially compete as a woman and was cleared by the IOC to represent Brazil in the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. She didn’t win a medal in 1996, but she did become a world bronze medalist the following year.

Silva competed again in the 2000 Olympics in Sydney but encountered unwanted attention when Australian competitor Natalie Jenkins repeatedly referred to her in a press conference as “he.”

“I have never fought that one before. My plan was not to grip with her, she’s—he’s—very strong,” Jenkins told reporters. Silva gave a mouth swab to officials, which proved she was female. She beat Jenkins but again failed to win an Olympic medal. However, one of her biggest career achievements came that year when she won her category at the Tournoi de Paris in 2000.

HTR Williams is a freelance writer living in New Zealand. To read more of his work or say hello, please visit htrwilliams.com.

Throughout history, people have always tried to find some way to cheat their way to glory without any effort, a quality that has caused numerous issues in sports. Humans have been enjoying sports for thousands of years, and players have always tried to take the easy path to victory. Many cheats have been identified over the years and are recognizable by most officials, but some are more elaborate. Over the years, bizarre cheats have been used that still shock people today.

10 Abortion Doping

Abortion doping is one of the most disturbing forgotten techniques used by East German sports officials to prepare female athletes for the Olympics. There has been great controversy since rumors about abortion doping first surfaced. Some believe that it’s nothing more than a particularly dark urban legend, while others say that it was a very real technique.

East German female athletes were treated very poorly in the name of sports. Their coaches would use every method to achieve victory at the risk of the athlete’s health. Steroids were given to athletes without their permission, but possibly the most horrifying method used was abortion doping. To this day, it’s unknown if abortion doping was ever actually used to improve athletes’ performances, but it was acknowledged by the Olympics in 1988. It was theorized that the increased hormones and physical effects from a pregnancy could actually help a female athlete, even if the baby had been aborted beforehand. The only person to actually speak about abortion doping in the Olympics was Prince Alexandre de Merode of Belgium, former vice president of the International Olympic Committee. He claimed to know Eastern European athletes who had been artificially inseminated and then had their pregnancies terminated after a few months for the purpose of better sports results.

The rumors of abortion doping may have been born after steroids caused multiple issues with pregnancies during the 1970s and 1980s. Anabolic steroids were fed to female athletes, giving them masculine features and wreaking havoc on their anatomy. Babies were born with severe defects, and some athletes had miscarriages due to the steroids they were given. Whether or not the rumors about abortion doping are true, it’s terrifying to think what lengths athletes (or coaches) will go to for a win.

9 Boris Onischenko’s Magic Epee

Like East Germany, the Soviet Union was well-known for the liberties they would take to get the gold. The methods that they employed were often quite elaborate, as was the case with Boris Onischenko. Onischenko was one of the most prominent athletes in the world. In 1972, he was a three-time pentathlon champion and had been on the winning Soviet pentathlon team. He was a national celebrity, but a scandal in 1976 would change everything for him.

At the age of 38, Boris Onischenko was an older athlete by the Montreal Olympics in 1976. An excellent fencer, he blew his competition out of the water. It soon became increasingly clear, however, that there was no way that Onischenko could have won as a brilliantly as he did. The coaches of the Great Britain pentathlon team began to wonder what was going on. They had an expert examine the epee that Onischenko was using. After extensive observation, the expert said that there was nothing wrong with it. Onischenko then fenced Jim Fox, and an observation by Fox would expose Onischenko’s deceit. During the match, Onischenko lunged at Fox, who successfully dodged his attack. Despite Fox evading the attack, a point was given to Onischenko. Fox was confused; neither of them had actually scored a point.

After Onischenko handily defeated Fox, Fox went to the Olympics committee and had them examine Onischenko’s epee. They went through every last portion of the epee and made a shocking discovery. Inside the handle, intricate electrical wiring was found that created a system by which Onischenko could win. The system worked when pressure was applied. The pressure would cause the device to give a point to Onischenko without actually making a hit. After an investigation, officials decided that Onischenko had cheated and gave the win to Great Britain’s team.

8 Spain Paralympics Scandal

In 2000, Spain won the gold medal in basketball in the Paralympics. This should have been an inspirational story about athletes overcoming their disabilities to achieve something great, but it soon became clear that the win was nothing short of cheating on the part of the Spanish team. The players were supposed to have mental handicaps; instead, most had no mental deficiencies whatsoever.

Carlos Ribagorda was one of the players on the 2000 winning team. After he won the gold, he started working as a writer with a business magazine and later even published a book. As it became more clear that he had no handicaps, he agreed to give back his gold medal and explained to the Paralympics Committee what had occurred. He was just one of 10 others who had no disabilities but were put on the 12-player team. The revelation shocked many who thought that no one would go as far as to cheat in the Paralympics.

Soon, it became clear that cheating had occurred in even more events: Two Spanish swimmers were found to have no disabilities along with a table tennis player. Further investigations revealed that the Russians also cheated. The Paralympics Committee soon began to blame Fernando Martin Vicente, who founded the National Association of Special Sports in 1975. He had a disabled son, so it seemed that his actions were out of kindness, but as the events became bigger, he began to make millions from them. After the corruption was uncovered, Vicente was forced to resign.

7 Rosie Ruiz Fakes The Race

In 1980, Rosie Ruiz handily won the 1980 Boston Marathon. It was an impressive feat. She won in record time—little more than two and a half hours. When she was crowned the winner of the marathon, she was hardly sweating despite having run 26.2 miles. Her hair was perfectly styled, and she wasn’t flushed like the rest of the runners. For many who saw Ruiz at the end of the race, nothing made sense for a good reason: She hadn’t run at all.

While the judges were suspicious of Ruiz because of her appearance, they initially gave her the win. Then, both spectators and competitors testified that they had never seen Ruiz running in the race. Some even testified that she was seen on the sidelines. Ruiz fed the judges’ doubts even further when she said she had only been training for 18 months by running in Central Park. She had been in one other race—the New York Marathon, for which she had a similarly impressive and possibly dubious performance. Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon and a famous runner in her own right, was covering the marathon on television. When she interviewed Ruiz, she began to have doubts about her victory. She asked Ruiz what her intervals had been, to which Ruiz responded by asking what intervals were.

It became increasingly clear that Ruiz was not an experienced runner in any way. In the New York Marathon, Ruiz finished in 24th place. It was revealed that she had done so by cutting out and traveling by subway to the finish line. She used a similar strategy of cutting out and taking shortcuts to win the Boston Marathon. It was also discovered that she lied to get into the New York Marathon. When she submitted her application past the deadline, she claimed special dispensation by saying she had a “fatal brain tumor.” She was stripped of her title but faced no criminal charges. Later on, however, she began to have trouble with the law. In 1982, she was charged with stealing $60,000 from the company she worked for and was arrested in 1983 for selling 2 kilograms (4 lb) of cocaine to undercover officers.

6 Tom Williams’s Fake Blood

In 2009 during rugby’s Heineken Cup Match, there appeared to be no way that the Harlequins could win against Leinster in the quarterfinal. Then, Tom Williams was taken off the field because his mouth appeared bloody, but no injury seemed to have occurred. Nick Evans, the Harlequins’ best kicker, was taken back onto the field. Leinster won the game anyway, but there were questions about Tom Williams’s injury.

Because of Leinster’s win, they weren’t allowed to examine Williams to see if his injury was legitimate. Nevertheless, it was soon discovered that Williams had not been injured; he had actually taken a blood capsule from his sock during the 69th minute. Six minutes later, he put the capsule into his mouth and bit it, causing his “injury.” Professor Arthur Tanner, the Leinster club doctor, was initially suspicious of the injury and tried to follow Williams but was prevented from examining him. Dr. Wendy Chapman, the Harlequins’ club doctor, was told to cut Williams’s lip so it would appear that his injury was legitimate.

The scandal became known as “Bloodgate” and shocked the rugby community. Dean Richards, the director of the Harlequins, was banned for three years by the ERC and was fined £259,000. Tom Williams was given 12 months, but the ban was shortened to four after he admitted to using the capsule.

5 Sylvester Carmouche Uses Fog To His Advantage

January 11, 1990, was a foggy day in Louisiana, and very few went to the racetrack that day. Because of the foggy conditions, the audience could hardly even see the horses. Sylvester Carmouche really wanted to win with his horse, Landing Officer, and the weather conditions gave the idea to him to try to cheat in one of the most audacious racing scandals of all time. When the race started, all nine of the horses went off into the fog. In a surprising finish, Landing Officer dashed ahead of the competition and won the race. The odds of Landing Officer winning were 23–1, so anyone who bet on him happily went off to collect their enormous winnings.

Then, the protests lights went up, and it became clear that something was very wrong. Videos of the track only showed eight of the nine horses. Landing Officer was missing. Officials began to claim that Carmouche led Landing Officer into the fog and then stopped him so that he could appear to have a fantastic finish later on. Carmouche denied this and said that Landing Officer was just very fast that day.

A veterinarian examined Landing Officer and found that he wasn’t sweating, wasn’t breathing hard, and his bandages were clean. The Louisiana Racing Commission looked into the controversy and decided that Carmouche had indeed cheated. He was banned for 10 years. This wasn’t the end of his troubles, though. Carmouche was charged with misdemeanor attempted theft of $50—the difference between the $140 that Carmouche received for winning and the $90 fee all the jockeys were paid. He was convicted and sentenced to 30 days in jail, of which 20 days were suspended, along with court costs and a fine of $250.

4 Manny Ramirez’s Female Fertility Drugs

Manny Ramirez revitalized the Dodgers franchise, which had long been mired in chronic losses. He became one of the best players in baseball history, resulting in fame and a huge salary from the Dodgers, but in 2004, a drug policy was instituted which would eventually be Ramirez’s downfall. In 2009, he was caught using female fertility drugs, which are used illegally in conjunction with steroids.

Ramirez claimed that the drugs had been prescribed by a doctor for a “personal issue.” He said that the doctor told him that the drugs shouldn’t have been an issue. However, he never disclosed the doctor’s name, the health issue, or the name of his medication. The medication was identified as human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG), which has been legitimately prescribed to men who don’t produce enough testosterone. HCG can also restore testosterone after steroid use, which suggested that Ramirez had been using steroids in the past. A quick call to a league hotline would have shown that drug was banned, and players who are shown to legitimately need certain drugs for hormone issues can get therapeutic exemptions, but none of these steps were taken by Ramirez. Ramirez was given a 50-game ban, which cost him $7.7 million.

3 Onterrio Smith’s ‘Whizzinator’

In 2005, Minnesota Vikings running back Onterrio Smith was caught at an airport with an unusual device. Identified as “The Original Whizzinator,” the device consisted of a kit which contained dried urine, capsules to clean the device, and even a prosthetic penis. The device was marketed as a way to beat drug tests. While the airport alarms were set off by a bottle of toothpaste, and he was allowed to go on with his flight, many began to wonder just why Smith had the device in the first place.

Smith claimed that he was taking the device to his cousin, but there was considerable evidence that he may have been using the device for himself to pass drug tests. He’d had considerable trouble with failing drug tests in the past: There were already two strikes on his record, including a four-game suspension for marijuana. According to the league, his possession of the device could be considered a violation against the policy of altering urine samples.

An NFL inquiry was opened up over the issue, but until they made a ruling, Smith returned to practice. Many tried to help Smith, including Vikings quarterback Daunte Culpepper, who said about him: “Onterrio, I love him like a brother. [ . . . ] I just tell him, ‘You just have to be straight man. You always have to think before you react and make decisions.’ ” After an investigation, it was determined that Smith had indeed violated the NFL’s policy, and he was suspended for the entire 2005 season.

2 Ben Johnson And The Dirtiest Race In History

Ben Johnson was a beloved athlete from Jamaica who moved to Canada and began to compete there as a runner. In 1988, he was selected to compete in the 1988 Seoul Olympics. An ordinary 100-meter final became quite extraordinary when Ben Johnson beat the world record, but it became clear that he had cheated by using banned steroids. However, it wasn’t just Johnson who had been doping; the majority of the runners in the race were found to be doping also.

Many of the runners were edgy that day, and Johnson was the last one on the field. When the race began, Johnson blew everyone else out of the water, winning the 100-meter in only 9.79 seconds—a world record. After the award ceremony, Johnson spoke to the journalists who still couldn’t believe what had occurred: “I’d like to say my name is Benjamin Sinclair Johnson Jr., and this world record will last 50 years, maybe 100. [ . . . ] A gold medal—that’s something no one can take away from you.”

As it turned out, they did take the medal from him. When Johnson was given a drug test, he failed by testing positive for stanozolol, a banned steroid drug. That wasn’t the end of the story, though. Six of the eight finalists in the 100-meter race would test positive for doping during their career, a fact that has led writers to dub the Seoul 100-meter final “the dirtiest race in history.” While doping was officially banned by the Olympics at the time, it was hardly regulated as fiercely as it is today. The huge publicity from Ben Johnson’s doping scandal in 1988 led to the Olympics finally cracking down on doping with rigorous testing and harsher rules.

1 Panama Lewis’s Black Bottle

In 1982, Aaron Pryor was boxing Alexis Arguello, and it seemed quite clear who would win. For the first several rounds, Arguello pounded Pryor, who was soon so worn out and beaten that he felt he could no longer fight. Panama Lewis, Pryor’s trainer, wasn’t going to let his fighter lose. Lewis gave Pryor a black bottle to drink from. After downing the concoction, Pryor bounced back and won the fight.

No one knew what had occurred. Pryor came back from certain defeat and pummeled his opponent, but many wondered what exactly was in Lewis’s black bottle. People began to wonder whether or not Pryor had cheated. There were questions about what was in the black bottle, but Lewis claimed that the bottle was gone, so there was no way to perform an analysis of the chemicals in the mixture. He claimed that his mixture was nothing more than Perrier water, which he used to soothe Pryor’s stomach.

This explanation only created further scrutiny. Some began to claim that the black bottle mixture was a compound made with cocaine. Luis Resto, a boxer who trained with Lewis, claimed that he had been given a similar mixture, but that it was nothing more than an antihistamine, which would allow for increased lung capacity during fights. There were even theories that Lewis had given an ammonia capsule to Pryor. Because there was no sample, there was no way to prove that Lewis had cheated. To this day, rumors continue to claim that Lewis cheated by giving his boxer illegal stimulants.

Gordon Gora is a struggling author who is desperately trying to make it. You can write him at [email protected].

We all have those days where we have spurts of inspiration and motivation to be fit and live healthier. For most, that feeling fades the second we lace up our shoes or try to eat nothing but a salad for dinner. Well, the good news is that some people actually are cut out for insane physical ability more than others.

Some traits people are just born with, while others are earned through rigorous training and a yearning to be the best. Try to see this article through your rose-colored glasses. Any super-athlete will say that no matter how much natural talent you have, your skills need to be honed. In other words, don’t let this list turn optimism to pessimism when it comes to working out. The struggle is real.

10 VO₂ Max

“VO₂” means the volume of oxygen taken up by muscles during physical activity.^[1] There is some debate over whether high maximum intake levels are dependent on natural ability or if the body can be trained to increase oxygen uptake. Most scientists have settled on an idea that gifted runners are born with a higher VO₂ max, but it can still be improved slightly (maybe 5–20%) with high-intensity training. This is a very important factor in competitive running for both sprinters and marathoners because the more oxygen their muscles can take in, the less fatigued they will become during a race. More oxygen means less lactic acid buildup, which is the cause of soreness and tired muscles.

VO₂ max is commonly measured in high-end athletics, which involve a lot of cardio work such as running, cycling, and even skiing. Looking at the maximum oxygen uptake levels of Olympic-level athletes, sprinters generally have a higher VO₂ max than marathoners. This could show how natural body characteristics determine what type of sport a person is best at. Steve Prefontaine, a runner with a mile time of 3:54.6, shows a VO₂ max of 84.4, whereas top marathoner Derek Clayton’s VO₂ max is 69.7. Sprinters must be highly efficient at getting oxygen to their muscles, while marathoners run at a relatively slower pace and maintain more steady breathing.

9 Fast And Slow Twitch Muscle Fibers

Fast and slow twitch muscle fibers define what kind of running one would be best at. While VO₂ max is a compilation of important factors, muscle fibers can be a deal breaker. Everybody has both fast and slow twitch fibers, but the ratio is different for everyone. Some people have about 50 percent of each, while others can have as few as just 20 percent of one type. Sprinters generally have a high density of fast twitch muscle fibers, whereas marathon runners have high densities of slow twitch muscle fibers. The real difference between the two types of cells is the way they produce energy, which is a very important factor in running because sprinters and marathoners utilize energy in very different ways.

Slow twitch muscle fibers have organelles called mitochondria, which actively expel energy in the form of ATP. Fast twitch muscle fibers rely on stored ATP molecules.^[2] This means that fast twitch muscle fibers have a faster reaction time because they aren’t actively creating energy during a run. With this in mind, it makes sense that sprinters utilize fast twitch muscle fibers more than slow twitch. Recalling those memories of muscle images from high school biology books, the darker red muscle fibers are slow twitch, and the lighter white fibers are fast twitch. Red slow twitch fibers contain high levels of myoglobin, allowing them to stay oxygenated, while white fast twitch fibers don’t contain as much blood, making them appear lighter.

8 Lactate Levels

Lactic acid is produced during rigorous activity, when oxygen cannot be distributed to muscles quickly enough. When oxygen supplies are low and lactic acid increases, hydrogen ions are released, causing that burning muscle sensation we’re all so very fond of. The lactate threshold (LT) is assessed to help target an ideal workout intensity. LT is the point at which lactate begins to rapidly build up in the blood and is measured in either heart rate or running speed. Generally, workouts which fall in the middle area of lactate levels will increase running capabilities.^[3]

Lactate levels are one of the aspects of physical fitness that do not rely on natural components so much as training. Competitive runners will hit an LT at around 85 percent of their maximum heart rate. The more a person runs, the more their muscles will acclimate to it, and they will not overcompensate with high amounts of lactate.

7 Peak Age

There have been a few recent studies done to show what age is the best for runners, and they’re good news. The studies have shown that unlike many other sports, runners of all ages can achieve their goals; it really just depends on how hard they train. That being said, this mostly pertains to distance running. The studies have shown that speed will deteriorate long before endurance.^[4] Fast twitch muscle fibers are the first to go, and on average, maximum heart rate decreases one beat per year as we age. Scientists have not yet discovered the reason behind this, but it is clearly related to the human aging process.

There are many stories about older competitors running their fastest marathon times once they hit age 60. The only aspect of running that really becomes more difficult with age is recovery time. While older runners do not necessarily have less endurance, it may take longer for their muscles to recover from a difficult workout, although this, too, is relative. Muscles store glycogen, which helps mend soreness and fatigue. Older people generally lose muscle mass and therefore glycogen and the ability to make a speedy recovery. However, if a steady routine is maintained, the affects of glycogen loss can be curbed significantly, allowing runners to hit their prime as late as their seventies.

6 Resting Heart Rate

This is definitely a trait that people are born with and will not change based on workouts. Studies have shown that runners very commonly have lower resting heart rates than your average Joe. A typical resting heart rate is between 66 and 72 beats per minute in a healthy adult, but competitive athletes will have resting heart rates around 40 beats per minute.^[5] (One man was measured at only 28!) A low resting heart rate grants an athletic edge. It means that it doesn’t require as much energy to pump blood through the body. In athletes, low heart rate indicates a very healthy heart and healthy, oxygenated blood.

During a workout, the blood can pump up to seven times as much blood through the body as it does while at rest. This is triggered by an increased need for blood and oxygen in muscles. Athletes who run frequently prompt a change in their autonomic nervous system, which controls involuntary actions such as a person’s heartbeat. All of this being said, many factors can influence heart rate besides exercise, and a low heart rate is not always a sign of health, especially in non-elite athletes. Maintaining balance between parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system activity is what will ultimately lead to a healthier heart rate. Plainly put, that means a healthy balance between rest and activity.

5 Maximum Heart Rate

Maximum heart rate is obviously directly linked to resting heart rate, and elite athletes are just a little bit different from the rest of us normal weekend joggers. You might think that athletes can go faster and work harder, which results in a higher heart rate, but this isn’t the case. In relation to having a lower resting heart rate, athletes will also have a slightly lower maximum heart rate, allowing them to not feel as overworked when achieving amazing speeds and top-shelf endurance levels.

Max heart rate is very important to monitor for competitive athletes, because it helps determine a target heart rate for workouts. Generally, the target heart rate should be between 50 to 85 percent of the maximum heart rate. Keep in mind that heart rates differ and can be indicators of different factors from person to person. For example, women’s hearts usually beat four to five times more per minute, either at resting or at max.^[6] Either way, elite athletes have managed to shift the entire heart rate scale down. I always thought they made it look easy somehow.

4 Oxygen Systems

There are a few different types of systems with different methods of transporting oxygen to muscles during a workout. The overall categories include aerobic and anaerobic, meaning when oxygen is readily available and when it is not, respectively.^[7] An aerobic system uses oxygen that is available, whereas anaerobic systems have no available oxygen and must find another way to restore muscles.

During heavy exercise, the body quickly exhausts it oxygen stores. Oxygen can be depleted in as little as ten seconds depending on the intensity of the activity. The body will then change to an anaerobic pathway, which will readily produce energy in the form of ATP to help fuel the muscles. This process can also cause that burning muscle sensation we all know too well, and the body can adapt to and become used to the process. Elite athletes have trained their bodies to both tolerate low oxygen and use other systems efficiently.

3 Altitude Training

Altitude training is a tried and true tool used by elite athletes, particularly runners and swimmers. “High-altitude” in this case is defined as at least 2,100 meters (7,000 ft) above sea level, while 1,200 meters (4,000 ft) above sea level and below is considered low-altitude, although 1,200 meters is still pretty high up, as any exploding bag of chips will tell you. Using this kind of training is one of the ways to slightly change the physiology of your body to help excel in cardio athletics. It has been studied extensively by scientists working with the Olympics to develop new training methods. One scientist received the largest and longest-lasting grant that has ever been given in the name of the Olympics to study it, to the tune of ten years.

Higher altitude levels have less available oxygen in the air, resulting in less oxygen being dispersed to muscles. This makes it necessary to work harder and exert more force and energy during a workout. After returning to a lower altitude, the body still is used to a higher level of exertion. In addition, in high altitude, the body will compensate by creating extra red blood cells to carry oxygen more efficiently, which adds another advantage at lower altitudes. However, scientists suggest that to gain full benefits of altitude training, athletes must spend at least 12 to 15 hours per day in high altitude for the duration of the training so that the body can acclimate.^[8] It is a rigorous process, but it also boasts significant results.

2 Tarahumara

The Tarahumara are a tribe of incredibly able long-distance runners living in Mexico. They embody the perfect example of what a life of running does. The tribe has always lived in huts that are fairly spread out, and they spend days running from village to village, often covering hundreds of miles, without stopping to sleep or eat.^[9] They are also known for their handmade alcohol, which they drink in excess. This somehow does not inhibit their running. The abilities of the Tarahumara are truly unparalleled. Running is their way of life, as they do not use modern technology and live in a very secluded environment, essentially only interacting with their fellow tribe members.

And if you hate toe shoes, the book that made them famous was based around the lives of the Tarahumara. They run in extremely minimalistic sandals, which basically consist of a slab of rubber tied onto the foot in whatever way works. The Tarahumara are cited as evidence for the idea, often espoused by toe shoe enthusiasts, that the foot has evolved over thousands of years to perform perfectly without two and a half inches of padding. Whether or not you personally agree with the theory popularized by toe shoes, there is no denying the physical capabilities of the Tarahumara.

1 Women In Ultrarunning

There is no question that men can generally outcompete women in athletics. Men are built bigger, stronger, and faster. This is not to say that women cannot be incredibly athletic and can never beat men. In fact, there is one sport where women have proven to be equally as talented as their male counterparts. Ultrarunning is technically any race that is longer in distance than a marathon. They range anywhere from 50 to well over 160 kilometers (30–100 mi), meaning that competitors will run for days on end with little or no sleep and often with no other people around. To many of us, the idea that anyone would do this, and pay an entry rate, seems ludicrous. But it happens.

With distance running, results have shown that the longer the distance of the race, the smaller the gap becomes between the finishing times of men and women. The science behind it is as follows: In activities such as sprinting, women are at a disadvantage because of their smaller frames and less muscular builds. However, this same downfall is an advantage in ultrarunning. The sport isn’t so much about speed as it is about endurance, and women tend to have higher fat stores than men, which also helps to retain liquid.^[10] It can take days for this to pay off, which becomes clear on the trail. There may come a day quite soon when the top women can outcompete the top men in the same race purely due to well-adapted physiology.

Check out my other published lists for more interesting facts, and check out my blog! Thanks a bunch!

We always expect athletes to give it their all. At their best, sports competitions showcase both inherent physical talents and the virtue of hard work. When our teams win or an athlete takes gold, it examples the culmination of God-given ability and tireless training.

But sometimes tragedy strikes before the final bell or finish line. Sometimes athletes take the field with the intention of giving it everything, and end up with nothing left to give.

Here are ten athletes who literally left it all on the field.

10 Of The World’s Most Bizarre Sports

10 A Lethal Leap: Kevin Dare

Pole vaulting is considered the most dangerous track & field sport, as it involves catapulting oneself more than a dozen feet in the air with no protective gear. While impalements certainly happen – last year, a college athlete needed 18 stitches after a pole pierced his scrotum – those injuries aren’t usually lethal. Instead, the likeliest way to die pole vaulting is failing to clear the bar, missing the landing pad and smacking the ground headfirst.

One example is particularly horrific. In February 2002, 19-year-old Penn State sophomore Kevin Dare was competing in the track & field championships for the Big Ten, a prominent college sports conference. Dare sprinted down the runway with the bar set at 15 feet 7 inches — a relatively easy height as he’d just cleared 16 feet in practice. He planted the pole into the steel setting at the base of the takeoff point and launched himself, the pole bending then rebounding as Dare was carried upward. With the pole completely vertical, Dare kicked out as though he’d cleared the bar. Only he hadn’t.

”He swung upside down and sort of stalled with his jump,” assistant coach Mario Sategna said. ”It looked like he became disoriented and didn’t know where he was.”

Dare let the pole go and plunged straight down, headfirst, and crushed his skull on the eight-inch-deep steel casing where he’d planted the pole on takeoff. Spectators screamed and medics rushed to Dare’s aid, but he was pronounced dead shortly after arriving at a hospital.

9 Checked Out: Bill Masterton

For a sport as notoriously violent as ice hockey, it’s surprising that fatalities aren’t more frequent. But they certainly do occur. In fact, less than a month ago a 19-year-old Russian junior league hockey player named Timur Faizutdinov collapsed after being struck in the head by the puck. He died on March 16.

Still, hockey deaths are rare considering not only its high-velocity collisions but semi-legal fisticuffs. The last notable fight-caused death was in 2009, when a player in Canada’s Ontario Hockey League named Don Sanderson struck his head on the ice during an altercation.

Incredibly, there has been just one fatal on-ice incident in the history of the sport’s most prominent organization, Canada-USA’s National Hockey League. On January 13, 1968, Minnesota North Stars center Bill Masterton was racing up the ice at full speed. As he passed to a teammate, two players with the Oakland Seals converged on him with a fierce yet legal check.

Like many players at the time, Masterton wasn’t wearing a helmet. His opponents’ combined hit sent him flying backwards; many witnesses believe Masterton was unconscious before even hitting the ice, which he impacted with such force it was audible from the bench. Bleeding from his nose, ears and mouth, he briefly came to and muttered “Never again, never again.” His statement proved prescient 30 hours later, when he died without ever regaining consciousness.

8 Foiled: Vladimir Smirnov

At the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, fencer Vladimir Smirnov won the gold medal in the individual men’s foil, as well as two other medals for team competitions. Proving his success wasn’t merely due to 65 nations (including must of the western world) boycotting those games, the following year he won the World Championships.

In July 1982, Smirnov was prepared to defend his title at the World Championships in Rome. Among his opponents was a West German fencer named Matthias Behr, who’d won the gold medal at the 1976 Olympics. The anticipated showdown began as the two champions jabbed, swiped, and deftly blocked each other’s attacks. Suddenly Behr lunged…

… and his sword broke. Behr’s jagged, thin blade sliced through the mesh of Smirnov’s face mask, and unfortunately didn’t stop there. It punctured Smirnov’s eye socket and lodged in his brain.

Smirnov fainted to the floor. He died nine days later, one of only seven fencers to die from competition-related injury. The accident led to sweeping changes in gear safety, including swords comprised of materials far less likely to break, tougher uniforms made of Kevlar and masks with stronger steel alloys to prevent penetration. Since Smirnov’s passing, there have been no deaths in high-level fencing.

7 Neck and Neck: Howard Glenn and Stone Johnson

In American sports, it’s well known that Chuck Hughes, a wide receiver for the Detroit Lions, is the only National Football League player to die on the field. During a contest against the Chicago Bears on October 24, 1971, Hughes collapsed following a play from a major heart attack. He died later that day.

However, the modern NFL is a combination of two leagues: the original National Football League and the since-absorbed American Football League. That organization saw two equally tragic yet largely forgotten fatalities.

In 1960, an offensive guard for the New York Titans (now the Jets) named Howard Glenn suffered what was considered a minor in-game injury. Leading into the ensuing week’s matchup, in hot and humid Houston against the Oilers (now, ironically, the Tennessee Titans), Glenn complained of headaches.

During one huddle, he confided “I don’t think I can make it,” but was encouraged to stick it out. Soon after, he was sandwiched by two defenders and needed to be helped back up. Glenn went to the bench and, after the game, the hospital, where he died. Remarkably, the cause of death was a broken neck. It’s unclear whether he suffered the injury in Houston or during the previous week’s game.

Three years later, a former Olympic sprinter named Stone Johnson was blocking during a kickoff return for the Kansas City Chiefs. A brutal hit left him instantly paralyzed with a broken neck, and he died the following week. Despite never playing in a regular season game – the tragedy happened during a preseason exhibition – Johnson’s #33 was retired.

6 Death by Ref? (David Browne)

Unsurprisingly, boxing has caused the most athlete deaths. While the majority are simply the nature of the sport, sometimes poor refereeing factors in mightily. For example, in 2017, Canadian heavyweight Tim Hague was getting completely trounced by his opponent, Adam Braidwood. Hague was floored five times in two rounds – the fifth and final fall leading to his death two days later. Letting the fight continue that long was questionable at best.

Perhaps the most problematic case of death by ref occurred in Australia. On September 11, 2015, super featherweight David Browne showed early promise before fading in the later rounds against Filipino fighter Carlo Magali. By the 11th and penultimate round, Browne was taking a pummeling.

As featured on 60 Minutes Australia, following that round Browne – who was hit with several punches after the bell due to the ref’s inattentiveness – could barely find his corner to sit down. He had a concussion so severe that a coroner’s report determined “he was unable to adequately defend himself or continue the contest.” His corner stalled for time, since despite Browne’s wooziness he was likely to win by decision if he survived the final round.

He didn’t. The bell for round 12 rang, and the ref actually pulled Browne out of his corner into the center of the ring. Defenseless, Browne suffered a barrage of blows so brutal the footage has been removed from the Internet. He died three days later.

5 A Rugby Death Spree in… France?

Rugby is more associated with English-speaking nations – including New Zealand and Wales, where it’s the national sport – but recently a string of fatalities occurred on pitches across France.

On November 24, 2018, 23-year-old ESIREM Graduate School player Nathan Soyeux was injured by a fierce tackle. After initially sitting up and speaking with medics, he lost consciousness and was hurried to a hospital in Dijon. Doctors placed Soyeux in an induced coma for two weeks, but his health deteriorated when they tried bringing him out of it. He died in early January 2019.

Worrisomely, Soyeux was the FOURTH Frenchman to die from a rugby injury in just eight months. His fatal blow came just a few weeks after 18-year-old Stade Francais Academy flanker Nicolas Chauvin died after breaking his neck. Just two months before Chauvin, pro rugby player Louis Fajfrowski collapsed and died in his Aurillac club’s locker room. A heavy tackle had forced him from the field, and an autopsy cited his cause of death as “lethal fibrillation” – meaning a harsh blow to his chest caused a lethal change to his heartbeat rhythm.

Prior to Fajfrowski there was 17-year-old amateur Adrien Descrulhes, who died in May 2018 after receiving a crushing blow to the head. Combined, the deaths prompted France to adopt new rules aimed at limiting dangerous pileups, which other countries are also now considering.

4 A Heart-stopping Blow: Bruno Boban

In a sport that often requires athletes to run several miles over the course of a 90-minute game, it’s not surprising that most soccer-related deaths involve overworked hearts. Footballers have suffered fatal cardiac arrests on the pitch several times; most recently, in January 24-year-old Alex Apolinario, a Brazilian playing for Portugal’s FC Alverca, went into cardiorespiratory arrest on the field and died soon thereafter.

In 2016, a Cameroonian pro footballer named Patrick Ekeng died during a game in Bucharest, Hungary after collapsing on the field. Disturbingly, the 26-year-old midfielder went from fully participating one moment to completely sprawled out on his back the next.

However, another recent soccer death was far more freakish. In 2018, a 25-year-old Croatian soccer player died on the field after being struck by the ball in his chest. Initially following the hit, Bruno Boban, a forward with the Croatia League’s NK Marsonia, continued standing – even jogging on the pitch for several seconds.

Then he collapsed. Medical personnel tried to revive him for 40 minutes but were unsuccessful. An autopsy determined that the ball’s violent impact caused Boban’s heart to seize and ultimately fail.

3 Goalkeeper Turns Cryptkeeper: Akli Fairuz

Though the mileage on their hearts is minimal, soccer goalkeepers frequently find themselves in precarious positions, often chasing a ball at full speed while an opponent or teammate is pursuing the same ball from the opposite direction. Such was the case in 2017 for Choirul Huda, a goalkeeper for Persela in the Indonesia Super League, who inadvertently collided with a teammate while attempting to field an errant ball. Huda’s head was bashed into the ground. He briefly clutched his face and jaw, then collapsed, unconscious. He died a short while later of head trauma.

But during a May 10, 2014 contest in the Indonesian Premier League, the goaltender was the one doing the damage – and far less excusably. When a looping shot ricocheted off the chest of PSAP Sigli goalkeeper Agus Rahman, it bounded directly into the path of Persiraja forward Akli Fairuz.

The two raced for the ball, and Fairuz got there first. But as Fairuz handled and ultimately scored off the rebound, Rahman dove feet-first, lifted his cleats and kicked Fairuz directly in the midsection, spikes up in something resembling a WWE drop-kick. Both benches cleared and scuffles ensued as Fairuz’s teammates took umbrage with Rahman’s cheap shot.

Fairuz seemed OK, and even watched the rest of the match from the sidelines. Afterwards, though, severe internal injuries were discovered at a hospital. He underwent surgery but died. Adding insult to mortal injury, the goal he scored was disallowed.

2 A Dead Man Ends Baseball’s Dead Ball Era: Ray Chapman

Babe Ruth’s bonanza of home runs may not have happened were it not for the death of a less notable player.

Before 1921, baseballs were often in play for several innings, until they essentially unraveled. Fans had to return fouls rather than keep them as lucky souvenirs, and the balls themselves were loosely stitched and prone to scuffing and dirt buildup. The ball didn’t travel well, limiting offensive outputs and making home runs rarities.

Per Ken Burns’ classic documentary, this period, baseball’s “Dead Ball Era,” was defined by a “misshapen, earth-colored ball that traveled through the air erratically, tended to soften in the later innings and, as it came over the plate, was very hard to see.”

On August 16, 1920, the inevitable happened. With the Cleveland Indians’ Ray Chapman at bat, a submarine-style Yankees pitcher named Carl Mays threw a fastball high and inside. Wearing just a cap (protective batting helmets were still rare), Chapman failed to react, presumably unable to see it.

The sound of the ball striking Chapman’s skull was so loud, and the ball’s carom so defined, that Mays thought it hit the end of Chapman’s bat. So he fielded it and threw it to first base while Chapman lay in a crumpled heap in the batter’s box.

He died 12 hours later. The tragedy helped lead to a tighter, brighter and more frequently switched-out baseball, without which Ruth’s legendary blasts would have been far fewer and further between.

1 Sweet Kiss of Death: Frank Hayes

Twenty-two-year-old jockey Frank Hayes had never won a race before. In fact, calling him a jockey was a stretch, as he’d spent most of his brief career training horses rather than riding them.

His streak wasn’t likely to end on June 4, 1923 at Belmont Park in New York. Hayes was scheduled to compete in a steeplechase – a race featuring fence and ditch obstacles that horses must jump – and his steed, Sweet Kiss, was a 20-to-1 longshot. But on this day, Sweet Kiss stormed out of the gate, cleared obstacles with ease and crossed the finish line a head’s length in front of the runner-up. Hayes had won.

He’d also died. Somewhere in the middle of the race, Hayes suffered a fatal heart attack – a fact brought to light only when the horse’s owner came over to congratulate him. In the investigation that followed, it was suggested that Hayes’ cardiac arrest may have been brought on by his extreme efforts to meet the weight requirements.

“It was the first winning mount for Hayes,” wrote W.C. Vreeland in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. “And the last.” More than anything, witnesses were amazed Hayes had remained in the saddle despite the violent, jump-and-land riding that steeplechase requires. He was buried three days later in his winning racing silks. The horse was deemed cursed and never raced again.

Top 10 Most Brutal Modern Fight Sports

If you watched the Tokyo Summer Olympics, you were reminded of how jaw-dropping these Olympians’ feats of skill, strength, and endurance can be. But sometimes, it’s good to be reminded that athletes often risk not just failure but their life. Here are 10 instances when athletes lost far more than a trophy.

Related: Top 10 Forgotten Murders Of Once-Famous Athletes

10 An Entire Soccer Team Killed on the Field

It’s quite common for participants in sporting events to pray or appeal to a deity for help in a game. Apparently, in the central African nation of Congo, they may also utilize witchcraft. In late October 1998, the village of Bena Tshadi was hosting a soccer (football) match against the nearby village of Basangana in the south-central Congolese province of Eastern Kasai. The game was tied 1-1 when lightning struck the field (pitch), killing all 11 members of the Bena Tshadi team and injuring more than 30 spectators standing on the sidelines. It is the only known instance of an entire team dying on a playing field.

Investigators determined that the freak lightning bolt was the result of witchcraft, no doubt conjured by someone rooting for the Basangana team. That team, after all, walked off the field without a single injury. According to the Congolese Press Agency, sorcery is commonly used to influence games. Not to trample on their beliefs, but lightning strikes to open soccer fields are not at all rare. That same weekend, six soccer players were injured when lightning interrupted their game in South Africa.^[1]

9 The 90-Mile-An-Hour Death of Nodar Kumaritashvili

In the years before the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, the International Olympic Committee had drawn criticism for its efforts to elevate interest in the games by adding more dramatic, more dangerous events such as snowboarding and ski cross. It also used technology and track designs to push existing events such as the luge to faster and faster speeds. Josef Fendt, president of the International Luge Foundation, was one of those concerned about Vancouver’s Whistler Sliding Center track where luge, skeleton, and bobsled teams would compete. After record speeds and some accidents by seasoned luge athletes during an international training week at Whistler, Fendt felt the track was just too fast.

Worse, many Olympic athletes complained that they did not have adequate time to practice—not just on Whistler, but also on the ski courses and the speed skating oval. In the week before the Vancouver Olympics, athletes trained on Whistler, and many of them crashed, among them the two-time defending gold medal luger Armin Zoeggeler of Italy.

One luger who hoped to dethrone Zoeggeler was Nodar Kumaritashvili from the Republic of Georgia. Nodar had been competing on the luge since he was 14, seven years before, and according to his father, had never sustained an injury. But Nodar was worried about Whistler, and his father, an experienced luger himself from the Soviet era, told him to start his run farther down the course to slow his speed. Nodar was shocked at the suggestion, replying that he came to the Olympics “to win,” adding, “I will either win or die.”

On February 10—two days before the opening ceremonies—Nodar rolled down Whistler on his back, feet-first, for his second practice run. He crashed. Undeterred, he continued practicing, and on the Friday morning of the ceremonies, he launched his fifth practice run. The run went well, and by the time Nodar reached curve 16, the final turn on the track, he was traveling just under 90 mph. Nicknamed Thunderbird, turn 16 was a sweeping right curve.

As Nodar approached the banked end of Thunderbird, his luge slid downward, his left hand and feet attempting to slow his progress. He hit a wall, upending his luge and sending Nodar over the track’s lip and into two vertical supports, sustaining massive head and torso injuries. He was pronounced dead at the hospital. Olympic organizers blamed the accident on Nodar’s inexperience and claimed it had nothing to do with “deficiencies in the track.” They said the subsequent changes to the track—they altered the Thunderbird turn, moved the starting line further down the track, and wrapped padding around the supports—were simply to soothe the athlete’s fears.^[2]

8 Sweet Kiss of Death

Among the more shocking horse races in the last century was the June 4, 1923, race at New York’s Belmont Park when a longshot named Sweet Kiss and its jockey, Frank Hayes, won. Part of the surprise was that Sweet Kiss was not a winning horse. Records are sketchy, but it appears the horse had won for its owner, a Ms. A.M. Frayling, a paltry sum of $1,775 ($28,000 in 2021 money) in its career and was given 20-1 odds to win the Belmont race. Hayes, too, was a longshot as he worked the stables, was not a jockey, and had never raced a horse before. The reason Hayes was tapped to jockey Sweet Kiss is unknown, but it was reported that he had to drop from 142 pounds to 130 pounds in just one day to take the saddle. On the morning of the race, Hayes spent hours jogging while denying himself food and water just to reach his target weight.

There is a surviving photo of Sweet Kiss and Hayes during the race, and sometime after the photo was taken, but before crossing the finish line, Hayes died of a massive heart attack. As Frayling and officials rushed up to the winners, Hayes tumbled out of the saddle, already dead. Hayes has the dubious distinction of never losing a race and being the only known jockey to win a race as a corpse. Sweet Kiss never raced again as jockeys refused to ride it. Legend has it the horse was given the nickname of Sweet Kiss of Death.^[3]

7 A First No One Would Want

It shouldn’t be surprising that boxing ranks among the top 10 most dangerous sports. Some 90% of all boxers receive some brain damage during their careers, and about 10 fighters a year die of injuries sustained in the ring.

Between 1884, when the Queensberry Rules were adopted, and 1995, an estimated 500 boxers died from their injuries. Twenty-two died in 1953 alone. Perhaps the most famous incident was when Jimmy Doyle died of brain injuries after a punch from Sugar Ray Robinson in a 1947 world welterweight title fight. Just last April, 18-year-old Rashed Al-Swaisat of Jordan died after a knockout blow during the world youth championships.

In 1993, USA Boxing lifted the ban on women in the ring, opening the door for, among others, Laila Amaria Ali (Muhammed Ali’s daughter), Mia St. John, and disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding to compete. Among the 2,200 women registered by USA Boxing in 2005 was Becky Zerlentes, who had a Ph.D. in geography, a black belt in Goshin Jitsu, a brown belt in taekwondo, and competed in triathlons, synchronized swimming, and kickboxing while teaching economics and swimming at a community college. Oh, and she became the Colorado Golden Gloves champ in 2002.

On April 2, 2005, Zerlentes stepped into the ring against Heather Schmitz for a Golden Gloves championship bout. Zerlentes vowed it was her last bout since USA Boxing barred anyone over 34—her age at the time—to fight. Both women passed pre-fight physicals and donned regulation headgear. In the 2nd round, Schmitz socked Zerlentes in the face, causing her nose to bleed. After her nose bleed was staunched, the bout continued, and in the 3rd round, Schmitz delivered a blow to Zerlentes’ left temple, sending her to the mat. She never regained consciousness, dying the next afternoon.

The autopsy determined that the blow to Zerlentes head jarred her brain, causing it to bleed uncontrollably. The coroner found no vascular malformation or aneurysm that might have ruptured with the blow. Nor did Zerlentes have any drugs in her system. It was just an unfortunate blow—one Zerlentes had shrugged off numerous times—that opened up a blood vessel. She was the first woman to die from an injury at a sanctioned amateur boxing event.^[4]

6 Death by Celebration

A perusal of the risks of death in sporting events reveals few surprises. For instance, boxing has about 46 deaths for every 100,000 participants. BASE jumping has about 43 deaths, while skydiving has one fatality in 100,000 jumpers. Around 1,000 drivers die for every 100,000 who race behind a steering wheel, while 100 racers die astride a motorbike. Swimming—which includes open water and endurance swimming—has two fatalities per 100,000 participants, while scuba diving has three.

One surprise, however, is the number of deaths during or immediately after soccer games. One study found that there may be as many as seven deaths out of every 100,000 footballers due to cardiac arrest alone. And this does not count fatalities due to collisions with other players, the ground, and the ball, resulting in head injuries, ruptured bowels, ruptured kidneys, ruptured blood vessels, and even infections due to broken bones. Nor does it count the unusual deaths due to lightning strikes (see #10), due to disappointed fans, or being shot by police (stay tuned).

The October 2014 death of Peter Biaksangzuala definitely falls in the latter category. Peter, a 23-year-old midfielder for Bethlehem Vengthlang FC, India, was in the 62nd minute of a match against Chanmari West when he scored the game-tying point. He then celebrated with a somersault, one he misjudged. He landed awkwardly on his neck and collapsed on the field. He was rushed to the hospital, where a CT scan determined he had extensive damage to his spinal cord. He lingered for five days before succumbing.^[5]

5 Death by Snow Groomer

The year 1992 marked the last time the winter and summer Olympics were held in the same year, and the Albertville (France) Winter Olympics were the first after the fall of the Soviet Union. Six former Soviet-bloc countries formed a Unified Team while the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia and a newly reunified Germany participated in the Olympics as independent nations for the first time since 1936.

On the next-to-last day of the Olympics, Swiss speed skier Nicolas Bochatay, 27, was warming up for the finals on a public slope at La Lechere, France. Bochatay used slalom skis instead of his wider speed skis as he and teammate Pierre Yves-Jorand roared down the slope at top speed. As Bochatay approached a hill, people downslope started shouting and waving off the skiers. Too late, Bochatay flew over the hill only to find a snow groomer—a vehicle that works the snowpack for optimal skiing—on the other side. He slammed into the groomer, sustaining massive internal injuries and dying immediately. The Swiss team claimed the snow groomer was idle, hidden behind the hill without its siren or flashing lights activated. Other witnesses disagreed.^[6]

4 Bloody Sunday (1920)

The citizens of Dublin, Ireland, awoke on the morning of November 21, 1920, to gunfire. The Irish War of Independence had been raging for nearly two years between British forces and the Irish Republican Army (IRA). That Sunday morning, the IRA touched off coordinated assassinations of undercover British intelligence agents, killing 15 and wounding five. In pursuit of the assailants, the police arrived at Croke Park, where a soccer match between the Tipperary and Dublin soccer teams was being held. The police suspected some of the assassins had slipped in among the soccer fans. At 3:25 that afternoon—10 minutes into the game—the police blocked the Croke Park exits, and a contingent was sent in to search the crowds—estimated to be 5,000 strong—for IRA gunman.

Who fired the first shot is still, a century later, under dispute, but the police began firing indiscriminately into the crowds. The first shot was 11-year-old William Robinson, who had climbed a nearby tree to better view the game. Shot in the chest, William died later at the hospital. Two other schoolboys—Jerome O’Leary, 10, and John William Scott, 14—were also killed, along with Jane Boyle, a shopkeeper who was to be married in only five days. A military inquiry later concluded the police shootings were excessive and unauthorized.

At least three members of the IRA were also killed at Croke Park, one of them a footballer on the Tipperary team. Michael Hogan was team captain as well as captain of the Grangemockler company of the IRA. In the melee, Hogan was shot in the back at the corner of the pitch, now known as Hill 16. Tom Ryan, a gas fitter, was one of the IRA volunteers sent to kill a British agent that morning (the target was not at home). He decided to attend the Tipperary vs. Dublin game that afternoon. He was reportedly whispering the rites of contrition in Michael Hogan’s ear when he himself was shot in the stomach and died later.^[7]

3 “The Honor of My Race, Family and Self Are at Stake”

The October 6, 1923, game between the Iowa State Cyclones and the University of Minnesota Gophers meant a lot to 21-year-old Jack Trice. He was the only African-American on the football field, and this was his first game for the Cyclone’s varsity team. While most African Americans were only allowed to attend black colleges in the South, they had been attending Iowa for 32 years by then. But none had ever played on a Cyclone varsity team, and Jack, a sophomore, was on two varsity teams: football and track.

Jack felt the weight of his responsibility the night before the game. Using a piece of hotel stationery, Jack wrote down his feelings and intentions for the next day: “My thoughts just before the first real college game of my life. The honor of my race, family, and self is at stake.” As the Cyclone’s defensive lineman, Jack said he would “break thru the opponents’ line and stop the play in their territory.” Last, he told himself to “watch for crossbucks and reverse end runs” and “roll block” any runners.

American football in the early decades of the 20th century was brutal. Helmets were leather and had no padding or facemask. Padding under the uniform was minimal, mostly along the shoulders. Many plays that are illegal now—such as the roll block—were perfectly legal back in 1923.

In the first half of the game, Jack broke his collarbone but refused to leave the field. At halftime, the game was tied 7-7, but by the middle of the third quarter, Minnesota had pulled ahead 14-7 and had the ball. At the snap, the Gophers sent a gaggle of blockers to clear the way for their fullback. Jack ran right at them, throwing himself in front of the blockers and rolling forward to trip them. It was a roll block, but instead of rolling on his belly, Jack rolled onto his back. “The fullback, going through the hole, stepped on Jack’s stomach and maybe his groin,” recalled a teammate. “He was badly hurt but tried to get up and wanted to stay in. We saw he couldn’t stand and helped him off the field.” He was taken to a local hospital where doctors determined Jack could travel back to Iowa with his dejected team. They had lost the game 20-17. Jack died two days later of internal bleeding.

Questions still persist about whether Jack was purposely or accidentally stepped on. We’ll probably never know. Iowa, however, refused to play Minnesota for the next 66 years. In the 1980s, a statue was erected of Jack that stands outside Jack Trice Stadium, the only major college stadium named after an African American.^[8]

2 The Final Ride of Lane Frost

Bull riding is another extremely dangerous sport, with 20 catastrophic injuries for every 100,000 riders. Between 1989 and 2016, at least 21 professional bull riders died, along with an unknown number of amateurs. For instance, in 2016, a 15-year-old amateur was trampled to death by a bull after being thrown at a New Mexico rodeo. It happened again in 2019 at the Denver Western Stock Show when a pro bull rider was thrown, and the bull brought its 2,000 pounds down on the rider’s chest, killing him.

Lane Frost was born into a rodeo family, his father a bronco buster and calf roper. And while his parents tried to steer Lane away from the dangerous bull riding sport, Lane’s attention seemed riveted to it. According to his Mom, Elsie, his first spoken word was “bull,” and he’d go around the house riding a toy horse on rollers, claiming he was riding one.

At five, Lane often sat astride the arm of a couch, pretending it was a bucking bull. He graduated to riding calves on the family’s Utah dairy farm, and when the family moved to Oklahoma, he came under the tutelage of legendary bull rider Freckles Brown. At 19, Lane was a member of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association and became a favorite on the circuit. He was crowned the world champion at 23 and went to the Calgary Olympics in 1988 to compete in a rodeo exhibition.

The Cheyenne (Wyoming) Frontier Days was the largest and oldest rodeo in the world, and on the last day (July 30) of the 1989 event, Lane was set to ride a tough but not particularly mean bull that some sources called Takin’ Care of Business (TCB). Lane’s ride of TCB was perfect, lasting the proscribed 8 seconds, and as TCB turned right, Lane dismounted to the left, landing safely on his hands and knees. Then TCB did something unexpected: he turned and drove his right horn into Lane’s back. “A lot of bulls do that. It’s kinda their nature,” said another bull rider Cody Lambert. “It’s something that happens to every one who rides bulls, and sometimes you get a nick or a bruise. But usually you just get up, and later everyone pats you on the back and laughs about it. That’s what it looked like. I’ve seen a lot worse wrecks [gores] than Lane had there.” But TCB’s horn had broken some of Lane’s ribs and punctured a major artery. Lane got up, took a few steps, then signaled for help before falling into the mud. Within minutes he was dead. Lane was inducted into the ProRodeo Hall of Fame the next year. Five years after his death, Lane was immortalized in the movie 8 Seconds.^[9]

1 Death by Fans

Every sport has fans who lose their minds and toss anything and everything at the athletes. Basketball had the 2004 infamous “Malice in the Palace” when a fan threw a cup of beer at Indiana Pacer Ron Artest. Baseball has the lemons thrown by Chicago Cubs fans at New York Yankee Babe Ruth during the third game of the 1932 World Series. Legend has it, the lemons prompted the Babe to “call his shot,” pointing at center field before swatting a home run in that direction. For golf, there’s the fan who threw a hot dog at Tiger Woods in 2011 (how much anger management therapy should you receive if you’ve lost it at a golf game?). But these incidents reach a whole new level when the projectiles become deadly.

On August 23, 2014, Albert Ebosse Bodjongo, 24, was playing for the Algerian soccer club JS Kabylie at home against another Algerian team—USM Alger. Albert scored the only point for his team in their loss, 2-1. As the home team ran off the field, they were pelted by objects from the fans that allegedly included roof tiles from a nearby construction site. A short time later, Albert was dead from a blow to the head that was sufficient to crack his skull and push pieces of it into his brain. Initially, it was determined that Albert had been hit by a heavy, sharp object thrown by the fans. The truth was far more sinister.

His family was not satisfied with the official cause of death and hired a pathologist to conduct another autopsy which found the head injury was delivered at close range, not from the fans in the stands. Worse, Albert had a stab wound near a collarbone as well as wounds consistent with an assault. Had fans attacked and murdered Albert in the locker room? His murderer has still not been identified.

If this seems far-fetched, soccer fans have a history of violence. Peruvian fans were incensed during a May 24, 1964, game between Peru and Argentina when a referee disallowed a game-tying point to count with just two minutes remaining. One fan ran onto the pitch to smack the referee, and dozens followed, creating a riot. The police launched tear gas into the crowds, creating panic and starting a stampede toward the locked steel gates. As many as 328 were crushed to death. About 127 fans died in a similar riot during a 2001 game in Ghana.

Seventy-three died at Port Said, Egypt, during a soccer brawl in 2012. Then there’s Andres Escobar, who contributed to Columbia’s loss to the U.S. when he accidentally deflected the ball into his own goal in the 1994 World Cup. A little more than a week later, Escobar was confronted at a hometown restaurant and shot multiple times, the killer reportedly shouting “Goal” as he fired.^[10]

Athletes don’t get banned for no reason. The common denominator for all bans is cheating. For various reasons, some athletes cheat and, by doing so, ensure that the competition is skewed in their favor. This insults clean athletes who have spent years dedicating themselves to their chosen sport only to find that the playing field isn’t level.

Some athletes cheat for glory and some for money, but you have to wonder how they could feel satisfied when they know they “competed” unfairly.

There are few, if any, sports free from cheats who often use sophisticated methods to get around the rules. The authorities have to be equally sophisticated. So let’s look at ten athletes who were banned from competition.

10 Fred Lorz

Fred Lorz won the marathon at the 1904 Olympic Games held in St Louis, Missouri. Or so people briefly thought. He started the race with the best intentions but pulled up after nine miles because he was exhausted. His manager picked him up in his car and drove him the next 11 miles. In 1904, cars weren’t particularly fast, but Lorz’s vehicle was fast enough to outstrip the rest of the field. He managed to finish the marathon under his own power and, not surprisingly, broke the finishing tape ahead of the competition.

The race attracted many spectators, and many saw Lorz and his manager driving by. The witnesses were quick to tell officials who confronted Lorz with the truth. He admitted the deception but claimed that it was a practical joke.

Not impressed, the officials awarded the race to the runner-up, Thomas Hicks. Hicks’s trainers had dosed him twice with strychnine to control muscle contractions during the race and had carried him part of the way—so he wasn’t a worthy winner either. In fact, Hicks was too weak to collect his medal and never competed again.

9 Ben Johnson

The rivalry between the American sprinter Carl Lewis and the Canadian Ben Johnson was one of the fiercest in athletics. Before 1985, Lewis was undoubtedly the world’s best 100-meter sprinter, but that year, Johnson beat him after losing their eight previous meetings.

In 1987, at the World Championships in Rome, Johnson beat Lewis again to become the world-record holder, setting the best time ever. Lewis hinted that certain gold-medal winners were taking performance-enhancing drugs.

At a pre-Olympic meeting in Switzerland, Lewis won with Johnson in the third position. Lewis claimed nothing could stop him from winning gold at that year’s Olympics in Seoul. He didn’t win; Johnson did, even bettering his own world record.

A subsequent urine test revealed that Johnson had taken an anabolic steroid called stanozolol. Johnson and his trainer claimed that they had to use drugs because everyone else did. It finally came out that Johnson had used steroids since 1981. He received a ban for his trouble.

8 Marion Jones

Marion Jones’s career in athletics was always tainted by accusations that she used performance enhancers right from the beginning. Perhaps this was not entirely her fault. From a very young age, her trainers pushed drugs at her.

In the early 1990s, the teenage Jones was banned for four years for missing a drug test. She claimed that she had never received the test notification, and the authorities lifted the ban.

In 2006, a urine sample tested positive for the performance-enhancer Erythropoietin, but as a second test showed a negative result, there was no further action.

In 2007, Jones admitted to taking steroids and, as she had lied to federal authorities, a court sentenced her to six months in jail. The athletic authorities deleted all her records, and she received a suspension.

7 Sinning Soccer Player

Sports betting is an enormous industry, and many of us wager a few dollars, test our knowledge, or try our luck. Nowadays, sophisticated controls monitor betting activity to try and discover suspicious results or trends. Back in the 1960s, things weren’t so advanced.

Jimmy Gauld had spent most of his soccer career playing in the English leagues for lower-tier clubs. Although he never made the big time, he knew many people and decided he could make quite a bit of money by fixing matches. But he would need inside help.

At a former club, Gauld had gotten to know David Layne, who was now playing for Sheffield Wednesday. Gauld asked Layne to choose a match they could bet on and ensure the outcome. Layne roped two other players—Peter Swan and Tony Kay—into the deal. The syndicate picked a match that Wednesday would lose 2-0, with the three players ensuring the result. It wouldn’t be an unusual score, so it wouldn’t attract attention. But also, as the score was reasonable, the winnings were not very large.

Ironically, the result was 2-0, but the other team won the game fair and square. The Sheffield Wednesday players didn’t have to do anything untoward.

Gauld extended his activities to other teams, involving other players, but his activities quickly came to light. He sold his story to a Sunday newspaper and named the three Sheffield Wednesday players involved in fixing one match. All the players involved received jail sentences and a ban from professional soccer.

6 Rob Sloan

Known as Britain’s most beautiful marathon, The Kielder race attracts athletes from all over the world. A good finishing position or time is a badge of honor.

It wasn’t surprising then that in 2011, Steve Cairns was happy to be placed third as the runners were well into the second half of the race. Cairns knew he wouldn’t be able to catch up with the two runners in front of him, but he had opened quite a gap between himself and the pack behind him. He was running comfortably and confident that he could keep going and clinch an honorable third place.

The race seemed to play out as Cairns expected. The front runners placed first and second, and Cairns crossed the line in third place. Imagine his surprise when the marshals announced his fourth place position. Cairns asked who had come in third, and the marshals (who could only see the last section of the course) pointed at Rob Sloan. Cairns knew him as the winner of a 10k race the previous day and asked when he had overtaken him.

In fact, no runners could remember Sloan, and there were no photos that showed him running. Sloan didn’t collect his medal and never appeared at an event again—not that he would be allowed to.

5 Boris Onishchenko

Boris Onishchenko, a member of the Soviet team, had taken part in the 1968 and 1972 Summer Olympics. It was now 1976, and Onishchenko was on the team again.

Britain was in the gold medal position in the pentathlon after the first event. The second event was fencing, and Britain and the Soviet Union faced each other in what was sure to be a closely fought event.

In fencing, sensors in the weapon (an épée) depress when the fencer hits its target. The target then registers a strike and, therefore, a point. The British team complained that Onishchenko was scoring points without hitting anything. A close examination of the fencer’s épée showed that it had a trigger that Onishchenko could press to register a hit.

The authorities banned him for life, the Soviet Communist Party expelled him, and he got a personal reprimand from the Soviet leader.

4 Ekaterini Thanou

The Summer Olympics in 2004 took place in Athens, and the Greeks had a strong contender for a medal in the 100 meters in Ekaterini Thanou. There was intense competition, but with the home crowd urging her on, Thanou had a very good chance of winning.

The day before the opening ceremony, the authorities summoned Thanou and her training partner to take a routine drug test. They didn’t turn up. Instead, they booked themselves into a hospital and claimed they had had a motorcycle accident. The pair immediately came under suspicion because this was their third violation that summer. Thanou withdrew from the games. A Greek commission quickly concluded that no accident had occurred, and the pair had staged the whole thing as an excuse.

Thanou was suspended from athletics. When she returned to competition in 2006, she never regained a competitive level, and crowds booed her when she appeared.

3 Petr Korda

Korda was a very good tennis player. He reached the world rank of number 2 in February 1998 and was one of the favorites for that year’s Wimbledon tournament. Although he was only 30, Korda had announced that he would retire. He had won the Australian Open in 1998; perhaps he wanted to add a Wimbledon title before he stepped away from tennis.

Whatever his reasons, Korda tested positive for the steroid nandrolone after his quarter-final match. A long process of appeals ran its course, and the International Tennis Federation banned him for 12 months in September 1999. He did compete in more tournaments in his native Czechoslovakia after his ban ended, but his career at the top was over.

2 Luis Suarez

Luis Suarez is one of the world’s top soccer stars. A truly gifted player, he started his career in his native Uruguay with local side Nacional. He soon moved to Europe, where he played for some of the best clubs in Holland, England, and Spain. He moved from the Dutch side Ajax to Liverpool, then on to Barcelona, before moving to Atlético Madrid. He is now finishing his professional life back at Nacional. Certainly a star, but a controversial one.

A Dutch newspaper called Suarez the “Cannibal of Ajax” after his club suspended him for biting an opponent. Once at Liverpool, Suarez earned a ban for racially abusing a Manchester United player. Then, in 2013, he returned to putting teeth into his game. He bit a Chelsea player and received a 10-game ban for his trouble.

When he moved to Barcelona, he couldn’t start the 2014 season with them because he was serving another ban—this time for biting an Italian player at that year’s World Cup.

Suarez showed good taste but should never have been allowed to continue playing.

1 Dennis Mitchell

Dennis Mitchell, a track and field athlete, had a successful relay and sprinting career. But, in 1998, he ran into trouble. The International Association of Athletics Federations handed him a two-year ban after a test showed a high testosterone level in his sample. His explanation didn’t cut much ice with the board.

Mitchell claimed that his wife’s birthday had fallen just before the test. To celebrate, he had drunk five beers and made love to her five times; it was not, he said, surprising that the test showed too much testosterone. It’s perhaps surprising that he could walk, let alone run.

It’s intriguing that for all the power that our brains have, it often chooses to reflect inward and damage the mind. Please, tell me if you’ve never been drifting off to sleep when your brain snaps you back to reality to remind you of something completely embarrassing that you had done in the past. You’d be the first. We cope with these horrible memories by telling ourselves that we were young and stupid and that nobody even really remembers it like we do. All these are valid points, but sometimes they’re not. What if you’re a professional and mess up something so basic that it actually overshadows your whole career?

Two quick things before diving into this list. First, this list is meant to be lighthearted, so I’m not including any incidents that resulted in people getting hurt or killed for their failures. Secondly, my rubric for judging how much they are known for their gaffe is based on the auto-complete feature in Google. So if one of the top three search options is the person’s name and their mistake, I count it. With that said, let’s look at 10 athletes who are famous for their mistakes.

10 Bill Gramatica Celebration Injury

Bill Gramatica is a former NFL kicker drafted by the Arizona Cardinals in 2001. As a rookie, he went 16/20 in field goals and 25/25 in extra points, setting a rookie franchise record of 73 points scored. He probably could have scored more had he not famously gotten injured on December 15, 2001. After nailing a field goal, Gramatica took a running leap before making an awkward landing and falling to the ground clutching his leg. It turns out his celebratory jump ended with him tearing his ACL. The kicker is that this all happened in the first quarter on a 42-yard kick. Not really the most dramatic circumstances to warrant such a celebration.

Gramatica recovered and spent a few more years in the NFL, but his injury is still what he is most known for. To his credit, he is able to look back and laugh. In 2010, he corrected an interviewer who said he got injured from jumping. “My jump was excellent. It was my landing I needed to work on” I agree with him. If you stop the video just as he lands, it is a pretty good celebration. As a special note: due to his injury, the late, great Pat Tillman handled kickoff duties for the rest of the game.^[1]

9 Lindsey Jacobellis

The most decorated female snowboard cross athlete ever is not known for her five world championships but for her last-minute celebration that knocked her from gold to silver in the 2006 Winter Olympics. Jacobellis was almost 150 feet (46 meters) ahead of her competition, which equates to about a 3-second lead (that’s how fast they go), when she attempted a method grab on the second to last jump to add a little flare to her victory. Unfortunately, that flare caused her dreams to go up in smoke as she fell and was overtaken by Tanja Frieden, earning her quite possibly the most disappointing silver medal in history. At first, Jacobellis said the method grab was meant to stabilize her board but later owned up that she was excited and wanted to pump up the crowd.

Despite her unparalleled success at the X-Games and world championships, Jacobellis continued to struggle when it came to the 2010 and 2014 Olympics. She began to wonder if her 2006 fall was all she would be known for. Eventually, she teamed up with a mental skills coach named Denise Shull, who encouraged her to analyze, normalize, and embrace that defining moment of 2006. Whatever they did worked because, in 2022, Jacobellis won the Olympic gold she had been chasing after for years. Jacobellis may still be known for her fall, but now it is in the greater context of a redemption arc.^[2]

8 Alexander Semin Fight

In the broadest sense, there are two kinds of hockey players: the big hitters that will punish you if you touch the puck and the skill guys who score goals like I eat cookies. Suffice to say, if you’re unfamiliar with who Alexander Semin is, you’ll definitely know what kind of player he is after watching this fight against New York Ranger Marc Staal in 2009.

In an attempt to stick up for his goalie who was knocked down by Semin, Staal grabs Semin by the jersey, and they begin to tussle. Semin wriggles out of his jersey and then proceeds to… “play the drums” on Staal’s chest—as announcer Joe Benenati stated. You really have to watch this video to understand just how weird this was. And if you were wondering. Yes, this was Semin’s very first and only fight in the NHL.^[3]

7 The Cody Parkey Double Doink

With less than 10 seconds left in the 2019 NFC wildcard playoff game between the Chicago Bears and Philadelphia Eagles, the Bears set Parkey up for a 43-yard field goal. Parkey blasted the ball through the uprights for the game winner, but before the snap, Eagles coach Doug Pederson called a time-out, so the kick didn’t count. Parkey again attempted the 43-yarder only to see it ricochet off the left upright, hit the crossbar, and land in front of the field goal. The Bears lost the game and ended their season by a score of 16-15. It wasn’t really the kick that cemented the legacy of Parkey; it was more the call from NFL commentator Chris Collinsworth, “Oh my goodness… the Bears’ season’s gonna end on a double doink.”

It was those final two words that took off all over the internet. There’s just something about how double doink rolls off the tongue and how it evokes that feeling you get when you hear the fail music from The Price is Right. Although it was later revealed in the game tape that the Eagles’ defensive tackle Treyvon Hester just barely blocked the kick and caused the ball to stray off course, the damage had already been done to Parkey’s reputation. Just as a reference to how much this took off, the double doink actually has its own Wikipedia page! ^[4]

6 Patrik Stefan Missed Empty Net

It was January 2007, and the Dallas Stars were holding a 5-4 lead over the Edmonton Oilers with 12 seconds left in the game. The Oilers pulled their goalie for an extra attacker. As the Oilers went up the ice, Stefan came up with a steal and skated in all alone toward the empty net. Instead of shooting from a short distance, Stefan decided to go for the casual skate and tap into the net. But the puck hit a divot in the ice and bounced over his stick. Trying to maintain control, he fell to the ice and ended up passing it to the Oilers, who quickly transitioned and scored a goal to force overtime.

Although Dallas ended up winning the game in a shootout, this moment gained Stefan a lot of notoriety in the worst way. I think the play-by-play announcer described it best: “Oh, I thought he was gonna until he blew it! The cherry on top is that there were 12 seconds left. Had he done anything else than what he did, Dallas would not have had to go into overtime. Stefan only played 13 more games in the NHL after that. He now coaches teens in the Detroit area and often tells them after a bad shift or game, “There’s always next shift, next game. I didn’t kill somebody. It’s a game. Mistakes happen.”^[5]

5 Steven Bradbury’s Unlikely Win

Steven Bradbury is a four-time Olympic speed skater who was the first person from the southern hemisphere to win a gold medal at the Winter Olympics. He is a source of pride for Australia, yet all anyone really remembers is how he won that gold medal.

It was at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. Bradbury was in his fourth Winter Olympics and was almost 30, making him the second-oldest competitor. He managed to make the semi-finals after another racer was disqualified but recognized that he could not match up to the much quicker, younger skaters like Apolo Ohno. So Bradbury developed a strategy of hanging back from the other racers, hoping they would crash. Sure enough, that is what happened, and Bradbury took first in his semi-finals race. Bradbury was in dead last during the final race until the final corner when the frontrunners caused a pileup. Bradbury cruised by to earn Australia’s first gold medal.

After the race, Bradbury had this to say, “Obviously, I wasn’t the fastest skater. I don’t think I’ll take the medal as the minute-and-a-half of the race I actually won. I’ll take it as the last decade of the hard slog I put in.” Many American commentators were not happy with Bradbury’s win but accepted that the risk-taking behavior of the favorites was what allowed him to win. Nevertheless, Bradbury is seen as an underdog and a hero to many. His win was so impactful to Australians that he is directly referenced in the phrase “do a Bradbury,” which means to succeed in an unlikely way.^[6]

4 Pete Carroll Not Running the Ball

There’s a reason why Pete Carroll is one of the longest-tenured NFL coaches in the league today, but he is also famous for one of the most questionable play calls in the history of the sport.

In 2015, the Seattle Seahawks were going for their second Super Bowl in three years. With only 26 seconds left in the game and down 28-24 against the New England Patriots, the Seahawks found themselves less than a yard from the end zone on 2nd-and-goal. Everyone watching this game knew what was going to happen next: Beast Mode. Marshawn Lynch earned the nickname Beast Mode due to his explosive running game that shredded through defenders. To get an understanding of his power, you have to watch his legendary game-winning run against the Saints in 2010. So you’re about two feet from the goal line, and you’ve got one of the most powerful running backs in the game. No brainer, right?

That’s why the next play was so shocking. Instead of handing the ball off to Lynch, Seahawks quarterback Russel Wilson threw a pass aimed at Ricardo Lockette. The pass was intercepted by Patriots rookie Malcolm Butler. It was his first career interception. The Seahawks lost the Super Bowl, and all anyone could think about was why Lynch wasn’t carrying the ball. Fans, Seahawks players, and analysts were all second-guessing Carroll. I mean, they had a chance to take out the Brady/Belichick Patriots, and they blew it. That final play also birthed a great meme of Seahawks defender Richard Sherman looking on in shock and terror as the interception occurs.^[7]

3 Armando Galarraga’s Almost Perfect Game

The perfect game is one of the rarest feats in all of sports. For those unfamiliar, a perfect game is when a pitcher goes nine innings without letting a single batter get on base. In nearly 150 years of professional games, only 20 players have accomplished the feat. It is something special, and the Detriot Tigers’ Armando Galarraga was so close to capturing one, and many argue he did.

In a 2010 game against the Cleveland Indians, Galarraga was one out away from a perfect game. He threw a pitch to Jason Donald, who put the ball in play. Galarraga celebrated as the ball clearly beat Donald to first base, but then he shook his head and smirked. The first base umpire, Jim Joyce, called Donald safe. Just like that, Galarraga’s perfect game was ruined. Galarraga went on to win the game, but it didn’t really matter. While Joyce was adamant he made the right call during the game, he was horrified after seeing the replay.

In an amazing display of sportsmanship, Joyce reached out and spoke to Galarraga and tearfully admitted to his mistake. Galarraga responded graciously by saying, “probably feels more bad than me. Nobody’s perfect. Everybody’s human. I understand. I give the guy a lot of credit for saying, ‘I need to talk to you.’”

Since that game, Galarraga has been awarded a car, had his perfect game recognized by the governor of Michigan, and earned a medal of reasonableness from Jon Stewart. While both the player and ump will forever be remembered for this really bad call, Joyce’s humility and ability to admit his mistake, along with Galarraga’s grace and acceptance, have made this a very positive and unifying moment in baseball.^[8]

2 Shizo Kanakuri’s Long Race

Shizo Kanakuri is known in Japan as the father of the marathon. His best-known race is the marathon he ran in the 1912 Olympics, where he completed the marathon in a time of 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 5 hours, 32 minutes, and 20 seconds. Truly a legendary effort in persistence and resiliency.

The 1912 Olympics were held in Stockholm, Sweden, which required Kanakuri to travel by boat and train for 18 days to reach the Games. Already weary from traveling, Kanakuri struggled with the local cuisine and the unexpected heat. Additionally, this was Kanakuri’s first time experiencing white nights, the phenomenon where the sun shines throughout the night. All of this led to Kanakuri spending more time recovering than actually training.

Kanakuri was unable to finish the race and unceremoniously returned to Japan out of embarrassment. The problem was that he never alerted racing officials about his withdrawal. News spread, and it became a running joke—pun intended—that somewhere in Sweden was a lost Japanese marathoner. The story persisted until 1967, when Swedish Television reached out to him with an offer to finish what he started. Kanakuri accepted and was triumphant. After completing the marathon, Kanakuri stated, “It was a long trip. Along the way, I got married, had six children and 10 grandchildren.”^[9]

1 The Butt Fumble

Okay, I’m gonna be honest with you, this whole list was made just so I could have a reason to talk about the Butt Fumble. It was Thanksgiving 2012, but we all remember it like it was yesterday. The New York Jets and New England Patriots faced off in the primetime slot. Quarterback Mark Sanchez took the snap and dropped back for a handoff but had a miscue with the running back. With the play pretty much blown, Sanchez tried to get back to the line of scrimmage to not lose any yards. He started to slide when he collided with the derriere of Jets offensive lineman Brandan Moore. This caused Sanchez to drop the ball as he fell to the ground, which was then picked up by Patriots safety Steve Gregory and returned for an easy touchdown.

This play became the defining moment of Mark Sanchez’s career. It was the perfect storm: a comically inept play resulting in the other team scoring during a nationally televised game being watched by millions and played in front of 79,000 fans. Maybe it was because everyone was woozy from all the tryptophan in the turkey, but the Butt Fumble took off. It was featured on ESPN’s “Not Top 10” list the following day and was quickly voted to the “worst of the worst” spot for 10 months straight. ESPN had to eventually retire the play because people continued to vote for it. ESPN even did a sports science segment showing that the impact of Sanchez colliding with Moore created a force of 1300 pounds. No wonder he dropped the ball.

While analysis of this hilariously bad moment is totally fascinating, it is also interesting to see how Sanchez and Moore have handled the publicity of this event. Moore definitely doesn’t find the play amusing and seems more annoyed about how much it has impacted the other accomplishments in his career. On the other hand, Sanchez seems much more accepting and laughs about it quite a bit.

In an appearance on The Pat McAfee Show, Sanchez talked about how he can laugh about it, but it has frustrated him as a competitor to have that one stupid play be all anyone remembers you for. Sanchez then goes on to say that he looks at the Butt Fumble as the bad you sometimes have to take with the good. If he laments the critiques of that play, then how can he accept the accolades of his good plays? It’s a great way to look at it and a very healthy way of dealing with failure. It’s still hilarious watching him get dropped by his own teammate’s butt, though.^[10]