The words "cheating" and "Olympics" go together hand in hand, a marriage made in hell but sadly accepted as inevitable by all. However, what the Spanish Paralympic Basketball team (and perhaps many others in the Spanish Paralympic Team) did in 2000 would have made even the most bare faced low down dirty cheat raise an eyebrow...
In the 1996 Atlanta Games athletes with intellectual disabilities were allowed to participate for the first time.
The 2000 Summer Paralympics in Sydney, which had already seen controversy with numerous positive drug tests, would be the venue for the most scandalous events in the sport's history. Spain was stripped of their intellectual disability basketball gold medals shortly after the Games closed after Carlos Ribagorda, a member of the victorious team and an undercover journalist, revealed to the Spanish business magazine Capital that most of his colleagues had not undergone medical tests to ensure that they had a disability.
The IPC investigated the claims and found that the required mental tests, which should show that the competitors have an IQ of no more than 70, were not conducted by the Spanish Paralympic Committee (CPE).
Ribagorda alleged that some Spanish participants in the table tennis, track and field, and swimming events were also not disabled, meaning that five medals had been won fraudulently.
He went on to say that the Spanish Federation for Mentally Handicapped Sports (FEDDI) deliberately chose to sign up athletes who were not intellectually disabled in order to "win medals and gain more sponsorship". Fernando Martin Vicente, president of the FEDDI and vice-president of CPE, initially denied the allegations. After it was confirmed that 10 of the 12 competitors in the winning team were not disabled, Martin Vicente publicly apologised for the error and accepted total responsibility, resigning just before the findings were officially released.
Two weeks later the team were officially disqualified and was ordered to return the gold medals. The controversy has been cited as one of the "most outrageous sporting moments" in history.
Wikipedia
Labels: James G