Greatest and Worst Moments of the Summer Olympics

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Every four years since 1896, the top athletes in the world have gathered together to compete in the Olympics. Those games have produced some great moments. Here are 20 of the best.

Jim Thorpe, 1912

Considered the greatest all round athlete in first half of the 20th century, Thorpe reportedly trained for the Olympics on the ship over. He went on to take the gold in the pentathlon and decathlon. Thorpe was also awarded two challenge prizes by King Gustav V of Sweden for the decathlon and Czar Nicholas II of Russia for the pentathlon.

Before Thorpe could walk away, Gustav grabbed his hand. “Sir,you are the greatest athlete in the world.” Replied Thorpe: “Thanks King.’”

Thorpe was later forced to return his medals for the crime of having been paid for playing baseball a couple of years earlier.

Harold Abrahamson and Eric Liddell, 1924

In the “Chariots of Fire” Olympics Liddell, a Christian missionary, was selected for the 100m, 200m and 400m. The 100m was his to win, but he refused to run on the Sabbath. Instead, Abrahams, a Jew, won the 100m and went on to become a prominent official in sport and an admired BBC commentator.

Abrahams’ win was not without controversy: In order to train for the Olympics, the athlete had hired a personal coach. At the time, the establishment looked with disdain at any hint of professionalism in sports; hiring a coach simply wasn’t done.

Paavo Nurmi, 1924

Nurmi was the top middle and long distance runner throughout the 1920s, competing in three Olympics that decade. His best showing came in 1924 in Paris when he won the 1,500m and 5,000m with only 26 minutes in between to rest. He also won the cross country and was a member of the winning 3,000m relay, but was denied a chance to win a fifth gold medal by Finnish officials who said he had too much on his plate to attempt to defend the 10,000m.

In 1932 he was favored to win the 10,000m and marathon, but was barred for having accepted more than his expenses while on tour the year before the Games.

In all, Nurmi won 12 medals, nine gold and three silver–more than any track and field Olympian to date.

Jesse Owens, 1936

Three quarters of a century later, Owens’ performance has taken on mythic proportions: Jesse Owens, snubbed by Hitler after winning his first gold medal, singlehandedly demolished the Fuehrer’s claims of Aryan superiority.

It’s not quite that simple.

Hitler did not congratulate Owens, but that day he didn’t congratulate anybody else either, not even the German winners. As a matter of fact, Hitler didn’t congratulate anyone after the first day of the competition. That first day he had shaken hands with all the German victors, but that had gotten him in trouble with the members of the Olympic Committee. They told him that to maintain Olympic neutrality, he would have to congratulate everyone or no one. Hitler chose to honor no one.

Hitler did snub a black American athlete, but it was Cornelius Johnson, not Jesse Owens. It happened the first day of the meet. Just before Johnson was to be decorated, Hitler left the stadium. A Nazi spokesman explained that Hitler’s exit had been pre-scheduled, but no one believes that.

None of that, however, takes away from Owens’ wins. He gave four virtuoso performances, winning gold medals in the 100- and 200- meter dashes, the long jump and on America’s 4x100 relay team.

It was during the qualifying rounds for the long jump that saw perhaps the most extraordinary moment of the Nazi Olympics.

Luz Long, Owens’ main rival in the long jump, noticed Owens struggling to qualify for the competition. His first jump failed and the judges counted what Owens thought of as a practice jump as his second try. Then Long–who had set an Olympic record in the qualifying round–got up, introduced himself to Owens and suggested Owens should try taking off from several inches behind the line. He did, and managed to qualify.

In the final, Long came in third while Owens’s sixth jump broke Long’s record and took the gold. Long and Owens walked arm-in-arm to the dressing room afterwards, posing for press photos. Long died during World War II, but Owens kept in touch with the German athlete’s family until he died.

Hungary v USSR, 1956

Twenty six days after Soviet tanks entered Budapest to put down the Hungarian uprising, Hungary’s water polo team met the USSR team in Melbourne in a semifinal match.

More than 2,500 Hungarians had been killed, 200,000 had lost their homes and 13,000 had been imprisoned as a result of the Soviet invasion. But Hungary’s water-polo team only learned of their country’s fate weeks later; they were kept incommunicado at a training camp in Czechoslovakia until just before they arrived in Melbourne.

The Hungarian team decided to exact revenge in the pool in what became known as the “Blood on the Water Match.”

“The pool,” wrote British sports commentator Harry Carpenter, “became a bubbling cauldron of spite.”.

In scoring the first goal, Dezsö Gyarmati of Hungary, who would eventually win medals in five Olympics, nearly KO’d his Soviet opponent. Minutes later, the USSR’s Vyacheslav Kurennoi was sent to the penalty box for slugging. Then the Soviet Union’s Boris Markarov and Hungary’s Antal Bolvari went at it. It was open warfare thereafter, with players from both teams trading blows and headlocks.

However, the avenging Hungarians did all the scoring, and they led 4-0 with only a minute to play. At that point Zador, who had scored twice, looked away from the man guarding him, Valentin Prokopov, to respond to a referee’s whistle. Prokopov rose out of the water and sucker-punched Zador hard above the right eye. Blood streamed from the wound into the pool. When angry Hungarians scrambled out of the stands, apparently eager to join the fight, officials called the game. The Soviet team was led by police through a cordon of cursing spectators to the safety of its locker room.

The match was awarded to Hungary. Forty-five members of the Hungarian Olympic team defected after the games, including Zador who went on to coach future Olympian Mark Spitz.

Abebe Bikila, 1960

As a last-minute add-on to the Ethiopian Olympic team, Bikila was stuck with a pair of ill-fitting shoes in which to run the 26 mile race.

So he ditched the shoes. And he won the race.

Bikila finished the race in a record time of 2:15:16.2, becoming the first African to win an Olympic gold medal. He became the first man in history to retain the marathon title in 1964 in Tokyo. That time, however, he was wearing shoes.

Cassius Clay, 1960

Cassius Clay won gold in the light heavyweight class against Polish fighter Zigzy Pietrzykowski. a three-time European champion. Clay, who would later change his name to Muhammad Ali and hold the world heavyweight title three times, was so proud of his gold medal that he didn’t take it off for two days.

Legend says that Ali later threw his medal into the Ohio River after being refused service at a white-only restaurant. At the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta he was awarded a new medal by the US basketball team.

Wilma Rudolph, 1960

The 20th of 22 children, Wilma Rudolph suffered through double pneumonia, scarlet fever and polio as a child. She wore a brace on her leg until age 11. At age 16, Rudolph was a member of the 1956 Olympic Team where she won a bronze for her part in the 4x100m relay.

Four years later she was back. Rudolph won three gold medals in Rome and remains one of only three women to win all three Olympic sprint events on the track. All with a sprained ankle.

The Romans dubbed her La Gazella Nera, The Black Gazelle, so graceful was her flowing style, so easy did she make her victories appear. Her world records over 100 and 200m, 11.0sec and 22.9sec, survived the 1964 Olympic Games.

Bob Beamon, 1968

Beamon pulled off one of the greatest Olympic feats to date, jumping 8.90 meters (more than 29 feet) in the long jump at the 1968 Games in Mexico City. At the time, defending Olympic champion, Lynn Davies of Great Britain, told Beamon, “You have destroyed this event.” The jump beat the old record by 55 centimeters, making Beamon the first person to reach both 28 and 29 feet in the event.

Beamon was assisted by wind speeds of 2 meters per second and an altitude of 2,240 meters. Still, his record survived for another 22 years.

Dick Fosbury, 1968

From the long jump to the high jump, 1968 was also the year the world was introduced to the Fosbury Flop, named after gold medalist Dick Fosbury’s head first, backwards leap over the bar. Fosbury took the gold with a (2.24 meter jump. (That’s 7 feet and 4.25 inches for those of us not on the metric system.)

Although the move revolutionized the sport, Fosbury had his detractors. Among them was the US coach at the time, Payton Jordan.

“Kids imitate champions,” Jordan said. “If they try to imitate Fosbury, he’ll wipe out an entire generation of high jumpers because they all will have broken necks.”

Forty years later, athletes are still using the technique.

Olga Korbut, 1972

Millions of girls worldwide took up gymnastics after seeing Olga Korbut in Munich in 1972. And the adoration of Olga didn’t stop there. Merchants in Munich were so taken with the 17-year-old gymnast that they refused to take payment from her. After the games, the Soviets assigned a special clerk to answer the gymnast’s fan mail.

She became the first person ever to do a backward somersault on the balance beam in competition. She was also the first to do standing backward somersault on bars, and a back somersault, a move now known as the Korbut Flip, on beam. She won three gold medals and a silver that year.

But it was her personality rather than her technical skills that made Korbut a star. In contrast to her Eastern bloc counterparts, Korbut showed emotion on the floor: Crying when a disastrous performance on the uneven bars shattered her chances of medaling in the all around and smiling ear-to-ear after taking the gold.

Mark Spitz, 1972

Seven events, seven gold medals, seven world records. Spitz won four individual events — in the 100m and 200m freestyle and 100m and 200m butterfly — and three relay races.

No one had done it before and no one has done it since although Michael Phelps will try to better or equal Spitz in this Olympiad when he competes in eight events. Phelps went after Spitz in 2004, but “only” achieved gold in six events.

Nadia Comaneci 1976

When 14-year-old Nadia scored the sport’s first perfect 10 in on the uneven bars, the scoreboard couldn’t accommodate the extra digit as it was assumed no athlete would ever achieve such a score. So Nadia’s perfect mark was displayed on the board as 1.00. Comaneci went on to score six more 10s.

Naturally she was a sensation. After ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” set a montage of her performance to the theme from “The Young and the Restless,” it became a top-selling single and was renamed “Nadia’s Theme” by the composer.

Comaneci was the first Romanian gymnast to win the all-around title at the Olympics. She also holds the record as the youngest Olympic all-around champion. The age requirement has since been upped to 16, so that record can never be broken.

Carl Lewis, 1984

Lewis entered the games a star in the track and field world. Then he matched Jesse Owens’ 1936 four-gold-medal performance and the whole world took notice.

One of only four Olympic athletes to win nine gold medals, Lewis is also one of only three to win the same individual event four times.

At the 1988 Seoul Games, Lewis gained a second gold medal in the 100m after Ben Johnson was disqualified. He also defended his long jump title. At the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, Lewis won a third gold medal in the long jump; he also anchored the world record-setting U.S. relay team. At Atlanta in 1996, he barely qualified but then went on to win the long jump.

Mary Lou Retton 1984

Inspired by Nadia Comaneci growing up, Mary Lou Retton became an Olympian herself when she became the first American to win the all-around title at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. She won the gold by earning a perfect 10 in the vault, the final event of the competition. It was the first time a female gymnast outside Eastern Europe won the Olympic all-around title. Retton also won two silver and two bronze medals in individual and team competitions.

Greg Louganis, 1988

Greg Louganis is the only male diver ever to retain both the Olympic platform and springboard titles - in 1984 and 1988 - and the only diver to win three successive world platform crowns.

After gashing his head on the end of the springboard during the preliminaries, which earned him five stitches and a concussion, Louganis went on to capture gold in both the 3-meter springboard and 10-meter platform at the 1988 Games in Seoul.

Michael Johnson, 1996

The only male athlete to win both the 200m and 400m events at the same Olympics, Johnson is also the only man to successfully defend his Olympic title in the 400m.

After breaking the 200-meter world record at the U.S. Olympic Trials, Johnson shattered his own record at the Games, clocking in at 19.32 seconds. Johnson’s time of 19.32 broke his own world record by a third of a second. No other man in history has run below 19.6.

“The Man With the Golden Shoes” also breezed to the gold medal in the 400 meters, blowing away the field by almost an entire second. Johnson was noted for his unique running style. His upright stance and very short steps defied the received wisdom that a high knee lift was essential for maximum speed.

Kerri Strug 1996

The 88-pound gymnast won the gold for the American gymnastic team by achieving a near perfect vault on a broken ankle.

Strug needed to nail the vault because teammate Dominique Moceanu had fallen in both her attempts. Strug fell on her first attempt, also, and wrenched her ankle. Then she stood up, and limped to the end of the runway for her second attempt. She landed the vault on one foot, raised her arms in a salute to the judges, then collapsed in agony to the mat. She had to be helped off the stage.

Rulon Gardner, 2000

In the “Miracle on the Mat,” Gardner beat Russian Greco-Roman wrestler Aleksandr Karelin, who had not lost a match in 13 years or given up a point in six years. But American Rulon Gardner stopped the champion in his tracks.

Michael Phelps, 2004

Though he may still have a chance to break Mark Spitz’s record of seven gold medals in a single Olympics in Beijing, Phelps came close in 2004.

Phelps began his assault on the record books on the first day of competition, winning the 400m individual medley. The next day he added a bronze medal in the 4x100m freestyle relay, and the day after that he picked up another bronze by setting a personal record in the 200m freestyle.

Phelps then won the 200m butterfly and, an hour later, won as the leadoff leg for the U.S. 4x200m freestyle relay team. His next gold-medal came in the 200m individual medley, which he won by 1.64 seconds. In the 100m butterfly, Phelps earned his fifth gold medal. Phelps gained another gold in the 4x100m medley relay by swimming the preliminary heats. Phelps and gymnast Aleksandr Dityatin are the only athletes to earn eight medals at a single Olympics.

Faster. Higher Stronger. That’s the motto of the Olympics–an event that’s supposed to be about athletic perfection. An event where the greatest athletes of the world meet to compete on neutral ground just for the glory of it.

Not in this world.

When the Olympics become an athletic meet for saints, perhaps we’ll see such perfection. In the meantime the Olympics have seen their share of cheating and chicanery. In general, the worst Olympic moments involve drugs, money or politics with politics far outshadowing the first two.

It was politics that led to the worst moment in Olympic history: The 1972 massacre of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists.

It started in the early morning of Sept. 5, 1972 when eight members of Black September faction sneaked into the Olympic Village and entered the rooms where the athletes slept. Two men, wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg and weightlifter Yossef Romano were killed on the spot. Nine more were taken hostage. Twenty one hours later they were dead in a botched rescue attempt.

Politics also played a role in the basketball match between the US and the USSR that year as it had in other years, most notably the 1980 Miracle on Ice.

It wasn’t just competing ideologies that came to bear in these confrontations: American athletes also objected to the fact that their Eastern bloc counterparts were essentially paid to play while the US athletes were amateurs.

None of the Soviet athletes had sneaker deals. None of them appeared on a box of Wheaties. But they were employees of the state who were able to devote themselves to their individual sports full time. They also didn’t have to worry about paying for trainers or the any of the other numerous expense borne by amateur athletes in the US.

That was the case when the athletes competed for gold in the 1972 basketball finals.

Led by the inside outside combination of guard Sergei Belov and forward Alexander Belov, the well seasoned and well coached Soviets proved to be the stiffest competitor the Americans had ever faced.

“They had a great team,” said U.S. assistant coach John Bach. “Their team, it was reported, played almost 400 games together. 400 games. We had played 12 exhibition games and the trials.”

The quasi-professional Soviet club stood in stark contrast to America’s system of selecting a new amateur team every four years to conquer the world’s best. In 1972, the politics involved with picking the right team and naming the right coach became thorny issues. Henry Iba, the legendary retired head coach of Oklahoma State, was chosen to coach the U.S. team for a third straight Olympics. Iba led the U.S. to gold in 1964 and 1968, but by 1972, his conservative, defensive style of play was viewed as out of touch with the modern game.

With the score at 50-49 for the Americans, officials called a foul on team Russia, but the clock failed to stop in time, and was a second over. After the final buzzzer, the Americans celebrated their victory, but both teams were told they had to replay the final seconds of the game because of the clock malfunction. Instead of restoring the clock to the correct one second, the officials added two extra seconds, giving Russia enough time to score a layup and win 51-50.

The American team protested the outcome to no avail.

To this day, the American team’s silver medals lay unclaimed in a vault in Lausanne, Switzerland.

“If we had gotten beat, I would be proud to display my silver medal today,” [forward Mike] Bantom said. “But, we didn’t get beat, we got cheated.”

“I have placed it in my will that my wife and my children can never, ever receive that medal from the ‘72 Olympic games,” said [team captain Kenny] Davis.

The Soviet players claim the American players were bad sports, albeit patriotic bad sports, who couldn’t bear to accept defeat from their enemy. The Americans point to an abundance of Eastern bloc judges on the panel.

There’s much talk this year about China as a venue for the Olympics given the People’s Republic’s human rights record and its penchant for censorship. In 1936, when Germany hosted the games, there were also objections to the venue.

Germany was awarded the 1936 games in 1931, a year before Adolph Hitler came to power. By 1933, Hitler’s discriminatory policies toward Jews and Gypsies were known throughout the world and some thought the Olympics should be boycotted.

Responding to reports of the persecution of Jewish athletes in 1933, Avery Brundage, president of the American Olympic Committee, stated: “The very foundation of the modern Olympic revival will be undermined if individual countries are allowed to restrict participation by reason of class, creed, or race.” Brundage, like many others in the Olympics movement, initially considered moving the Games from Germany. After a brief and tightly managed inspection of German sports facilities in 1934, Brundage stated publicly that Jewish athletes were being treated fairly and that the Games should go on, as planned.

Debate over participation in the 1936 Olympics was greatest in the United States, which traditionally sent one of the largest teams to the Games. By the end of 1934, the lines on both sides were clearly drawn. Brundage opposed a boycott, arguing that politics had no place in sport. “The Olympic Games belong to the athletes and not to the politicians.” He wrote in the AOC’s pamphlet Fair Play for American Athletes that American athletes should not become involved in “the present Jew-Nazi altercation.” As the Olympics controversy heated up in 1935, Brundage alleged the existence of a “Jewish-Communist conspiracy” to keep the United States out of the Games.

Brundage’s rival, Judge Jeremiah Mahoney, president of the Amateur Athletic Union, pointed out that Germany had broken Olympic rules forbidding discrimination based on race and religion. In his view, participation would mean an endorsement of Hitler’s Reich.

As we all know, the Olympics went on as planned and the IOC brooked no opposition to its plan: American athlete Ernest Lee Jahnke, the son of a German immigrant, was expelled from the IOC for encouraging athletes to boycott Hitler’s Berlin Games.

Before the games began, the Nazis cleaned up the streets of Berlin, removing anti-Semitic signs from the streets and anti-Semitic rhetoric from the newspapers. A month before the games, 800 Roma (Gypsies) residing in Berlin were interned in a special camp. A huge sports complex was constructed and Olympic flags and swastikas bedecked the monuments of Berlin. Nazi officials also ordered that foreign visitors should not be subjected to the criminal penalties of the German anti-homosexuality laws.

Germany took most of the medals that year, earning 89, with 33 gold medals including one for cycling won by Toni Merkens who fouled Dutchman Arie van Vliet in the cycling sprint final, but was allowed to keep the gold medal after being fined 100 Reichsmarks.

For 101 years, from the start of the Olympic Games in 1896 to 1987, the Olympics forbade athletes from earning money for athletics. Money, the International Olympics Committee alleged, would taint the games. But from the beginning critics of the policy have charged that barring athletes from receiving payment made the Olympics little more than an exclusive club for the rich, who could afford to devote themselves to sport without thinking about remuneration.

Jim Thorpe was one of the first athletes to face sanctions for playing for pay.

“The greatest athlete in the world” lost his medals in 1913 after a newspaper account revealed he had played baseball for money.

Depending on which biography you consult, Thorpe received $2 a game or $25-$35 a week in 1909 and 1910 for playing minor league baseball. Two years later, Thorpe became the only athlete ever to win the pentathlon and the decathlon as a member of the US Olympic team in Stockholm, beating out the prohibitive favorite, Avery Brundage.

Brundage, who later served as president of the International Olympic Committee, finished sixth in the pentathlon and 15th in the decathlon, which some say led to his intransigence on the subject of Thorpe’s medals. For decades, Brundage steadfastly refused to overturn the ruling and reinstate Thorpe’s medals, even after the US Olympic Committee voted for reinstatement in 1973.

Thorpe eventually received his hard earned medals in 1983, 30 years after his death. The decision was made under the auspices of then-IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch, who also played a leading role in allowing professional athletes to compete in the games.

In the 1932 games, Swedish athlete Bertil Sandstrom was demoted to last after winning the silver medal in equestrian dressage for clicking at his horse to encourage it. He claimed it was his saddle making a creaking noise.

Another possible cheating scandal could be called the she-male controversy.

Tamara and Irina Press won five golds and one silver. They also set 26 world records in shot put, discus and pentathlon. The sisters mysteriously disappeared from international competition when genetic testing was instituted.

Western track and field officials and media representatives often mocked the sisters for appearing masculine and speculated that the two received male hormone treatments. Some even conjectured that the sisters were actually men. Those questions led in 1966 to the imposition of gender tests for international competitions. The sisters withdrew from competition; Soviet officials announced the pair were retiring to care for their ailing mother in Ukraine.

These days, questions of cheating generally involve doping. The most recent scandal was revealed last year when Marion Jones, who won five medals in the 2000 Summer Olympic, admitted to taking drugs.

In October 2007, Jones admitted she had lied about her steroid use in statements to the press, sports agencies and two grand juries. Jones accepted a two-year suspension form track and field competition, and eventually announced her retirement on October 5, 2007. She also lost her medals.

Jones is far from alone. Here’s a partial list of summer Olympians caught doping:

• Seoul 1988: Ben Johnson, a Canadian sprinter, was stripped of his gold medal in the 100m after testing positive for stanozolol. Johnson had astounded the world when he stormed to gold in the 100m in Seoul a record time of 9.79 seconds.
• Sydney 2000: Romanian Andreea Raducan became the first gymnast to be stripped of a medal after testing positive for pseudophedrine, a banned drug. Raducan was fighting off a cold, and the Romanian team doctor game her cold medicine pills. The doctor was expelled from the Games and suspended for four years. Raducan’s teammate Simona Amanar, who had taken the silver medal, was eventually awarded the gold and Raducan was allowed to keep her other medals.
• Athens 2004: Kenyan boxer David Munyasia tested positive for cathine and was banned from competing.
• Athens 2004: Greek sprinters Kostas Kenteris and Ekaterini Thanou withdrew from their team after they failed to take drug tests before the games began.
• Athens 2004: Myanmar’s Nan Aye Khine tested positive for steroids after finishing fourth in the women’s 48 kg weightlifting event.
• Athens 2004: Turkish weightlifter Sule Sahbaz tested positive for steroids and was barred from competing.
• Athens 2004: Bronze medalist Leonidas Sampanis lost was his bronze medal in the 62 kg weightlifting competition after testing positive for testosterone.
• Athens 2004: Robert Fazekas of Hungary was stripped of his gold medal and Olympic Record in the Men’s discus after failing to produce a sufficiently large urine sample, then leaving the testing facility early.
• Athens 2004: Irish showjumper Cian O’Connor was stripped of his gold medal after his horse, Waterford Crystal, tested positive for fluphenazine and zuclophenthixol months after receiving the medal.

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