Olympic Games have been the center point of various controversies, scandals, and even tragedies since their re-establishment in the late 19th century, therefore we’ve decided to take a look at the biggest Olympic scandals of all time.
It doesn’t really come as a surprise that Olympic tournaments (both summer and winter ones) have yielded as many scandals as they have. Olympic Games represent the pinnacle of sports competitions. Winning the Olympic gold is every athlete’s dream and earning the right for his/hers national anthem to be played at the medal-awarding ceremony is probably the greatest honor an athlete can attain. Furthermore, Olympic games are only being held once in every four years which leaves a very limited number of opportunities for an athlete to win them. With all this in mind, it’s understandable why some people resort to cheating – though hardly condonable.
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Controversies and scandals aren’t reserved for Olympic tournaments alone. Sadly, wherever there’s a sports competition, some kind of controversy follows as we have so often witnessed. NFL, for instance, is an organization whose foundations have been shaken numerous times. Here’s a list of 14 biggest NFL scandals of all time to demonstrate the previous statement. You can compare the ramifications of these scandals yourselves after you go through both of the lists
In this list of biggest Olympic scandals of all time, we’ll revisit events from the dawn of modern Olympics, all the way to the latest ones. Some of them have been mostly forgotten, but some have had consequences that are still being felt today. Olympic scandals and controversies over the years have been created by athletes, executives, politicians, referees and even audience. There’s no real way to determine which scandal is bigger, and hence, to rank the scandals by their impact. After all, let us not make a controversy by ranking controversies. Finally, we’re aware that there’s simply no way to mention all the scandals that have occurred during these 120 years modern Olympics are being held (disregarding the World War I and II years). That’s why we’ll also give you a few (dis)honorable mentions along the way as well, as we list the Olympic scandals that were most talked about that we could find on the Internet.
