Napoleon's Hemorrhoids

by Phil Mason

  From shortest participation to longest: the semi-final of the 1912 Greco-Roman wrestling competition lasted over 11 hours, the longest in Olympic history, before Estonian Martin Klein beat Finn Alfred Asikainen. The bout was fought for the most part under a blazing sun. Klein was so exhausted he could not fight the final, having to give up the gold medal by default.

  At Seoul in 1988, the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu had its first ever Olympic Games competitor disqualified before he even started. Eduard Paululum, a bantamweight boxer, ate a large breakfast on the day of his first-round fight and weighed in a pound over the 119-and-a-half-pound limit. He went home never having thrown a punch in anger.

  At the 1936 Berlin lightweight boxing tournament, South African Thomas Hamilton-Brown was robbed of his Olympic dream by a referee’s error and an eating binge. He had thought he had lost his opening bout when the judges split 2 – 1 against him. It was later discovered that one of them had got his scores round the wrong way for the boxers and that Hamilton-Brown was actually the winner. By the time his coach had caught up with him, Hamilton-Brown, who had struggled to meet the 9st 9lb limit, had gone on a comfort-eating binge and put on five pounds. Despite a night of desperate weight loss activity, when he turned up for the second round the following day he was unable to meet the limit and was disqualified.

  Soviet cyclist, Eduard Rapp, one of the favourites for the 1976 Montreal 1,000 metres time trial, realised he had jumped the starter’s gun at the start of his race and stopped cycling expecting that the starter would call him back. The officials, however, ruled his start was legal, and then disqualified him…for stopping.

  Inept officialdom reached its apogee in the 1912 Stockholm Games when the quality of the tennis tournament was well below the world standard. The organisers had scheduled the event at exactly the same time as Wimbledon.

  The Swedish equestrian team at the 1948 London Games missed out on the gold medal because one of its three members wore the wrong cap. At the time, the equestrian competitions were only open to military personnel, and officers at that. The third member of the Swedish team, Gehnäll Persson, was spotted by the Head of the International Equestrian Federation, in the dressage stage, wearing the cap of a sergeant, a non-commissioned rank. Sweden was accused of a fake promotion of Persson to enable him to compete in the event, and the team was disqualified. His cap had given him away.

  The rumpus led to the abolition of the military qualification rule before the next Games. Sweden, with the same team, and incidentally a properly promoted Persson, nevertheless still won the gold, as did the same team again in 1956.

  The Dutch coxed pairs rowing team won the 1900 Paris gold by ditching their cox for being too heavy after losing their first heat and replacing him with a diminutive French schoolboy plucked from the crowd. They won the final, with a string of three French teams behind them, by a fifth of a second in the seven-and-a-half-minute race.

  The schoolboy, estimated to be between 7 and 10 years old – the youngest competitor and gold medallist in Olympic history – disappeared back into the crowd and his identity is lost to posterity.

  In the US athletics qualifying trials for the 1928 Games, the then world 400 metres record holder, Emerson Spencer, failed to make the national team because he thought he was running in a heat. He timed his run to be just enough to progress into the next round only to be told that he had actually been running in the final selection race. He missed out.

  Some never even made it, even though they intended to compete. In the 1908 London Games, the Russian military shooting team sent their entry notification to the authorities, but by the time they arrived the competition was long over. It transpired that they had forgotten to take into account Russia’s use of the Julian calendar, which was 12 days behind the Gregorian, which the rest of the world was on.

  They therefore arrived for their event nearly two weeks late.

  The year before the 1936 Olympics, Eulace Peacock had beaten compatriot Jesse Owens in the 100 metres on three of their five encounters, and beaten him in the long jump at the American national championships. A hamstring injury kept him from competing in the Olympic trials. It was Owens who went on to achieve immortality by winning gold in both events (and two others) in Berlin.

  Some acts of sportsmanship ended up costing big time. In the fence-off for the 1932 women’s foil gold medal, British fencer Heather Guinness pointed out to the judges two hits that she had conceded but they had not spotted. They turned out to be the margin of victory for her Austrian opponent, Ellen Preis.

  In the 1956 javelin final in Melbourne, Russian Viktor Tsibulenko, lying in second place with two throws left in the competition, lent his steel javelin to Norwegian rival Egil Danielson who was then languishing back in sixth. Danielson proceeded to throw a world record distance and won the gold by an astonishing margin of nearly 19 feet from the silver medallist. Tsibulenko had to be content with bronze, more than 20 feet behind.

  The inclusion of synchronised swimming as a medal event in the Olympics at the 1984 Los Angeles Games has always subjected the Olympic movement to a modicum of ridicule. It emerged some years later that the decision had been far from clear cut, and may even not have been legally approved.

  It was revealed in 1986 that when the International Olympic Committee decided the issue, it was voted on by show of hands. Monique Berlioux, the director of the Executive Committee and a former Olympic swimmer and strong advocate of synchronised swimming, was in charge of counting. After a rapid assessment of the two factions, she turned to Lord Killanin, the President of the IOC, and confidently declared the vote in favour of inclusion. ‘Are you sure?’ Killanin is reported to have asked. ‘Definitely!’ replied Berlioux, reportedly, ‘with an air of massive certainty’.

  Except, she confided in 1986 to The Times newspaper, ‘I am still not sure…’

  The Indian national tennis side had the chance to win its first Davis Cup in 1974, but it decided to forfeit the final against South Africa in protest against the apartheid regime. The two least fancied sides in world tennis reached the final because most of the professional players in the big tennis nations were recovering from a prolonged strike campaign against the tennis authorities over prize money.

  India has only managed to reach the final on two other occasions in the 108-year history of the competition (in 1966 and 1987), losing both ties comprehensively to big boys Australia and Sweden respectively.

  The 50km cycling race at the 1997 Pan-Arab Games in Beirut had to be officially expunged from the records after the authorities forgot to close the roads for the event. Only four riders managed to complete the course, one of them after being knocked down by a car.

  Traffic was so bad that vehicles carrying supervising officials got stuck in jams and were soon way behind the pace. No one could formally vouch that the course had been adhered to by any of the competitors.

  Local football side, Coleridge FC from Cambridgeshire, were due to celebrate being recognised by the Guinness Book of Records as Britain’s cleanest soccer team in 1983, having never had a player booked since they formed in 1954. The weekend before the new edition of the annual was published in October 1983, they had two players cautioned in the same match.

  Ed Oliver finished equal first with two other players in the 1940 US Open golf tournament, but was then denied the chance of playing off for the championship when stewards disqualified him – for the offence of starting his round 28 minutes earlier than his appointed time.

  An even stranger way to lose a golf championship was Hale Irwin’s missed stroke in the 1983 British Open. In his final round he had a one-inch putt to finish off a hole. He went to play it and missed the ball entirely. The ‘air shot’ cost him a penalty stroke, and it was by that margin of a single shot that Irwin failed to finish in first place.

  American boxer Daniel Caruso was psyching himself up at the start of his bout in the Golden Gloves tournament in New York in 1992. He was pummelling himself in the face with his glo
ves when he delivered to himself one hit too hard. He broke his nose, and doctors ruled he was no longer fit to fight. He had lost even before being introduced to his opponent.

  Henry Cooper astonished the boxing world in June 1963 when he floored the supposedly unbeatable Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) at the end of the fourth round of their clash at London’s Wembley Stadium. Clay was in serious trouble and, it later emerged, was helped to get through the difficulty by a subterfuge by his trainer.

  Angelo Dundee confessed years later that he had deliberately widened a small tear in Clay’s glove as the fighter was still recovering so that they were unusable. This led to a delay of several minutes between the rounds while new gloves were brought from the dressing room. The extra time is credited with helping Clay’s restoration. He went on to beat Cooper in the next round.

  It was Clay’s warm-up bout before his challenge on Sonny Liston for the world title. Had he lost against Cooper, his chances of reaching a title challenge might never have materialised.

  The United States were on the other end of a cheating claim in their 1967 Davis Cup tennis tie against Ecuador in Guayaquil. It was the Americas Inter-Zone final, and a torridly partisan crowd spurred the home team to a surprising 3 – 2 victory. The Americans complained most, however, over the antics of a squawking parrot high in the trees overlooking the court. It only seemed to screech when an American was about to serve.

  The match turned into a highly charged affair. The Ecuadorean coach broke his leg when he rushed onto the court to celebrate winning the first rubber and tripped trying to jump the net, and crowds outside threw stones onto the American coach throughout the tie. But it was the parrot that was etched in the defeated Americans’ memories.

  The effects of the turmoil can be seen by the Ecuadoreans’ next performance. They played Spain in a more sedate Barcelona and were solidly trounced 5 – 0.

  It’s one of America’s most famous sporting ‘what ifs’. The Chicago Cubs blame their lack of success in the American national baseball league – they have not won the World Series title since 1908 – on a curse inflicted by an angry spectator who tried to bring his goat into the ground in 1945.

  William Sianis, a Greek immigrant tavern owner, self-publicist and diehard Cubs fan, wanted to bring his mascot into the fourth game of the 1945 World Series at the club’s famous Wrigley Field stadium. He had even bought a ticket for the animal. Ushers refused entry because of the animal’s smell. Sianis cursed the club, saying it would never win another World Series. The Cubs were 2 – 1 up in the series of 7 before the dispute. They won only one more game, and lost 4-3 overall.

  Not only have they not won a World Series since, they have failed even to reach the finals in every season to date. (They had reached seven between 1908 and their last in 1945.) It is the longest dry spell in the American game.

  One of the most exciting finishes to an American football match was lost to millions of television viewers when the game overran and the broadcaster, in deference to sponsors, started showing a children’s film instead.

  The game in November 1968 between New York Jets and Oakland Raiders was 42 seconds from the end. New York led 32 – 29. The NBC channel cut to its evening presentation of Heidi. In the final unbelievable seconds, Oakland scored two touchdowns to overturn the result. In American Football folklore, the match is still remembered to this day as ‘the Heidi game’.

  Had the Tour de France started as it had been intended, it would probably never have survived and become the legendary sports event it is. Henri Desgrange, editor of sports newspaper L’Auto, whose idea it was to create the race to boost the circulation of his paper, initially envisaged the event as a 35-day race. When he advertised for racers in early 1903, so few responded to the daunting month-long challenge, that he only got 15 riders signed up. He delayed the starting date from June to July – fixing on the holiday period that the race has occupied ever since – and cut the race to 19 days, again, pretty much the length that has been followed every year.

  With the progress of the race pumped up excitedly in the columns of L’Auto each day, the Tour drew thousands of people on to the streets as it passed. So many turned out for the final leg in Paris that the winner had to be taken into the Parc des Princes, where the race ended, by car. The frenzied finish guaranteed that the Tour would be a guaranteed success in following years. It also saved the ailing L’Auto, whose circulation doubled as a result of Desgrange’s visionary idea.

  Red Rum, the greatest Grand National racehorse of all time (three wins and two seconds between 1973 and 1977) was bought in 1972 by trainer Ginger McCain, who was unaware that he had been treated for a form of arthritis. Red Rum had been a relatively uninspiring sprinter, and was already seven years old. Had McCain known of the arthritis, he more than likely would not have given the horse a second chance.

  Golfer Jack Ackerman, playing the Bay of Quinte course in Belleville, Ontario, in 1934 scored a hole-in-one after his ball came to rest on the lip of the hole, and a butterfly landed on the ball causing it to drop in.

  Rugby player Gaston Vareilles was selected to play for France in an international match against Scotland in 1911. En route to Scotland, he jumped off the team train at a station stop to get a sandwich, was delayed in the queue and when he returned to the platform discovered the train was leaving without him. He missed the match and was never selected for the national side again.

  Jack Johnson, who was the first black fighter to hold the world heavyweight boxing title (from 1908-1915), and was at the time the most famous African American on the planet, nearly lost his life at the peak of his celebrity status. He planned to travel on the Titanic in 1912 – but was refused passage because of his colour.

  The brash feeling of self-importance of young Argentinian motor racing driver, and soon-to-be legend, Juan Fangio, saved him from disaster before he had won any of his five world championships.

  Driving in the 1950 Monaco Grand Prix, he approached a notoriously dangerous bend and suddenly became aware that something was wrong. He noticed that the faces of the spectators, which he usually saw as a whitish blur, were all turned away from him. The thought is said to have run through his head, ‘If they are not looking at me, they must be looking at something more important.’ He braked sharply and as he rounded the corner he discovered that his sense of feeling affronted by being ignored had saved him from smashing into a major pile-up involving most of the field which had blocked the track. He went on to win the race, the first Grand Prix victory of his career.

  Four times Olympic medallist and holder of 12 world athletic records, Sebastian Coe once explained the origins of his talent: ‘If you lived in Sheffield and were called Sebastian, you had to learn to run fast at a very early age.’

  The legendary Bill Shankly applied and was rejected for the manager’s post at Bradford Park Avenue in the late 1950s just before he took the job at Liverpool, a club he was to take to three League championships, two runners-up places and two FA Cup wins in 10 years.

  Bradford PA had been a respectable Second Division side throughout the previous two decades. Their fortunes were very different after declining Bill Shankly’s services, falling to the Fourth Division in 1958 and eventually losing their League status in 1970.

  Years later, the then club chairman ruminated, ‘It was the biggest mistake any football club ever made. The guy was unbelievable, one of the English game’s three outstanding managers, along with Matt Busby and Alex Ferguson. Bradford is a big city and, at the time, was supporting two teams very well. I think Shankly would have made all the difference. We picked the wrong man.’

  And what would Liverpool’s fate have been had they not had Shankly for that crucial decade, widely regarded as laying the foundations for the unparalleled success that was to come later in the 1970s and 1980s?

  Jimmy Adamson would have been the England manager in their 1966 World Cup campaign, but he turned down the offer of the post because he felt he did not have the experience. He
had served as assistant to the then manager, Walter Winterbottom, at the 1962 World Cup and was the Football Association’s first choice when Winterbottom retired after the competition. Although he had not applied for the post, he was asked to take it in front of the 59 aspirants who had done so.

  Instead, Adamson went back to manage the club he spent his whole playing career with, Burnley. And Alf Ramsey became the England manager.

  By the time England’s greatest footballer, Stanley Matthews, ended his career, he had achieved legendary status. When he made his international debut for England in 1934 it had been just four years after joining Stoke City at the age of 15. Geoffrey Simpson, the Daily Mail correspondent, however, was not impressed: ‘I saw Matthews play just as moderately in the recent inter-league match, exhibiting the same faults of slowness and hesitation. Perhaps he lacks the big-match temperament.’

  Arsenal would have gone out of business inside their first seven years had it not been for an archery competition. When the Football League expanded into two divisions in 1893, the club, founded in 1886, became the first southern outfit to be invited to join. No other side was south of Birmingham.

  Travel costs were soon crippling the club, and they got themselves solvent again by holding the archery tournament, which raised the £1,200 that gave them their lifeline.

  Liverpool, one of the biggest clubs in England, Europe and the world, owe their existence to a rent dispute involving near neighbours and rivals, Everton.