The Mammoth Book of Losers

by Karl Shaw

  Meanwhile, Kuwaiti defender Abdullah Mayouf pitched in: “There is no doubt in my mind that the referees in this World Cup are looking to help the top teams and are against the smaller countries like Kuwait. Every match, we have in our mind that we are playing against twelve players.” FIFA fined Kuwait and cautioned Prince Fahid for unsporting behaviour. The referee was never seen on the international stage again.

  3. Chile (1989)

  Brazil were leading Chile 1-0 in Rio and just twenty-one minutes away from a place at Italia ’90 when the Chilean goalkeeper Roberto Rojas went down, blood streaming from his face, having apparently been struck by a stray firecracker. The crowd looked on as Rojas rolled around on the ground in a pool of his own blood, before being stretchered from the field, followed quickly by the Chilean team as the game was abandoned. FIFA awarded Brazil a 2-0 win, but the Chilean FA, citing a similar incident between Holland and Cyprus in 1987, demanded a replay in a neutral country.

  A riot ensued outside the Brazilian embassy in Chile, as 4,000 people burned the Brazilian flag and smashed windows. Meanwhile, Brazil’s team doctor had said that he was “absolutely certain” that Rojas was not hit as “the flare that fell is for signalling and not explosive” and called for a FIFA investigation. They found that the Chilean ’keeper, under instruction from his coach, hid a razor blade in his glove and used it to cut himself in a bid to get the game abandoned. Video evidence confirmed that Rojas had not been touched by the firecracker.

  Chile were thrown out of the 1994 World Cup, while Rojas, the coach and the team doctor were all given life bans (overturned in 2002).

  4. Iraqi Team Manager (1996–2001)

  Saddam Hussein appointed his son Uday as head of the Iraqi soccer federation, an inspired choice designed to give his nation’s top footballers an extra incentive to do well. Underperformance was rewarded with beatings with iron bars or canings on the soles of the feet, followed by dunkings in raw sewage to ensure the wounds became infected. Motivational team talks included threats to cut off players’ legs and throw them to ravenous dogs; a missed training session was punishable by imprisonment; a loss or a draw brought flogging with electric cable, or a bath in raw sewage; a penalty miss carried the certainty of imprisonment and torture.

  During a World Cup qualifying match in Jordan, Iraq drew 3-3 with the United Arab Emirates, calling for a penalty shootout, which Iraq lost. Two days after the team’s return to Baghdad, the captain Zair was summoned to Uday’s headquarters, then blindfolded and taken away to a prison camp for three weeks.

  A red card was particularly dangerous. Yasser Abdul Latif, accused of thumping the referee during a heated club match in Baghdad, was confined to a prison cell two metres square, stripped to the waist, then ordered to perform press-ups for two hours while guards flogged him with lengths of electric cable. When Iraq lost 4-1 to Japan in the Asian Cup, goalkeeper Hashim Hassan, defender Abdul Jaber and striker Qahtan Chither were fingered as the main culprits and were tortured for three days by Uday’s bodyguards. When Iraq failed to reach the 1994 World Cup finals, Uday recalled the squad for extra training – with a concrete ball.

  5. Esperance (2000)

  The 2000 African Champions League showpiece final between Tunisia’s Esperance and Ghana’s Hearts of Oak was beamed live around the continent, complete with rioting, missile-throwing and another bizarre, self-inflicted wound by a desperate goalkeeper.

  Hearts had won the first leg in Tunisia 2-1 and Esperance were winning the second leg 1-0 in Ghana when the home fans started to pelt match officials and police with missiles. The police responded with tear gas, sparking a pitch invasion. Amid the confusion, one of the away fans ran on to the pitch and handed Esperance ’keeper Chokri El Ouaer a sharp object. As Simon Kuper wrote in the Guardian at the time: “In full sight of the stadium, he bravely cut himself in the face. Bleeding like a pig, he tottered to the halfway line, where he fell over. El Ouaer was presumably trying to get the match called off, but as he’d disregarded the most elementary precepts of secrecy, he simply looked silly.”

  After an eighteen-minute delay, El Ouaer was bizarrely substituted for an outfield player while the Esperance players began fighting with policemen. Esperance’s Walid Azaiez was then sent off for a headbutt, but refused to leave the field and punched a policeman on his way out. Hearts won 3-1 and become continental champions.

  Worst Bullfighter

  The Spanish bullfighter Rafael Gómez Ortega, known to his fans as El Gallo (the Chicken) came from a family of matadors. He was chiefly famous for his unique fighting technique known the “espantada” – or “the bolt”. This involved him fleeing and jumping over the barrier as soon as the bull entered the ring. Crowds loved this so much that he was brought out of retirement seven times.

  In his last fight, in October 1918, he claimed he spared the bull because it “winked” at him. The audience again felt this was hilarious, but Ortega’s brother, José (also known as “Joselito El Gallo”), concerned for the family honour, hopped into the ring and killed the bull.

  “If the motion of the earth were circular, it would be violent and contrary to nature, and could not be eternal, since nothing violent is eternal. It follows, therefore, that the earth is not moved with a circular motion.”

  St Thomas Aquinas, 1270

  Briefest International Rugby Career

  French rugby player Gaston Vareilles missed his international début against Scotland in 1910 thanks to a baguette.

  When the French team train stopped at Lyon, Vareilles hopped off to sample the station snack bar. But the queue was so long that by the time he returned to the platform his train was disappearing into the distance. He was never picked for his country again.

  “Animals, which move, have limbs and muscles; the earth has no limbs and muscles, hence it does not move.”

  Scipio Chiaramonti, Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics, University of Pisa, 1633

  Worst Sailor

  The sea has been a more dangerous place since Stuart Hill, a retired metalwork designer from Suffolk, took up sailing in 2001.

  The first of several quixotic attempts to circumnavigate the British Isles in a homemade boat began in June that year. He suffered a setback when he experienced an allergic reaction to the resin he was using on the hull of his boat Maximum Exposure, a modified fifteen-foot rowing boat, propelled by a windsurfing sail. After a month’s delay while waiting to recover, he launched his boat into the River Stour, hitting another boat within minutes. Six days later and a hundred miles into his journey, he fell asleep from exhaustion and, drifting off the coast of East Anglia, had to be towed ashore by lifeguards. Over a period of several weeks, he was the cause of five lifeboat call-outs and two air-sea rescue helicopter scrambles.

  After abandoning his attempt, Hill was defensive. None of the rescue attempts had been initiated by him, he said; they were the result of well-meaning but mistaken members of the public who took his vessel for a windsurfer in trouble. A spokesman for the RNLI begged to differ, noting that Hill’s attempted voyage was “like putting someone blindfolded in the middle of the M1 and telling everyone to avoid him”.

  Six months later, despite being advised by experts of his vessel’s unsuitability for the journey, and overlooking the fact that the costs incurred by the rescue services on Hill’s behalf were counterproductive to his fundraising for charity, he made a second attempt at the anti-clockwise circumnavigation of the British Isles using the same vessel, this time launching from Southwold in Suffolk. Hill optimistically declared his boat “unsinkable”, claiming receipt of a gold safety award from the RNLI.

  His ordeal came to an end a few weeks later when he was found clinging to the hull of his boat fifty miles west of Shetland. Coastguards described him as “very lucky to be alive” – it turned out that his boat had been leaking from the start and the water caused his radio to fail.

  In 2008, the sixty-five-year-old Hill was rescued yet again in heavy seas off Shetland after his latest
self-built boat – resembling an oversized punt and described as “about as seaworthy as a Welsh dresser” – was swamped by large waves. According to his rescuers, he had no life-jacket or radio and was equipped with a flare he didn’t know how to use.

  In 2010, Stuart Hill told the Shetland Times newspaper that he was hoping to try again and that his reputation as a calamitous mariner was one thing he would “like to put to bed . . . it seems to follow me around”.

  Worst Chess Player

  Finding themselves desperately short of foreign players, the organizers of the 1965 Baku International Chess Tournament invited Geoffrey Hosking, an Englishman studying at Moscow University, to take part.

  Hosking was completely unprepared, but manfully accepted the challenge. He only found out later that a Russian friend had put his name forward on the basis of his performance in a vodka-fuelled friendly chess game. Hosking lost all twelve games and performed so badly that officials were too embarrassed to publish any of the results.

  “All the ills from which America suffers can be traced back to the teaching of evolution. It would be better to destroy every other book ever written, and save just the first three verses of Genesis.”

  William Jennings Bryan, Democrat US presidential candidate

  Worst Wrestler

  During a 1930s wrestling match in Rhode Island, the American grappler Stanley Pinto was facing “Count George” Zaryoff. While trying to work himself into a winning position, Pinto became entangled in the ringside ropes. As he struggled to extricate himself, while his bemused opponent stood and watched, Pinto’s shoulders touched the mat for a three-second count. He had succeeded in pinning himself and Zaryoff was declared the winner.

  “Negro equality! Fudge! How long, in the Government of a God great enough to make and rule the universe, shall there continue knaves to vend, and fools to quip, so low a piece of demagogism as this?”

  Abraham Lincoln, 1859

  When Fighting Nicknames Go Bad

  When Quinton “Rampage” Johnson lost his mixed martial arts light-heavyweight title in July 2012, he was so upset that he literally went on a rampage through the streets of California in his one-tonne monster truck, driving on the pavement, shredding a tyre and injuring a pregnant woman.

  After a brief chase, Jackson was apprehended by the police. He was identified by the life-size portrait of himself on the side of his vehicle, next to the word “Rampage”.

  “Rembrandt is not to be compared in the painting of character with our extraordinarily gifted English artist, Mr Rippingille.”

  Nineteenth-century art critic John Hunt, date unknown

  Least Successful Medal Ceremony

  The triumph of Luxembourg’s Joseph Barthel in the 1,500 metres at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics was greeted with embarrassed silence. A surprise winner of the middle-distance event, nobody had anticipated a gold-medal winner from the tiny European duchy, so when it came to the medal ceremony, there was no sign anywhere of the score to the Luxembourg national anthem. After an awkward delay, the band struck up a hastily improvised version.

  Not nearly as awkward, however, as the situation faced by Maria Dmitrienko from Kazakhstan in March 2012. She had just won the gold medal at a shooting tournament in Kuwait and was standing proudly on the podium waiting for the opening words of the Kazakh national anthem – “Sky of golden sun/ Steppe of golden seed/ Legend of courage/ Take a look at my country!”

  Instead, the first notes were followed by the words, “All other countries are run by little girls . . .” and “Kazakhstan’s prostitutes are the cleanest in the region . . .” and “We invented toffee and the trouser belt!” This was followed by an invitation to “come grasp the mighty penis of our leader”.

  Dmitrienko stuck grimly to her task, reacting only with a bemused smile, as the song went on to boast that her country was the “number-one exporter of potassium” and its Tinshein swimming pool was endowed with a “filtration system a marvel to behold . . . It removes 80 per cent of solid human waste.”

  Someone had switched the tapes and they were playing the spoof version of the Kazakh national anthem written by Sacha Baron Cohen for the 2005 film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Kuwaiti officials kept the tape playing, unaware of the mistake.

  The Kazakh team manager denounced the error as “a gross insult to our nation”, although, to be fair, they should have been used to medal ceremony cock-ups by then. Earlier that year, at the opening of a skiing event, the Kazakh national anthem was accidentally replaced by Ricky Martin’s 1999 hit “Livin’ la Vida Loca”.

  Worst Olympic Swimmer

  For most swimmers, posting a personal best and a national record at the Olympic Games would give you a decent shout at contesting a medal. It was sadly not the case for twenty-two-year-old Eric ‘the Eel’ Moussambani, the 100-metre freestyle swimmer from Equatorial Guinea.

  Twelve months before he took part in the first qualifying heat of the men’s 100-metre freestyle at Sydney 2000, Eric couldn’t even swim and had never seen – let alone dipped his toe into – an Olympic-sized fifty-metre pool, having taught himself to swim in a twenty-metre pool in a hotel in his home town of Malabo. Training alone without a coach, he had nobody to help him clock his efforts. He also thought he would be swimming only fifty metres at the Olympics. So it came as some surprise when he lined up at the start in the first qualifying heat of the men’s 100-metre freestyle, twice the distance he’d been expecting and had “trained” for, a test of endurance he had never once attempted.

  Confusion reigned when two of the three nervous participants, Niger’s Karim Bare and Tajikistan’s Farkhod Oripov, jumped the gun, vaulting into the Olympic pool before the starter even had a chance to finish saying, “Get set!” With two out of three contestants now disqualified for false starts, and only one competitor left, it was presumed the heat would be abandoned and Moussambani would get a “bye” to the next round but, after conferring, the judges ruled that he would have to swim alone against the clock in front of 17,000 spectators in a bid to make the Olympic qualifying time of one minute ten seconds.

  After a dive that looked suspiciously inept, it quickly became apparent to even the untrained eye that Eric wasn’t much of a swimmer. As he approached the halfway turn in 40.97 seconds, it was painfully obvious that he was quite literally out of his depth. BBC commentator Adrian Moorhouse thought that Eric was going to drown. “This guy doesn’t look like he’s going to make it . . . I am convinced this guy is going to have to get hold of the lane rope in a moment!”

  At one point, Eric appeared to be treading water, but with the 17,000 crowd now roaring their support, he splashed and grunted his way to the finish, “winning” the heat in a time of 1 minute 52.72 seconds, the slowest time in Olympic history, as well as being forty-three seconds outside the qualifying time and seven seconds longer than it had taken the Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe to swim exactly twice the distance in the same pool the previous day.

  But Eric did get a lot better. By 2004, his personal best for the 100 metres was down to less than fifty-seven seconds and he hoped to qualify for the Olympics and win a medal, but due to a visa problem his dream was to remain unfullfilled. Eric was so disappointed he retired from international swimming.

  Remarkably, Eddie the Eel wasn’t the only aquatic underachiever from Equatorial Guinea to grace the Olympic pool at the 2000 Games. Eddie’s exploits guaranteed a media circus around his female compatriot, Paula “the Crawler” Barila Bolopa. Her last-placed time of 1 minute 3.09 seconds in the fifty-metre freestyle was double that of the next worst competitor and the slowest in Olympic history, completing a unique double for Equatorial Guinea. Her team manager, Enrique Roca Nguba, blamed the high starting blocks, which she had never seen before she arrived in Sydney. “It was a long way down to the water . . . she wasn’t used to that.”

  Least Successful Channel Swimmers

  Since merchant seaman Captain Matthew Webb first s
wam the Channel coated in porpoise fat in 1875, at the time of writing only another 810 people have made it to the French coast. That leaves at least another 6,000 people who have tried and failed.

  There are good reasons for this high failure rate. Powerful tides, the geography of the French coast, unpredictable weather, tankers, oil slicks, the risk of hypothermia (the water rarely gets above 15ºC), not to mention the horrors of jellyfish and raw sewage, make it an incredibly dangerous swim. Not for nothing is the crossing known as “the Everest of open-water swimming”.

  Jabez Wolfe reputedly tried to swim the Channel twenty-two times, starting in 1906 and never making it despite getting within a mile of France on three separate occasions – his 1911 attempt ended just 100 yards short. A Glaswegian, Wolfe relied on a bagpiper in the support boat to help keep his swimming stroke steady.

  Another of the most persistently unsuccessful Channel swimmers was Lord Freyberg, Governor-General of New Zealand from 1946–52. As a young man, Freyberg made numerous futile attempts to swim the Channel. On his closest attempt, he got within 200 yards of the French coast where he paused to rest before one last push. Seeing his exhaustion, his wife leant over the side of his support boat and gave him a “fortifying slug” of brandy – and that was the end of the attempt. It knocked him out and he had to be pulled out of the water.

  At least he lived to tell the tale. To date, at least seven people have died trying. Ueli Staub, a Swiss extreme sports enthusiast, spent sixteen hours in the water in August 2001 before disappearing under a seven-foot wave in the dark just off Calais. His body was found a week later off the Belgian port of Ostend. He was presumed to have suffered a heart attack, very likely brought on by his caffeine-heavy diet of strong coffee and flat Coca-Cola.