The world of chess lives convulsive days after the scandal of the alleged cheating of the young American Hans Niemann has been uncovered. After the initial complaint by Magnus Carlsen, the current best chess player in the world, a report has revealed dozens of games in which Niemann allegedly committed irregularities to win.
At 19 years old, and given the seriousness of the accusations, the American has seen how his before promising career as a future chess king It was blown up almost before it started. However, Niemann is not the only one who throughout history used evil arts to get on the fast track to success.
Lance Armstrong, cheating beyond doping
The famous American cyclist was stripped of his 7 Tours de France when he admitted to doping. However, he is not the only trap in Armstrong’s career: in 2021 he was accused of having raced with small engines on his bikes.
The gestures that, according to the French chronicler Antoine Vayer, would reveal the operation of a small engine on Lance Armstrong’s bicycles.
A switch under the saddle would turn on the 500W motor for extra oomph at key moments. pic.twitter.com/7F6VyAsYcg— Humberto Ortiz (@graffitiborrao) April 12, 2021
almost steel fists
In 1983, the American boxer Luis Resto starred in another of the most remembered scandals in the North American country. During a fight against Collins, he caused such exaggerated injuries that it was decided to investigate: he had fought with plaster reinforcement on his gloves.
Yo, Tonya
The case of the skaters, whose story was even made into a movie, is not so much a problem of cheating during the competition but rather a matter of very dirty play: Tonya’s entourage hired someone to try to break her rival’s leg and thus succeed in winning the 1994 national championship, which happened.
A highly questionable moral trap
In Spain we have also suffered some episode of sports shame, such as the one carried out by the Royal Spanish Federation of Sports for the Intellectually Disabled. It happened during the Sydney Games, when the great Spanish basketball team turned out to be a fraud: none of the components, except two, had a disability.
High technology in 1976
Boris Onischenko, a fencer from the former Soviet Union, went to the 1976 Montreal Olympics to try to make history. And boy did he do it. During a match, the judges detected that they were uploading hits to the scoreboard that the shooter had not made on his opponent – the points are marked by contact thanks to a sensor on the foil. Upon investigation, they discovered that he had a device to rig scores and was expelled.
THE MAGIC SWORD. In the 1976 Olympics, the Russian Boris Onischenko, favorite in Modern Pentathlon, was discovered an ingenious contraption is his sword that when pressing a button gave the signal of hit in his fencing matches. The Russian had just won silver in Munich. pic.twitter.com/XPvc1qosh3
— Tony Flores (@tonyfloresbbc) July 26, 2022
A marathon aboard the subway
Rosie Ruiz, a Cuban athlete, made history in 1980 by winning the Boston Marathon with a much shorter time than she had achieved in the neighboring New York Marathon. Quite a feat that she exalted her until her absence in graphic documents of the race raised her suspicions: she ended up showing that she had traveled a large part of the layout of the mythical test in the subway.
