Olympic Games scandals and controversies

The Olympic Games is a major international multi-sport event. During its history, both the Summer and Winter Games have been a subject of scandals and controversies, including the use of performance enhancing drugs.

Some countries have boycotted the Games on various occasions, either as a protest against the International Olympic Committee or to protest racial discrimination in or the contemporary politics of other participants. After both World Wars, the defeated countries were not invited. Other controversies include doping programs, decisions by referees and gestures made by athletes.

Summer Olympics

1908 Summer Olympics – London, England, United Kingdom

* Grand Duchy of Finland competed separately from the Russian Empire, but was not allowed to display the Finnish flag.
* In the men's 400 metres, American winner John Carpenter was disqualified for blocking British athlete Wyndham Halswelle in a manoeuvre that was legal under American rules but prohibited by the British rules under which the race was run. As a result of the disqualification, a second final race was ordered. Halswelle was to face the other two finalists William Robbins and John Taylor, but both were from the United States and decided not to contest the repeat of the final to protest the judges' decision. Halswelle was thus the only medallist in the 400 metres, a race which became the only walkover victory in Olympic history. Taylor later ran on the Gold medal-winning U.S. team for the now-defunct Medley Relay, becoming the first African American medallist.

1912 Summer Olympics – Stockholm, Sweden

* American athlete Jim Thorpe was stripped of his gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon after it was learned that he had played professional minor league baseball three years earlier. In solidarity, the decathlon silver medalist, Hugo Wieslander, refused to accept the medals when they were offered to him. The gold medals were restored to Thorpe's children in 1983, 30 years after his death.

1916 Summer Olympics (not held due to World War I)

* The 1916 Summer Olympics were to have been held in Berlin, German Empire, but were cancelled because of the outbreak of World War I.

1920 Summer Olympics – Antwerp, Belgium

* Budapest had initially been selected over Amsterdam and Lyon to host the Games, but as the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been a German ally in World War I, the French-dominated International Olympic Committee transferred the Games to Antwerp in April 1919.
* Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, and Turkey were not invited to the Games, being the successor states of the Central Powers which were defeated in World War I.

1924 Summer Olympics – Paris, France

* Germany was again not invited to the Games.

1932 Summer Olympics – Los Angeles, California, United States

* Nine-time Finnish Olympic gold medallist Paavo Nurmi was found to be a professional athlete and barred from running in the Games. The main orchestrators of the ban were the Swedish officials that were the core of the IOC bureaucracy, including IOC president Sigfrid Edström, who claimed that Nurmi had received too much money for his travel expenses. Nurmi did, however, travel to Los Angeles and kept training at the Olympic Village. Despite pleas from all the other entrants of the marathon, he was not allowed to compete at the Games. This incident, in part, led to Finland refusing to participate in the traditional Finland-Sweden athletics international annual event until 1939.
* After winning the silver in equestrian dressage, Swedish rider Bertil Sandström was demoted to last for clicking to his horse to win encouragement. He asserted that it was a creaking saddle making the sounds.

1936 Summer Olympics – Berlin, Germany

*In 1931 the IOC selected the German capital city Berlin as the host city of the 1936 Summer Olympics. However, following Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933, the plans for the Olympic Games became entangled with the politics of the Nazi regime. Hitler regarded the event as 'his' Olympics and sought to exploit the Games for propaganda purposes, with the aim of showcasing the post-First World War Germany. In 1936, a number of prominent politicians and organizations called for a boycott of the Summer Olympics, while other campaigners called for the games to be relocated.
*Lithuania was not invited by Germany due to the Memelland/Klaipėda region controversy.
*The Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic decided to boycott the Berlin Games entirely and, together with labour and socialist groups around the world, organized an alternative event, the People's Olympiad. The event did not take place however; just as the Games were about to begin the Spanish Civil War broke out and the People's Olympiad was cancelled.
*In the United States, there was considerable debate about boycotting the Games. A leading advocate of a boycott was U.S. athlete Ernest Lee Jahncke, the son of a German immigrant, who was an IOC member.
*International concern surrounded the ruling German National Socialists' ideology of racial superiority and its application at an international event such as the Olympics. In 1934 Avery Brundage undertook a visit to Germany to investigate the treatment of Jews. When he returned, he reported, "I was given positive assurance in writing ... that there will be no discrimination against Jews. You can't ask more than that and I think the guarantee will be fulfilled." In the event, a number of record-holding German athletes were excluded from competing at Berlin for being racially undesirable, including Lilli Henoch, Gretel Bergmann

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