On Tuesday night the BBC will honour the heroes. But here are the year’s best dark, devious and downright dumb sporting stories
It has been something of an annus horribilis for Xiangqi, the ancient sport known in the west as Chinese chess. Its troubles started a year ago, on the very day that last year’s anti-Spoty shortlist was published, when Yan Chenglong secured victory in the National Chinese Chess King tournament and headed to his hotel room with a few friends to celebrate.
As a result of what took place over the following hours he was to be stripped of his title, with the Chinese Xiangqi Association announcing the results of their investigation on Christmas Day.
“Yan consumed alcohol with others in his room on the night of the 17th,” they wrote in a statement, “and then he defecated in the bathtub of the room he was staying in on the 18th, in an act that damaged hotel property, violated public order and good morals, had a negative impact on the competition and the event of Xiangqi, and was of extremely bad character.”
On the plus side, they had found no evidence to support internet-based theories that Yan had been cheating during the event itself using a hidden communication device. “Based on our understanding of the situation,” they wrote, “it is currently impossible to prove that Yan engaged in cheating via ‘anal beads’.”
Yan later explained that for him it had been more of an anus horribilis: he had been suffering from diarrhoea, had been forced to decorate the bath after failing to reach the toilet, and had intended to clean up but left to catch a plane instead.
Shockingly, the sport of Xiangqi had not yet reached the bottom.
In September the CXA was back in the headlines, announcing that Wang Tianyi, the world’s top-ranked player for 11 unbroken years and in the eyes of many the greatest of all time, and his Hangzhou teammate Wang Yuefei, grandmaster since 2013, had been banned for life after being found to have conspired “for a long time” to fix matches.
Chinese sport is trying to deal with a widespread corruption problem, with this announcement coming just nine days after the Chinese FA announced that 43 players and officials, including three former internationals, had been banned for life for match-fixing along with another 17 for five years, and the month after their own vice-president had been sentenced to 11 years in prison for taking bribes.
Canada Soccer sent their women’s team to the Olympics as defending champions; they emerged from it promising to “change into a federation that Canadians trust and are proud of”, after it emerged that, not only had they attempted to spy on their opponents in Paris using drones, but they’d been doing it for ages.
This time they were rumbled by a security service that during the Games intercepted an average of six drones a day, most of them – according to the then prime minister, Gabriel Attal – flown by “individuals, maybe tourists wanting to take pictures”.
Attal boasted of “systems in place that allow us to very quickly intercept [them] and arrest their operators”, and the person controlling Canada’s as it monitored a New Zealand training session before their opening game of the tournament swiftly got his drone confiscated and a suspended eight-month prison sentence.
Meanwhile the Canadian Olympic Committee sent home an assistant coach and an analyst, while their British coach, Bev Priestman, made clear both that she wanted “to take accountability”, and to make clear that “by no means did I direct the individuals”.
David Shoemaker, the COC’s chief executive, said he had been “persuaded by the fact that Bev Priestman had no involvement, no knowledge” but changed his mind after an investigation. Priestman was suspended pending a review, which ended with her sacking in November.
In the end the spying was not just hugely destructive but completely unnecessary: New Zealand were completely rubbish, and Canada good enough to progress to the knockout rounds despite being stripped of six points (whereupon they promptly lost).
Camille Herron is an extraordinary athlete. Already a multiple world record holder, in March she took part in a six-day endurance race in California during which she broke records for 300 miles, 400 miles, 500 miles, 500km, 600km, 700km, 800km and 900km, as well as three-, four-, five- and six-day distances.
By the end she had covered the 4.1km course 220 times, her total distance of 901.76km breaking a 34-year-old record by 18.129km, an awe-inspiring feat.
Then her husband went back to his hobby, of editing the Wikipedia pages of her most high-profile rivals as well as her own.
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The first edit after that six-day race involved removing, among other things, the phrase “widely regarded as one of the world’s best trail runners” from the pages of Kílian Jornet and Courtney Dauwalter, who are widely regarded as two of the world’s best trail runners, on the grounds that it was “puffery”. Herron’s entry, meanwhile, was amended to add that she was, ahem, “widely regarded as one of the greatest ultramarathon runners of all time”.
In September Canadian Running magazine published details of the activity, which also included adding to her own entry words and phrases such as “legendary”, “prestigious” and “steely toughness”, leading to Herron being dropped by Lululemon, the Canadian clothing brand that organised her six-day race.
Herron’s husband, Conor Holt, has since taken full responsibility for the edits to Herron’s own Wikipedia page, which he insisted had been made in response to others “editing out significant parts of her life”, without mentioning the changes to her rivals’.
Meanwhile in September the Dane Stine Rex, who earlier this year described Herron as “amazing and totally crazy and a big inspiration”, beat her six-day mark but that record, like Rex’s time in beating Herron’s 48-hour record in May, and Japan’s Miho Nakata in beating Herron’s 24-hour record last year, all remain unratified because of various complaints made, apparently by Herron, about the conduct of those races.
Trishul Cherns, the president of the Global Organisation of Multi-day Marathoners, told Canadian Running magazine: “In my 46 years of ultrarunning I’ve never seen anyone as talented as Camille, who is so dedicated to creating division and animosity within the ultrarunning community.”
Russia’s basketball team, banned from the Olympics because of the country’s war in Ukraine, found themselves wanting to keep sharp with a bit of top-level international action. Christian David Mosquera Durán, a Colombian studying architecture in Kazan, was missing his friends from home. Russia’s team decided the answer to their problem would be to invite a few international sides to a tournament of their own, to be played in Perm; Durán decided the answer to his problem would be to intercept one of the invitations, and use it to fly some mates over.
Quite how he achieved this remains uncertain – the Colombian basketball federation insisted they had never been offered a place in the tournament, Russia’s that “all communications were carried out through official channels” – but in the fallout the first letter sent, on headed paper, to the Russians from a man identifying himself as the president of the Colombian federation was published.
“We gladly accept the conditions offered,” it read, “including accommodation in a 4-5 star hotel, full board for our delegation of 20 members, and flights from Bogotá to Perm and back.” It requested all further communication be sent to Durán’s personal gmail address.
A few weeks later the team arrived, and played the local club side Parma on the first day of the tournament; after the first quarter they trailed 41-2, and though they recovered to score 53 points they still lost by 102. “We just arrived and thought the difference would be even bigger,” said their coach, Jorge Vasquez.
Most of the Colombian players turned out to be decidedly amateur: Durán sometimes turned out in the third division of a 3×3 league in Kazan; another team member is an engineer who runs a basketball blog; Vasquez was actually a real basketball coach, but for a Colombian girls’ school.
Organisers promptly “reviewed the schedule and the format to ensure a more balanced and competitive tournament” (in other words, they sent the Colombians home).
In other fake team news, an 11-person Ghanaian paralympic squad arrived in Norway for a marathon in April; none turned up for the race, the coach died in an Oslo hospital three days later, another member was arrested while trying to get into Sweden, the other nine remain at large.
