Other Crap

Olympic Villains, Creeps, and Cheaters

My personal favorite of the ones that affected competitive results: R. Willam Jones, the Italian official who came down from the stands to overrule the officials in a basketball final - even though he had no right to do so! You have to admire a guy so flagrantly and unrepentantly corrupt! He browbeat the officials, and they kept on replaying the end of the game until Russia was able to win.

It was clearly an improper action, irrespective of the merits of the call itself, simply because he had no more authority over a game in progress than any other spectator! Imagine Bud Selig sitting in the stands of a Brewers home game, with the Brewers a run behind in the bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, two outs, full count. Ryan Braun lets one go by, the ump calls it a strike, ending the game, but Selig rushes onto the field and changes the call to a ball. The ump, intimidated, shrugs his shoulders, calls it a ball, the tying run is forced in by the walk, and the Brewers go on to win. You think that sounds ridiculous? That's almost exactly parallel to what happened!

At the end of the game, referee Renato Righetto (from neutral Brazil) refused to sign the official scoring sheet in an act of protest. Righetto said the game was "completely irregular, and outside the rules of the game of basketball".

Jones knew his action would be appealed, and he knew he would win in appeal. Why? Cold War politics. If he had come out of the stands with a six-gun and shot the American starters and the coach to prevent them from winning, the panel would have upheld his actions on a 3-2 vote. Those three people on the appeals panel were from Soviet bloc countries - people who might have spent the rest of their lives being "re-educated" if they had voted any other way!

There was one impartial judge on the appeals panel, an Italian, Jones's own countryman. He voted to overrule his paisano, as would have anyone evaluating the situation objectively.