Tennis this week joined the roster of major sports being played under the shadow of corruption allegations. So where should the ethical sports lover turn? Are there any “clean” sports left? Let’s try to find one …
Curling
It is hard to believe, but curling is a sport awash with allegations of cheating. Players have occasionally been upbraided for giving a stone a nudge with their foot, but the real issue is “dumping” – brushing the ice in front of a stone in such a way that you throw up debris and cause it to slow down.
Golf
The American golfer Bobby Jones, when asked why he had declared a penalty on himself in the 1925 US Open for a tiny infringement no one else had seen, said: “You might as well praise me for not robbing a bank.” But it seems robbers do now roam the greens. In 2011, a survey of 50 PGA tour caddies revealed half had witnessed instances of cheating, such as moving the ball closer to the hole after marking a putt.
Snooker
Like all one-on-one sports, this is relatively easy to fix. All it takes is one player to be in hock to gamblers, and the latter can make a killing. In 2013, for example, former top 10 player Stephen Lee was banned for 12 years for match-fixing.
Fencing
Still trying to live down the infamous Onishchenko affair at the 1976 Olympics. In the fencing stage of the modern pentathlon, the Ukrainian-born Boris Onishchenko, competing for the Soviet Union, rigged his épée so it would signal a hit on his opponent without any contact having been made. He was rumbled, thrown out of the Games, sacked from the Red Army and was last heard of driving a taxi in Kiev.
Bowls
Even lawn bowls has been besmirched by allegations of match-fixing. In 2009, a New Zealand team was accused of throwing a match against Thailand in order to get a more favourable draw in the quarter-finals. The players denied the allegations, but were disciplined by Bowls New Zealand.
Bridge
Forget sport, then. How about games? Still no luck, as it turns out. The bridge world is in uproar after a series of allegations of cheating made against several of the top pairs in the world. The accusations, which concern using coded signals to transmit the nature of your hand to your partner, are still under investigation, though one leading pair has owned up to an unspecified “ethical violation”.
Chess
A chess app is now stronger than any human, and there have been several instances of cheating in tournaments. The most serious concerned French grandmaster Sebastien Feller, who in 2010 was found to have cheated in the Chess Olympiad by using two accomplices to feed him computer-generated moves. He was banned for three years but, to the dismay of some of his rivals, has now returned to competitive chess.
It seems that finding anything truly “clean” is well-nigh impossible. Anyone for Monopoly – but do you mind if I’m banker?
