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The Times attempts to list the top 50 sporting scandals of all times and surprisingly enough Barry Bonds isn’t even in the top 10. Michel Vick not in the top 20. Perhaps a bit of English bias (plainly evident in this phrase: “Diego Maradona, the cheating swine”), but their number 1 dwarfs them in terms of real world significance.

Basil D Oliveira, 1968

The Cape Coloured cricketer, one of the most gifted players of his day, emigrated to England in 1960 because he was not allowed to play for his native South Africa on the grounds of race. In 1966, he was selected for England, being named one of Wisden’s five cricketers of the year in 1967. But controversy hit the following year when he made a match-winning score of 158 – and took a crucial wicket – at the Oval against Australia and yet was still left out of the winter tour of South Africa.

Political pressure not to include him had been put on the MCC by the South African Government, yet under massive public outcry the England selectors relented and called him up, at which point South Africa cancelled the tour. This was seen as the beginning of the sporting boycott of apartheid, yet it was also a tragedy that D’Oliveira, whose international career did not begin until he was 35, was not able to fulfil his immense talent. The treatment of him is cricket – and sport’s – greatest scandal

Sports as a catalyst for social change is nothing new as we know with the desegregation of pro sports in the 1950’s and Muhammad Ali’s draft rejection, but use as a tool in world politics? 1968 saw a lot of that, as well as the following years with various Olympic boycotts (No. 34 on the list).

The funniest entry by far was #23

Rosie Ruiz, 1980

Ruiz, a Cuban émigré, apparently won the Boston Marathon with a record time, until witnesses came forward saying that she had only joined the race in the last mile. “I got up with a lot of energy this morning,” was her explanation for why she had shaved 25 minutes off the time she ran in the New York Marathon six months earlier. Then it turned out she had taken the Subway for part of that race, too

Did she really think she could get away with that one? Really?

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