Olympic Cheats And Skullduggery

I don't know how well publicised it has been but the Olympics are just around the corner so we can look forward to glorious triumph, heroic failure and honest athletes pushing themselves to the physical limit. Well, most of the time that is because past Olympics have shown us that there will also be a little skullduggery and cheating.
Cheating can never be condoned but you do have to have a little smile at what some of the past contestants got up to, like the 1904 marathon winner, Fred Lorz, who spent 11 miles of the race in a car.
To so blatantly cheat does take some large cojones and nobodies cojones were as large as the woman who came fourth in the 1936 high jump who turned out to be a man called Hermann. The Ukrainian sisters, Tamara and Irina Press, won five golds between them in 1960 and 1964 but such was the concern over their manly appearance and physique, compulsory sex-testing was introduced and the Presses promptly announced their retirement from sport.
In 1976 the Russian modern pentathlete, Boris Onischenko, was found to have rigged his fencing sword to register non-existent hits by rigging a switch in his swords handle that allowed him to score points.
Even the Paralympics has known scandal with 10 of the 12 players on the Spaniards gold medal-winning Paralympic basketball team turned out not be disabled at all and had their golds medals stripped but of course the biggest scandals now revolve around drug taking and the competitors gaining a chemical advantage but even when they get caught they have delivered some cracking excuses.
Usually it is diet supplement or a cold remedy that is blamed but when Olympic women's heavyweight judo champion, Judoka Tong Wen, was caught taking performance enhancing drugs, she blamed eating too many pork chops from pigs that had been treated with steroids.
Daniel Plaza Montero, a Spanish race walker won the 20 km walk at the 1992 Summer Olympics then tested positive for the steroid nandrolone and claimed the test result was due to oral sex with his pregnant wife the day before.
My all time favourite excuse goes to LaShawn Merritt who won gold in 2008 at the Beijing Olympics but was suspended after failing three consecutive tests straight after.
Merritt's embarrassing excuse was that he had been on a course of penis enhancement pills. Embarrassingly brilliant and we can only hope that if there are any tiny todgered athletes competing this time around, they use the socks down the shorts method of padding.