Sydney – Sports events at the international level witness a mixed bag of occurrences. Joyous moments of hard work being paid off in medals, emotional moments of missing out on the awards, and conspiracies involving fraud and cheating.
Today, let’s look back at the biggest and the lowest act of cheating committed on the world stage of the Paralympics.
In the 2000 Sydney Paralympics, Spain bagged the gold medal in Basketball by defeating Russia with a score of 87-63.
Tim basket Spanyol di Paralimpiade 2000
The 12-member team rejoiced and proudly wore the gold and accepted bouquets of flowers and appreciation.
However, behind all the pompous celebrations hid a callous con.
Carlos Ribagorda, an undercover journalist and one of the team members of the Spanish Basketball team, revealed the truth about the winning team upon arrival to their home base.
The players were able to participate in the Sydney Paralympics as they claimed to have Intellectual Disability (ID).
However, Carlos blew the whistle on the claim and published a story that said that out of the 12 players, only two were actually suffering from ID, while the other 10 had no disability at all.
Carlos also revealed that he was invited to play in the Spanish Paralympics, months before the event, despite having no disability by the Spanish Federation for Mentally Handicapped Sports.
And all he had to do to get selected in the team is do six-pushups, according to a report by MamaMia.
Carlos mentioned that during one of the qualifier matches, the team had scored more than 30 points during the first half.
As a result, the coach directed the team to not play so well to brush off any suspicion.
The fraud fired up a worldwide debate on the selection procedure of the Paralympians for sports like Basketball. The ruckus hit the roof when the committee banned the ID Paralympic sports for a decade until they could formulate a method to classify people with ID.
The ban was lifted in the 2012 London Paralympics. However, until then, it had destroyed many promising careers, leaving athletes with grief and misery.
In 2013, the former head of the Spanish Federation for Mentally Handicapped Sports, Fernando Martin Vicente, was found guilty of the fraud and was fined a sum of $7300 (around IDR105 million) and was ordered to return roughly $200,000 (around IDR2,8 billion) in government subsidies for the scandal.
