Steven Lynch
Fri 6 Aug 2004 20.51 EDT
With the stakes high and reputations - as well as fortunes - to be made, it is no surprise that occasionally Olympic combat turns from fair means to foul, as competitors look outside the rulebook for an advantage.
As early as 1900, there were accusations that the marathon winner, Michel Theato, used his knowledge as a baker's boy to take short-cuts through Paris. This was never proved - unlike the case of Fred Lorz, the first man home in St Louis in 1904, who admitted he'd spent half the race in a car.
Most of the games' early controversies, however, concerned the judging, which was often incompetent and sometimes blatantly biased. The low point came in London in 1908, with a rash of complaints about home-town decisions. In the 400m final (a race featuring three Americans and a lone Briton), a re-run was ordered after British Army officer Wyndham Halswelle was "obstructed" - the race was not then run in lanes. The three Americans refused to race again and Halswelle trotted through to win gold in a walkover.
Complaints about judging died down, although they never quite fade away - as late as 1980 there was a suggestion that Russian officials were opening the giant end doors of the Moscow stadium when it was their javelin throwers' turns, hoping the extra tailwind might assist the Soviet spears.
As the judging improved, rule-bending turned into gender-bending. Dora Ratjen, fourth in the women's high jump in Berlin in 1936, was actually a man called Hermann. And Stanislawa Walasiewicz, who won the women's 100m in Los Angeles in 1932, turned out on death to have had "primary male characteristics". Ironically, when Walasiewicz lost her title in Berlin in 1936, a fellow Pole wrongly accused the new champion, Helen Stephens, of being a man.
Rumours that some women were not made entirely of sugar and spice rumbled on through the 1950s. Then came the Ukrainian sisters, Tamara and Irina Press, who won five golds between them in 1960 and 1964, amid whispers that they had been injected with male hormones - or even that they did not need them as they were male to start with.
Compulsory sex-testing was introduced in the mid-1960s -and the Presses stopped. The first athlete to fail a sex test was Poland's Eva Klobukowska, who had won a sprint-relay gold and a 100m bronze in Tokyo in 1964.
Those early tests were not exactly scientific. Britain's Mary Peters, the 1972 pentathlon champion, remembers being "ordered to lie on the couch and pull my knees up. The doctors then proceeded to undertake an examination which, in modern parlance, amounted to a grope. Presumably they were looking for hidden testes. They found none and I left."
