Olympics: the bizarre and the beautiful
For all its glamour, its prestige, its superstars, the sporting excellence and the corporate sponsors, the Olympic Games has also delivered its fair share of bizarre athletes and incident. We look back at some of the more colourful, headline-hitting characters and occurrences that have graced the Olympics over the years
Going it alone
The Games of the I Olympiad were held in Athens in 1896. Lasting ten days and staging only nine events, the inaugural spectacle was an all-male affair. Women were not allowed to compete. But one head-strong lady wasn't going to let that deter her.
Enter Stamata Revithi. She was desperate to take part in the long-distance race. Denied by the event organisers, as a gesture of protest, Revithi ran the race alone the next day, taking five hours to complete the course. The crowd soon warmed to her and subsequently gave her the nickname Melpomene, after the Greek muse of tragedy.
No pay, no play
At the 1932 Summer Games held in Los Angeles, only 24 members of Brazil's Olympic team of 69 actually competed!
Brazil was so poor from the Great Depression that the only way it could get the athletes to the USA was to pack them on to a barge with 25 tons of coffee to sell at ports along the way. Not as adept in sales, the team only managed to sell $24 worth of coffee and the United States required a $1 head tax per person entering the country.
The only hope of getting the whole team ashore rested on the Brazilian consulate in San Francisco, who sent out a courier with a cheque written out for the equivalent of $45, but by the time the courier arrived in L.A. the Brazilian currency devalued so much that the cheque was only worth $17. To add insult to injury, the cheque bounced!
Gender benders
Tamara and Irana Press, two sisters, won five track and field Olympic gold medals for the Soviet Union and set 26 world records in Rome (1960) and Tokyo (1964). They were a formidable duo who won almost everything that there was to win.
However, after gender verification for all international sporting events was made compulsory in 1968, both women vanished from the sporting stage. It was said of both sisters that their gender could not be determined. Some even thought that they might be hermaphrodites; still another opinion was that they were being injected with male hormones in order to make them stronger. Tabloids called them the 'Press Brothers'.
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