10 Dirtiest Sports Athletes Caught Cheating
Sometimes, in a bid to get ahead of their rivals, athletes go to extreme lengths to come out on top. It didn't work out for these sports cheaters.
By their very nature, sports are competitive. Professional athlete's reputations depend on them winning - and winning big. However, in the digital age, everything is filmed and shared on social media on a mass scale. It makes you wonder how these professional players thought they could get away with some of the cheating tactics they've tried to deploy on the pitch. Here's our top ten.
1. Hitz and Misses
Marwin Hitz is the cheeky keeper who plays for German team; just before Cologne's Anthony Modeste stepped up to take the shot, Hitz dug his studded boots into the area around the penalty spot and twisted around several times for good measure. This subtly carried out move caused the pitch to be uneven, and Modeste tripped over as he struck for goal, missing entirely.
2. Pineda's Pine Tar Pitching
Pine tar is a banned substance for pitchers in baseball. Hitters can use it to get a firmer grip of the handle of the lumber, but for pitchers to do the same gives them an unfair advantage. Michael Pineda's excuse for applying a blatant patch of the substance to his neck was that he wanted to get a better grip on the ball so he didn't accidentally hit the opposition players... yeah right.
3. Tripping the Opposition
American football can be a dirty game, with at least one cheating scandal popping up every year. One particularly nasty example of this was when New York Jets coach Sal Alosi took it upon himself to stop Miami Dolphins player Nolan Carrol in his tracks. As the cornerback runs along the sideline, Alosi sticks out his knee and foot, causing Carrol to plummet to the ground.
4. Violence on Ice
One of the most infamous cheating scandals in history is the hit-man attack of Nancy Kerrigan by members of Nancy Harding's entourage. Jeff Gillooly, her ex-husband and Shawn Eckhart, her bodyguard at the time, hired Shane Stant to break the legs of angelic skating rival, Kerrigan. The attempt was botched and saw Kerrigan escape with nothing worse than bad bruising. Thankfully, she qualified for the Olympic team that the conniving men had tried to sabotage her from taking part in.
5. Joe Niekro's Nail File
Minnesota Twins pitcher Joe Niekro who was caught red-handed. Using sandpaper on a ball alters the way it cuts through the air and makes it much more difficult for a hitter to get a good strike. Match officials thought something fishy was going on and asked Niekro to empty his pockets. A nail file and sandpaper went flying into the air as he made a lame attempt to evade being caught. He even tried to claim he only had the items in his pocket to keep his nails trim - sure thing Joe.
6. The Bad Name of Badminton
At the 2012 London Olympics, one of the biggest scandals was the way certain teams played to lose as a means of fixing which opponents they went up against. Throwing matches like this has become commonplace among Chinese teams. It's led to other competitors, including Indonesia and South Korea, to follow suit. Spectators have responded with fury at the way genuine gameplay was sacrificed.
7. Dive-id Luiz
In soccer, diving is one of the main ways players cheat. With at least one dive per match and no way of being able to spot a genuine fall from a theatrical enactment, it's genuinely rife in the game. In one match against Burnley, Chelsea player David Luiz dives and then proudly grins at the camera as he lays on the ground.
8. Sticky Balls
In a tense basketball match, Houston Rockets center Dwight Howard was caught using Stickum on the ball to try and throw off the opposition. When Atlanta Hawks player Paul Millsap went to take a shot, he instantly noticed something was wrong.
9. Boxing Glove Brutality
In a fight between Billy Collins and Luis Resto that went down in the history books for all the wrong reasons, Resto and his coach replaced the padded lining of his boxing gloves with plaster. Collins carried on throughout the entire 10 rounds, sustaining life-changing injuries that signaled the end of his career.
10. The Hand of God
Perhaps the most notorious instant of cheating in the history of sports - especially for English fans - was when Diego Maradonna handballed the winning goal in the 1986 world cup quarter-final. Despite protests from the England team, the referee declared the goal legal, and England lost their place in the next round.
