With the Olympics half over, it's fun to reflect on the history of the modern games, and how long it has left to live before the Olympic movement is tragically crushed beneath the weight of its own success when a member of the German Full Contact Tiddlywinks team goes on a roid-rampage through the athlete's village in 2024 and extinguishes the sacred flame of Olympicness. It's kind of hard to want to keep competing after seeing something like that. Trust me. Everybody goes back home, and decides to compete the old fashion way again: war.

This isn't actually a Top 10, because choosing the most controversial incidents in something as convoluted and wacky as the Olympics is like choosing the spiders with the most legs. So instead, these are just in chronological order. How big or important they really were in the grand scheme of things is up to.....well, just read them and see.

First, a little history: The Greek games began in 776 BC as a competition among amateur athletes from different city states to promote health, fairplay, community wellbeing and entertainment in an apolitical setting. Slowly over the cneturies subtle corruption, bribery, blackmail, political tampering, cheating, rank dishonesty and professionalism seeped into the Games, and in 394 AD they were abolished because they had become a parody of the amateur ideal, a focus of corruption and a source of heated political tension.

The modern Olympic Games were established in 1896 as a competition among amateur athletes from different nation states to promote health, fairplay, community wellbeing and entertainment in an apolitical setting.

What took the Greeks a thousand years to do, we have done in less than one hundred. One thing the Greeks had no problems with, however, was the wholesale consumption of illicit substances for performance enhancement. So the Games aren't all that bad.

This article is huge, so I've broken it up into 10 parts:
10. 1912: Jim Thorpe, professional athlete
9. 1936: Jesse Owens PWNS Adolf Hitler
8. 1968: Black Panther salute
7. 1972: Them terrorist sons o' bitches
6. 1972: US basketball team gets robbed
5. 1980/1984: Communists and Capitalists trade boycotts
4. 1988: Korean boxing fix
3. 1988: Ben Johnson
2. 1994: Tonya Harding vs. Nancy Kerrigan
1. 2002: Pairs figure skating

To read them sequentially, follow the button: