When sports figures fall from grace
It seems people love to read about athletes who have committed a crime or participated in illicit or sordid activities. This is one reason why whenever a story breaks about an athlete who has done something wrong, it gets a huge amount of media coverage.
The recent example of Tiger Woods and his sordid affairs is a prime example. People in the sports world have done some pretty stupid things over the years, and these usually get front page coverage. We love to see a famous person fall from grace, and that is why we gobble up every little morsel of information about a dodgy sports star that comes our way. From the sublime to the ridiculous, it seems people in the sports world have done some really crazy things.
This brings up an interesting question: do athletes commit more crimes than the general public? Well, it seems they do not. The criminal trend in society seems to reflect pretty accurately the criminal cases we find in the world of sports. In the general population, usually less than one percent of people commit crimes and are locked up for them. This trend is the same in sports; in America, which has about 3600 professional athletes, about thirty of them commit crimes every year.
We only hear more about the sports stars and their scandals because they feature so heavily in the media. One reason we love to find out everything about famous people is for that very reason, that they are famous. They seem to have fantastic lives, drive expensive cars, live in luxurious homes and are very rich. When someone like that falls from grace and does something dodgy, we all want to hear about it. It is because of this that it seems as if a lot of crimes are committed in sports, when in actuality, the same number of crimes proportionately can be found in sports as in the general public.
Continuing with the strange sports scandals and the crazy things sports stars and people connected to the world of sports have done, we find that the list is almost endless. Stories from horseracing, football, basketball, baseball, and almost every other sport show us that people do stupid things no matter if they are athletes or anyone else.
A story emerged many years ago about a racehorse called Flockton Grey.
In 1982, this racehorse won a race at the Leicester Racecourse by 20 lengths. This margin was so large that an enquiry was called and it was found that the owner of the horse, Ken Richardson, had switched the two year old horse with a seasoned three year old one. The dodgy owner had also bet on his own horse to win the championship. Richardson was banned from racing but then ended up becoming the manager of a football club. He was later found to have set the club on fire in order to claim insurance money. Some people never change, and it is a wonder how he got the job as the manager of a football club with his dodgy record. Another strange scandal comes to us from the world of the Paralympics. The Spanish Paralympic basketball team went and won gold at the 2000 Paralympic Games. It was later found out that 10 out of the 12 members of the team had no disability to speak of. They were claimed to have IQs of less than 85, but, when tested, turned out to be normal.
As long as there is money in sports and the desire to win is so great, some dodgy characters will do anything to get ahead in the game. We will continue to find examples of these types of strange cases wherever we look. It is not limited to any one sport and is pretty much universal. This, it seems, is something we will have to live with and just move on and continue to enjoy sports as best as we can.
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