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The Anti-Sports Personality of the Year awards 2019 | Simon Burnton


China’s orienteers … for losing their moral compass

The Military World Games may have received little publicity in Britain, which is not one of the 140 countries from Albania to Zimbabwe who participate but it was one of the year’s greatest festivals of sport, attracting nearly 10,000 participants to the Chinese city of Wuhan in October.

As well as the standard mainstream disciplines – athletics, volleyball, sailing, gymnastics and the like – there are four different kind of pentathlon (naval, military, modern and aeronautical, since you ask) and militarily-relevant events such as parachuting and orienteering, the last of which is where the real excitement happened.

In the first orienteering races – middle distance – Chinese women finished first, second and fourth, and one of their male competitors came second but some opponents felt something was awry.

An International Orienteering Federation investigation found “extensive cheating by the Chinese team”, who had “markings and small paths prepared for them which only they were aware of”. They also received help from spectators if they looked lost. China were disqualified from the rest of the orienteering competition, with the South China Morning Post brilliantly criticising the team for “losing its moral compass”.

Nick Kyrgios … for being No 1 bad boy again

A predictably headline-heavy year for Australia’s racket-wielding controversy-magnet. In February Rafael Nadal complained he “lacks a little respect for the public, for his rival and also for himself” after losing to a physio-bothering, underarm-serving Kyrgios in Acapulco (the Australian dismissed his opponent as “my polar opposite” and “super salty”), and when the rivalry resumed at Wimbledon Kyrgios not only prepared for the match with an evening in the nearby Dog & Fox pub, he then wound up the umpire – “Wow, you’ve got so much power up there” – did a bit more underarm serving and tried to thunder the ball into his opponent in a wildly aggressive manner – “The dude has got how many slams, how much money in the bank account? I think he can take a ball to the chest, bro.”

Also in this Kyrgios year: hurling a chair about and storming off court at the Italian Open, a £14,000 fine for mocking the umpire Fergus Murphy at Queen’s, and in Cincinnati a couple of months later a £100,000 fine for smashing two rackets during a bathroom break the umpire had refused him permission to take and then returning to court to call the official (Murphy again, as it happened) a “fucking tool”.

South Korea’s Under-18 football team … for putting a foot wrong

Readers may remember the Panda Cup, the annual (since 2014) youth football tournament held in the Chinese city of Chengdu, from England’s participation in 2018, when they finished second to China. This year China managed to retain the trophy in remarkable style – remarkable mainly because they lost all three of their games without scoring a goal. South Korea won their three matches, thumping the hosts 3-0 in their final fixture, and were duly presented with the trophy.

Fatefully in their celebrations one of the players, named in local media as Park Kyu-hyun, was pictured resting a foot on the pot (a photographer also claimed that one of the Koreans mimed urinating into it, but strangely given his profession could provide no evidence) and after a storm erupted on Weibo – one that, it must be said, seemed entirely out of keeping with the actual level of offence normally caused by someone cheerfully resting their foot on something – organisers took the opportunity to snatch the trophy back.

The victors’ behaviour, they insisted, was “not only an insult to the tournament but also to its participating teams, working staff and spectators”.

The young Koreans visited the local FA to do a lot of televised bowing and apologise to “all the people of China” for their “huge mistake” but nevertheless departed trophyless.

Kyle Stanley … for ‘hitting’ caddie’s mother

Kyle Stanley became the cartoon villain at the Open, where in a single round two wayward shots hit members of the public. On neither occasion, fatefully, did the American comply with traditional golfing etiquette by shouting “fore”, prompting his playing partner, Bob MacIntyre, to give him a mid-round dressing down. “Aye, there were harsh words,” MacIntyre said. “It wasn’t too pleasant but you’ve got to tell him it’s not right. He didn’t take it well at all. You know from the word go it’s going into the crowd. Just shout.”

Stanley refused to apologise, insisting someone else was taking care of the fore-shouting. “All I know is after I hit the ball it wasn’t but a couple of seconds when several people in the tee box started shouting fore,” he said. “I thought that was enough.” By cruel coincidence one of the people he hit was Stephanie, the mother of MacIntyre’s caddie. Still, Stanley was emphatically unrepentant. “He’s a young player and I’ve been out here a while,” he said. “I don’t feel I need to be schooled in the laws of golf.”

Also in this golf year, Sergio García was disqualified from the Saudi International for deliberately damaging several of the greens (“It’s not who I truly am. I am an emotional player and while I believe that’s one of my biggest strengths, it’s also one of my biggest flaws”) and England’s Eddie Pepperell was disqualified from the Turkish Airlines Open when he ran out of golf balls (“I thought he lost four or five,” said the watching Martin Kaymer. “I have never seen anything like that before”).

Igors Rausis … for reaching for the stars illegally

Careful analysis of chess results had led officials to “closely follow” Rausis, a 58-year-old whose results had improved to a startling extent at an age when most players are winding down. Their pursuit culminated in July when the Latvian-Czech grandmaster was discovered – and photographed – in the toilets during the Strasbourg Open clutching an illicit mobile phone. He was ranked 53rd in the world at the time, an impressive climb from the 2,518th position he held six years earlier, a ranking similar to that he had held for the previous decade.

Emil Sutovsky, the director-general of the International Chess Federation, said Rausis “has been caught red-handed”, while Rausis withdrew from the event, admitted he “simply lost my mind” and promptly retired.

Other cheating scandals in unexpected sports include a 10-pin bowler being stripped of Pan-American Games gold after failing a drugs test, the world’s No 1 bridge player, Geir Helgemo, testing positive for synthetic testosterone and a 17-year-old professional player of popular shooting-and-dancing sensation Fortnite getting a lifetime ban for the surreptitious use of automatic gun-aiming software.

Derby County … for Spygate and team-building dinners

English football has provided its usual hearty helping of scandal much of it involving Derby. It started a few days into the new year when the Championship club (then sixth in the table) discovered a binocular-toting individual in a Leeds tracksuit lurking outside their training ground before a crucial Championship match against the Elland Road side (then first).

Leeds issued a grudging apology – “We accept that, whilst we have not broken any specific rule, we have fallen short of the standard expected by the EFL with regards to regulation 3.4” – and were fined £200,000, apparently cleansing their reputation sufficiently for Fifa to give them a fair play award in September (for a separate incident, in a game against Aston Villa. “I thought it was irony at first. It was a strange decision,” sniffed Frank Lampard, now of Chelsea, who had been in charge of Derby at the time of the Spygate scandal).

Both clubs ended up losing in the play-offs. A year that started with someone monitoring their players too closely continued in September with nobody monitoring them closely enough, at a “team-building dinner” – football code for alcohol binge. “While the majority acted responsibly and left at around 8pm,” Derby said in a statement, “a small group continued drinking into the night. They also ignored the opportunity to be driven home using cars laid on by the club and chose to stay out.”

When they finally attempted to go home, Tom Lawrence smashed his Range Rover into Mason Bennett’s Mercedes (and then a lamppost), while in his back seat Richard Keogh, the Derby club captain, sustained a serious knee injury. Keogh was later sacked and Derby forced to pulp and reprint their 2020 calendar that had featured him as the pin-up for August.

In other news Leicester’s James Maddison, only days after being the subject of tabloid criticism for his use of a sartorially questionable £6,500 iridescent Luis Vuitton backpack (he countered it “would be worse turning up holding a Sun newspaper”), was banished from England’s squad to play the Czech Republic because of illness, so spent the night of the game in a casino instead. “He went to a casino on his own to sit and watch the second half by a poker table,” his manager, Brendan Rodgers, said. “The suggestions are he left England and then goes to a casino but that’s totally not the case at all.”



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