For all its glamour and prestige, the Olympics has also delivered its fair share of colorful personalities and bizarre incidents over the years. Here, we look back at some of the athletes and occurrences that have made headlines—and raised eyebrows—at the Olympic Games.



Going it alone

The Games of the I Olympiad were held in Athens in 1896. Lasting 10 days and staging only nine events, the inaugural spectacle was an all-male affair. Women were not allowed to compete. But one headstrong 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 organizers, 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.

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 U.S. was to pack them on a barge with 25 tons of coffee to sell at ports along the way. The U.S. required a $1 head tax per person entering the country, but the team, apparently not as adept at sales as at athletics, managed to sell only $24 worth of coffee. The only hope of getting the whole team ashore rested on the Brazilian consulate in San Francisco, who sent out a courier with a check written out for the equivalent of $45. By the time the courier arrived in L.A., however, the Brazilian currency devalued so much that the check was only worth $17. To add insult to injury, the check bounced!

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 thought they might be hermaphrodites; another opinion was that they were being injected with male hormones in order to make them stronger. The tabloids called them the "Press Brothers."

South African-born runner Zola Budd was a revelation when she came to the sport. As a teenager, she twice broke the world record in the women's 5,000 meters, and twice was the women's winner at the World Cross Country Championships. The most extraordinary aspect of her running was that she always trained and raced barefoot. However, while representing Great Britain at the 1984 Games, Budd collided with U.S. contender Mary Decker during the women's 3000 meter track final. The American stumbled and fell onto the infield, unable to continue. The partisan crowd began jeering at Budd, who was leading at the time. She reacted by falling back to a 7th-place finish.

At the 1972 Games held in Munich, Frank Shorter, Munich-born but representing the U.S., won the Olympic marathon, but not before facing the most bizarre reception. As Shorter was nearing the stadium, a German student wearing a track uniform emerged from the sidelines and joined the race for the last quarter-mile as a joke. Outrageously, he entered the stadium and ran partway around the track. Thinking he was the winner, the crowd began cheering him. Arriving seconds later, Shorter was perplexed to see someone ahead of him, and what's more, had to run to the finishing line enduring the boos and catcalls directed at the prankster!

At the 1976 Games in Montreal, Japanese gymnast Shun Fujimoto competed with a broken right knee and helped win the gold medal for the Japanese team! Fujimoto broke his leg on the floor exercise portion of the discipline. He could have pulled out, but due to the closeness in the overall standings with the USSR, he decided to hide the seriousness of the injury. With a broken knee, Fujimoto dug deep and somehow managed to complete his event on the rings, performing a perfect triple somersault dismount while maintaining perfect posture. Ouch! Unbelievably, he secured gold for Japan.

American athlete Florence Griffith-Joyner, also known lovingly as Flo-Jo, was a silver medalist in the 200-meter race at the 1984 L.A. Games. However, she gained much more attention and was courted by the media because of her natural beauty and her extremely long and colorful fingernails. Although she was considered a shoe-in on the U.S. relay team in the same year, officials denied her a spot because they considered her 6-inch fingernails to be too long and dangerous for passing the baton. There was no way Flo-Jo would put a nail clipper to those beauties.

American diver Greg Louganis, already a double Olympic champion in the 3-meter and 10-meter diving events (1984 Games), repeated this extraordinary achievement at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, although this time it was not without incident... During the preliminary rounds, Louganis miscalculated a dive and cracked his head on the diving board while performing a reverse 2 1/2 pike. Despite suffering a horrible cut and concussion, he completed the preliminaries, then went on to repeat the dive during the finals with near-perfect scores, earning him the gold medal.

Although it began without incident, the men's marathon event at the 2004 Summer Olympics later took a turn for the bizarre. During the final quarter of the race, an Irish protester appeared from nowhere and pushed race leader Vanderlei de Lima of Brazil into the crowds. A shocked de Lima managed to pick himself up and carry on racing, though he lost about 15 to 20 seconds of his running time and struggled to regain his rhythm. He finished third in the event, robbed of what until then seemed like a definite gold.

Oscar Pistorius is a South African Paralympic runner. Known as the "Blade Runner" and "the fastest man on no legs," Pistorius runs with the aid of artificial limbs made of carbon fiber that look like frog's legs. In 2007, Pistorius raced in his first international able-bodied competitions. However, his artificial lower legs generated claims that he has an unfair advantage over able-bodied runners. The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) has since ruled him ineligible for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Pistorius appealed the IAAF decision.