[Another article I pitched to a few places that went nowhere. Enjoy!]
Say what you will about the Olympics, there’s something inherently noble about them. Their insistence on only using amateur athletes prevents the games from becoming another cash-driven, gladiatorial prickfest, and the dedication to lesser-known sports gives people a chance to shine when they would normally be ignored.
Granted, there are always things to complain about, like travel chaos, media saturation and the near bankruptcy of almost every city that stages them…
…but nonetheless, the Olympic games provide a noble, upstanding example of what humanity is capable of at its best.
Or at least, it does until these assholes show up.
Whether through incompetence, inexperience or just plain shitty sportsmanship, these are the worst Olympians in history...
Eric Moussambani:
Eric “The Eel” Moussambani was a product of that brief and under-reported period in sporting history where the Olympic committee decided to team up with the estate of Roald Dahl.
Eric won his entry to the games via a magic ticket, and if you think that’s an exaggeration, no, it actually happens.
Hailing from Equatorial Guinea, Eric decided that his sport of choice was going to be swimming. “Decided” in this case means he took up the sport eight months before the games, and did all of his training in a hotel swimming pool.
It would be great to report that Eric’s plucky spirit and “can do” attitude held him in good stead, but there’s only so far that ambition can carry you, especially when the only time you’ve ever seen an Olympic sized pool in your life is immediately before you jump into it.
Eric managed the men’s freestyle 100m in a sedentary one minute and fifty-two seconds, which, it’s worth noting, was still slower than the pros could swim twice that distance.
Eric Moussambani was to swimming what Courtney Cox is to pie eating contests. He was less comfortable in an Olympic pool than the Wicked Witch of the West. He had all the grace and agility of cats having sex, and moved at the speed of elderly nail-growth.
He wasn't a great swimmer, all told.
Rather than fade from consciousness, Eric "The Eel" Moussambani stuck around, and things didn’t turn out too badly in the end. Despite posting much-improved training times (due to, y’know, actually having experience at swimming now) a visa problem kept him out of the following Olympics in Athens, but he did go on to success as, of course, the swimming coach for the entire national team of Equatorial Guinea.
Andarin Carvajal:
Andarin Carvajal was a Cuban runner at the turn of the twentieth century whose chief goal in life was to run an Olympic marathon.
Born dirt poor, Carvajal would stay that way his entire life, but in 1904 he literally begged on the streets until he could scrounge enough money for a ticket to America and, he hoped, glory.
Arriving in St. Louis, Carvajal would actually become part of one of the most farcical races in human history; the winner of the 1904 marathon would later admit that he gave up after nine miles and caught a lift in a car which - ironically - broke down at the nineteen mile mark itself.
With the first man to finish now stripped of his title, Thomas Hicks was declared the winner, even though he nearly died after being dragged over the line by his trainers, insensible from a combination of strychnine and brandy. These were what passed for diet supplements in those days, and it took a team of doctors to keep Hicks from flatlining in the stadium.
If anyone is thinking how pitiful these guys look in comparison to modern super-runners, bear in mind that this was the first Olympic marathon to include black African athletes, one of whom, Len Tau, was a hot favourite to win until he was chased for a mile by an angry dog and lost his way.
Where does all this leave Andarin Carvajal?
Asleep under a tree.
See, if there was one thing Andarin loved, it was running. But if there was something he loved more than that, it was free apples.
Half way through the race, he decided that he was hungry and snuck off to steal some apples from an orchard.
The apples proved over-ripe, causing a tummy ache, and so Andarin - no bullshit - decided to take a nap in the middle of the race until he felt better.
Olympic dreams are great, and all, but hey. Free apples.
Impressively, and probably due to a lack of angry dogs and strychnine, he still placed 4th.
Jung-Il Byun:
Jung-Il Byun, a bantamweight boxer at the Seoul Olympics in 1988, probably deserved a medal for childish bullshit if nothing else.
Presumably, the Korean phrase for “remember to work behind your jab” sounds very similar to the Korean phrase for “go and headbutt that guy in the teeth,” because Byun was told one and immediately did the other.
Boxing referees will generally only deduct points for head butts if they’re obviously deliberate or, at least, frequently occurring.
Impressively, Byun managed to have a point deducted for butting, and then another, separate point for the same offence. This shows an impressive frequency of headbutting, if not much boxing skill. He went on to lose the bout heavily on a judges' decision.
Most people in his situation would go in one of two directions; stoical acceptance of defeat, or angry protestations.
Jung-Il Byun went with the unusual third method of “nyuh-uh!” and proceeded to sit in the ring, presumably content to just sulk there until somebody, somewhere gave him a medal.
After Olympic committee members checked and confirmed that there were no medals for the men's freestyle head butting OR the zero-metres "acting like a toddler," they did the logical thing and turned out the lights in the stadium.
At this point, the last ghostly shreds of Byun's dignity put in an appearance and he agreed to leave.
His marathon one-man sit in last sixty-seven minutes.
Angel Matos:
Angel Matos discovered his passion in life and decided to follow it.
That passion was kicking things.
Already a gold-medal winning taekwondo athlete (referred to as a taekwondo-er [citation needed]), Matos went into the 2008 Olympics with a recent gold from the Pan American Games to add to his 2000 Olympic medal.
During a bronze medal face off against Kazakhstani Arman Chilmanov (yes - the Arman Chilmanov) Matos suffered a foot injury and took a kyeshi, the taekwondo equivalent of a time out.
Under taekwondo rules, a kyeshi can only last a minute, before the competitor must either return to the fight, request more time or concede the bout.
Having been warned about time at the forty second mark, Matos breezed through the minute barrier of his kyeshi without acknowledgment and the judges disqualified him for taking too long.
At this point, it became clear that Matos wasn’t actually having his foot treated so much as he was charging his special move.
Working from the sound logical principle of “fuck it, I came here to kick something”, an enraged Matos proceeded to kick a judge in the face, spit on the floor and try to pick a fight with pretty much everyone in the room.
He was disqualified and thrown out of the World Taekwondo Federation. The judge’s head landed somewhere in the shot-put field, where it placed fifth.
The Entire Tunisian Pentathlon Team:
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Tunisia?
If you said “Tattooine in Star Wars” or “where they filmed the crucifixion in Life of Brian” then fair enough, and if you said “the Battle of Carthage” or “the Second Punic War” you’re probably on the wrong website.
What literally nobody has ever said in answer to that question is “excellent pentathletes”, and there’s a reason.
In 1960, the Tunisian team descended on Rome with dreams of glory and the sporting ability of a late-nineties John Candy.
In the show jumping, the team committed a minor faux pas when every single member fell off of their horses, earning a record zero points.
One of the team nearly drowned in the swimming event, although rumours that he was a ringer from Equatorial Guinea went unconfirmed.
After proving they couldn’t be trusted around domesticated animals or water, rules dictated that the team be given live firearms for the shooting event, which went about as well as you’d expect; one member of the team was disqualified for firing “dangerously close to the judges.”
Worse was to come in the fencing, when the team, who had presumably met on the bus on the way to the games, realised that only one of their number had ever done any fencing before in his life.
Apparently having swapped their coach for a team of sitcom writers, the pentathletes devised a cunning plan: Make the same guy play every match, and keep his mask on the whole time.
Judges became suspicious when the Tunisian team fielded a string of fencers who were of identical height, build and style, and quickly saw through the ruse.
Having combined the near-drowning of Eric the Eel, the “nearly killing a judge” technique of Angel Matos, the forward-planning of Andarin Carvajal and the logic of Jung-Il Byun, the Tunisian team placed dead last, although presumably managed a rousing rendition of "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" afterwards.
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